Holding It All In Heart: Aliveness, Acceptance & Authenticity

In this course we are choosing to cultivate our own aliveness, to feel more present, to enjoy more mindful moments. In this first session we will explore behavioral change via the simple map of awareness, acceptance, and intention. Today’s exercise is a simple awareness practice bringing us back into contact with what is happening right here, right now. This session will support us in spotting our habits of disconnection, so that we can then consciously choose to come back into connection with our own heart. We will finish with setting our intentions to live more fully.

In this session we will teach ourselves to slow down and befriend whatever it is that we are feeling. We will learn to activate our own parasympathetic nervous systems, so that we have skills in modulating our own emotions. We will do this via practicing a mindfulness of breathing meditation, specifically working with lengthening the outbreath as a way to lower stress hormones and cultivate calm. We will come out of the busy mind and use the breath as a powerful tool for supporting presence.

Today we will work with using the input from our 5 senses as a key way to come more fully into the present moment. We will develop the skills to stay with ourselves when we are full of feeling. We will practice learning to titrate our feelings by changing the focus between our inner world and the outer world, enabling us to choose coming in and out of contact with our emotions in skillful ways. We will learn to see all the ways that the environment around us can support us, call us to the present, and build up our sense of connection with the world.

Today’s session is a self-compassion meditation. We will give ourselves permission to not be perfect, coming into caring contact with all the complexities of having a human heart. We will practice a loving kindness meditation, working with simple phrases of well-wishing. By being gentle with ourselves in this way, we will support opening the heart more fully to all of the different aspects of our lives - whatever they may look like. We will develop kindness, forgiveness, and well-wishing.

In today’s session we will give ourselves permission to pause and put down the need to be perfect. We will explore the fact that sometimes change can’t be forced, however hard we try, and look at the Gestalt Theory of Change, which states that it is bizaarely, by actually letting go, that sometimes change comes. We will do a deeply restorative yoga nidra practice whilst lying down – exploring how rest can offer a radical reset. We will see how letting go and letting things be supports our serenity.

In this session we will work with a series of simple written exercises, so that we can tune into the truth of our own heart. There is much wisdom deep within each of us that will serve and guide us, when we dive in deep and let ourselves hear it. We will work with a series of writing prompts to facilitate finding out what is actually really true for each us, beyond the spoken and unspoken expectations of those around us. We will give ourselves permission to hear own heart, supporting us in making more space for what matters most in our lives.

Today we will befriend the sense of fear - and it’s inevitable arising in the human heart as we grow in our lives. Learning to touch into our fear is powerful and permission-giving and lessens the hold that fear has on us. We will practice a gently guided meditation to develop a sense of the witness within us, distinguishing fear as actually being a series of bodily sensations, rather than as a limiting force on ourselves and our lives. We will normalize having a tender human heart and all of the growing pains that we go through as we dare to live and love more.

Our muscles have memory and we can build our ability to change our inner feeling state via basic embodied exercises. In this session we will explore a series of simple standing meditations, bringing awareness to our body and to the bone structure that we have within us, seeing how we can actively build a sense of our own inner-strength. We will practice feeling what is possible, cultivating a sense of competency and stepping towards our future with a strong back body and an open heart.

In this session we will focus on resourcing ourselves with what is good, so that we can feel energized, inspired, and uplifted enough to fully engage with our lives. Today’s practice will focus on gratitude and noticing what is going well, training our mind to orientate toward what lifts us up in life and widens the horizons of the heart. We will honor what has been gained in the journey we have walked and give thanks for all that is: the delightful, the difficult, and the million shades in between; developing the equanimity to be with it all.

In this final session we will look at ways in which we can increase the sense of aliveness in our day-to-day existence. We will gently explore the concept of impermanence as a wake-up call to share our love and our talents; and to dare to do more of the things that are important to us. We will use breath work and mindful movement to explore and expand the physical sensations of aliveness in our body. We will see that our time here is limited and build our resolves to be fully here-now, as best we can; heart-full, mind-full, and present to the preciousness of it all.