Your Mindfulness Toolbox For Daily Living

This lesson will primarily focus on establishing the traditional foundations for our mindfulness meditation practice. For new meditators, it will serve as a comprehensive introduction to mindfulness by both clarifying the fundamental components of the practice, and more importantly, getting you mindfully meditating right away. For experienced meditators, this lesson will serve to consolidate your previous learning and experience, providing us all with a common language to best proceed together through the later lessons. By the end of this lesson, you will be able to define and understand what mindfulness is, as well as be able to begin practicing breath-focused mindfulness meditation on your own.

This lesson will dive deeper into the traditional approaches to mindfulness meditation, by looking at the importance of establishing the appropriate context to best foster your practice both internally and externally. You will learn how to prime yourself prior to beginning a session, thus enabling you to better sink into the session, and attain the mindfulness state more effectively. It will also look at the benefits of establishing a consistent daily practice, as well as address some of the practical considerations of doing so, including finding the appropriate time and location that suits both your meditation goals and your living situation. By the end of this lesson, you will have the knowledge and motivation necessary to start meditating daily.

This lesson will break down the goals and expectations that we should have for our mindfulness meditation practice, highlighting how we can determine if we are indeed 'meditating correctly'. We will also look at some of the alternatives to the use of the breath as the object of our meditative focus, as well as introduce the techniques of 'present state awareness' and 'choiceless awareness'. By the end of this lesson, you will have a broad understanding of the potential breadth of your mindful focus, enabling you to expand your practice beyond the breath and onto other objects, physical sensations, and mental phenomena.

This lesson will introduce the use of broad awareness in conjunction with focused attention to best facilitate our mindfulness practice. On its own, focused attention may be laser-sharp but susceptible to distractions. Broad awareness assists this process by flagging distractions as they arise. Together, the use of these two tools results in significant improvements in mindful focus. This lesson will also introduce the analogy of 'using a splinter (mindfulness) to remove another splinter (illusion), and then throwing both away', as well as expand upon our mindful walking practice. By the end of this lesson, you will have experienced mindful walking, as well as added the tool of broad awareness to your ever-expanding mindfulness toolbox.

This lesson will highlight the multitude of opportunities we have at our disposal to be mindful throughout the day, as well as introduce the practice of mindful hearing. By the end of the lesson, you will be able to double or even triple your effective meditation time by adding mindfulness to your everyday tasks, including exercise, cooking, cleaning, and other mundane activities. Boredom itself can be used as a point of mindful focus. It will still be present, but rather than suffering through it, you will learn how to investigate it and see what it truly is. Once you know the basic form of mindfulness meditation, you can choose to change your focus to anything. This will help to enhance both mindfulness and qualitative experiences throughout the day.

In this lesson, we will start to look at mental phenomena themselves as objects of our mindful focus, as well as introduce the technique of 'labeling' to acknowledge and address potential distractions. You will learn how to build a catalogue of emotional knowledge, one that will enable you to identify feelings of anger, anxiety, and addiction as they are arising and thus, make better, long-term, focused choices. In addition, you will start to discover the reality of negative mental states. They are not desirable, yet they are manageable. Through the use of mindful focus, we can observe how these negative states feel, both physically and mentally, as well as the consequences of our observation and acceptance of them. Namely, a reduction in the severity and duration of their impacts.

In this lesson, we will present the traditional analogy of the mind as a wild elephant running loose in a village, highlighting the importance of our practice as well as the benefits we can expect to see from a consistent focus on mindfulness. We consider the importance of setting an intention to bring mindfulness off the meditation mat and into our day, as well as dive deeper into the practices of 'choiceless awareness' and 'triggered mindful breaths'. By the end of the lesson, you will have a collection of tools that will help you to experience moments of mindfulness throughout the day, thus, exponentially expanding the benefits of your formal practice.

In this lesson, we will investigate the nature of thoughts themselves. What are they? Where do they come from and where do they go? Do we create them, or do we just respond to them once they appear? The more we meditate mindfully, the more we will discover that our preconceived notions about our minds and the mental phenomena they contain are either misguided or incorrect. By the end of this lesson, you will have the tools necessary to start answering those questions for yourself, not based on abstract theory, but on your first-person mindful experiences. We will also introduce the 'body scan' technique as another option for our mindful focus.

In this lesson, the technique of 'Counting The Breaths' will be introduced as a way to further enhance your ability to stay mindfully focused on the sensations at the nose. In addition, a number of potential meditation props will be introduced, and their uses will be explained along with the potential pitfalls in doing so. By the end of this lesson, you will have a collection of inner and outer tools at your disposal that will further assist you in reaching and maintaining the mindfulness state.

In this lesson, we bring together all the techniques, tools, concepts, and ideas from the entirety of the course into one cohesive practice; highlighting how to use them all to attain the mindfulness state both on and off the meditation mat. We reemphasize the importance of doing what works for you as an individual meditator over the strict traditional approaches to mindfulness meditation. By the end of this lesson, and indeed this course, you will know how to establish a daily mindfulness meditation practice, as well as have a collection of unique approaches to troubleshooting your practice, thus, enabling you to reap the benefits of mindfulness moving forward. This lesson ends with a guided meditation that could serve as a template for your future sessions.