Fully, Freely, Fearlessly: Mindfulness & Embodied Presence Course
St Werburghs Community Centre, Bristol
Starting 24th October
From this...
...to this
Free your playfulness, heartfulness & bodyfulness
Four-Week Mindfulness & Embodied Presence Course
St Werburghs Community Centre, Bristol
Monday Evenings
6-8pm
Oct 24, 31
Nov 7, 14
Weekend Retreat
10am-2pm
Nov 12 & 13
This four-week course will cover the Four Foundations of Mindfulness over four evenings and in a deepening two-day weekend retreat. Through talks, experiential Mindfulness practices (sitting, standing, walking, lying), interactive triads (optional), gentle mindful movement (Qi Gong) and discussion we will deeply enter in to the territory of what it is to be human, how we actively build our world, and how, once we see how we take part in creating our experience, we can get more free from what we hold on to, from who we think we are or should be, and from what we think we have to do.
In this way we find more spaciousness, joy, and love. By letting go we find out just how much we have. By holding on less tightly to other people and things we become more free to enjoy them as they are for as long as we have them.
Join this wonderful course taught by Aubrey, a Mindfulness teacher certified by two excellent beings, Martin Aylward and Mark Coleman, co-Directors of the Mindfulness Training Institute and internationally-renowned Mindfulness teachers.
These teachings and practices changed my life and they can change yours too! Find greater freedom and belonging right here in the midst of your everyday life.
Monday Evenings - 6-8pm
Monday 24th October: Mindfulness of Breath & Introduction to Mindfulness
We begin with exploring together what Mindfulness is... and what it isn't! We do some simple experiential exercises to bring you in to direct contact with the felt experience of your breath. You will learn techniques for connecting to the breath and grounding and calming the mind. There are many misconceptions about Mindfulness due to its rise in mainstream popularity in our culture in the last decade. Many of us are familiar with the word Mindfulness. In our culture we tend to make everything about the thinking mind. We habitually treat our body as simply a means to transport our brain around. The word Mindfulness can therefore mis-lead us, making it seem like another thing to be approached with our heads. But Mindfulness is about developing embodied presence. Deeply connecting to our body, heart, and mind and bringing these in to closer relationship with each other. It is about living more freely, more heartfully, and more bodyfully.
Monday 31st October: Mindfulness of Body & Introduction to Embodied Presence
Next we delve in to Mindfulness of body, turning our conception of body away from body-as-thing or body-as-vehicle-to-drive-mind-around to body-as-experience. How does our relationship to our body and to ourselves change when we make our primary reference point how it feels to be in this body? In this way we learn to find freedom from externalising who we are and rather to rest in to our own experiential body. These practices can be deeply enjoyable and surprising, to find out how deeply pleasant it can be to just be, to sense what the body is sensing without the mind adding eighteen layers of interpretation or distraction! Though profound, these practices are short, simple and easy to learn and bring in to your daily life.
Monday 7th November: Mindfulness of Three Habitual Ways of Meeting Experience: Like (Demand), Don't Like (Defend), and Uninterested (Distract)
Once you have established a good base in Mindfulness of breath and body, we begin to look at how it is that humans habitually meet experience: We like it, we don't like it, or we aren't interested in it. We will look in to our own unique experiences of this way of being in the world. The importance of seeing our preferences in the form of this 'feeling tone' of experience is that this is the foundation for how we interact with and build our world. We demand more of what we like, we defend against what we don't like, and we distract from what is not interesting. When we begin to see this pattern of reactivity in our lives it can be a shock to notice how much of our life is spent demanding, defending or distracting ourselves: We are never really quite here. We are removed from the nourishment and joy of simple direct experience. We feel disconnected, stressed, overwhelmed, detached, as if something is missing. We will look at what happens when we turn our attention to noticing this pushing and pulling with experience, and learn simple Mindfulness techniques to bring us back in to direct contact with our sensate experience. We will take time to notice what this does to how we feel and how much resource we feel we have to meet our life. We can become more fully awake, alive, and present in the midst of our lives, deeply inhabiting our experience and unearthing a profound sense of belonging and connection.
Monday 14th November: Heartfulness: Cultivating a Loving Presence & Working Skilfully with what Obscures our Kindness and Love
In this final weeknight of the course we will go in to the territory of the heart. While this can be beautiful, it is also a clearing practice. We will be cultivating a loving presence and kindness through gaining an understanding experientially of what it is that may be blocking our capacity to open our hearts. Through experiential Mindful exercises including meditation we will explore your own unique heart patterning, and learn to work skilfully with these patterns, helping you to clear what obscures your natural and inbuilt kindness and love.
Weekend Retreat - 10am-2pm
The weekend retreat falls between the third and final weekday evenings.
We will take a deep dive together in to Mindfulness of our emotional life and of our thinking life. These two territories are rich areas for profound transformation in our lives and for developing a deep wellspring of wellbeing no matter our circumstances. We will take our time with these topics, learning a range of simple fifteen-minute Mindfulness practices in a variety of forms (sitting, standing, lying, walking), to get familiar with our own emotional and thinking patterning. We will look at ways to skilfully meet the common types of patterns that we can get stuck in in our emotional lives and in our thinking lives.
The retreat will focus on learning to find more freedom and nourishment in our heart-mind; to dance our lives with greater flexibility, joy, and presence; and to come in to more meaningful relationship with others.
Saturday 12th November: From Reactive to Responsive: Get Skilful With Emotions
When we meet our emotional lives with our thinking mind we tend towards escalation: Do you try to think yourself free of unpleasant emotions or feelings? What happens?
It is so deeply, poignantly human to try to get rid of emotions in ways that only make their hold on us stronger. When we meet our emotions by thinking about them we can become caught in our stories. The Self becomes very involved and often outraged or defensive or desperate.
As we build the story so the emotion builds, as we build the emotion, so the story builds. We become lost in a fast-paced swirl of emotion and thinking. A spiral of increasing intensity. An emotional storm.
So how can we meet our emotions in ways that help us to stay calm, grounded, and not swept away?
When we meet our emotional life with our sensate body we tend toward calm and moderation: Our body is by its very nature only in the present moment. It does not make stories about the future, it does not worry about what has already passed. When we bring our awareness in to bodily sensations we are grounding ourselves in the present moment. We are breaking the cycle of proliferation and escalation
We will explore together through discussion, talks, and experiential exercises what happens when we turn toward the felt sense of emotions in our body. We will look at what happens to the emotion when we begin to notice how emotions feel, their texture and tightness and energy. We will get more familiar with the felt sense of our emotions in the body with kind curiosity and friendliness. Together we will learn to see our own unique habitual patterns of reactivity and how to work skilfully with them.
You will learn some simple practical tools and knowledge to help you to navigate your emotional life with more freedom, more grace, more choice, and more compassion. You will understand how using the practices from this workshop will free up your relationship with your emotional life so that you have more choice, more ease, and more time to respond rather than react to your life.
Sunday 13th November: Working Skilfully with the Inner Critic & From Lost in Thought to Knowing Our Thoughts with Kindness
Is there an Inner Tyrant in your life? Does your Inner Tyrant beat you up, hold you back, and talk to you in ways that you wouldn't put up with from anyone else?
If a friend followed you around commentating on how useless you are, how much everyone dislikes you, how stupid what you just said was, how fat you are getting, would you keep spending time with them?
And yet our Inner Critic does just this. Building up a sense of our being
Not Good Enough.
Learn how to take the power out of your Inner Critic, to turn that part of your self in to a force for Inner Care, and free yourself and your life from inner tyranny: We will take time to notice your Inner Tyrant's way of working. We will look at common types of Inner Critic and time-honoured skilful and caring ways of counter-acting them. Our Inner Tyrant can have a powerful grip on us, constantly undermining and belittling us. The good news is there are simple techniques for working with the different ways the Inner Critic shows up. This work can be profound and transformational, changing the very way you feel about yourself and how bright you allow yourself to shine.
Lost in thought: Together we will explore through talks, discussion, and experiential mindfulness exercises how our thoughts in one moment impact the next moment and the one after that. Without training, we often feel at the mercy of our 'monkey mind' and its relentless rushing around. With Mindfulness we will learn that this is not the case. The mind can be a powerful ally in freeing up your heart, it just needs some patient guidance to unlearn past habits.
The four Monday evening course and two-day retreat together cost £95.
"Really found the course and Aubrey's teaching so beneficial. My practice has truly deepened and I feel I have more space and acceptance for everything. I just wish the course was longer!"