Van-Life Mindfulness & Embodied Presence Course ONLINE
September/October 2022
Van-Life Six-Week Mindfulness & Embodied Presence Course ONLINE
Wednesday Evenings Wherever You Are - 6-8pm
Meet like-minded people in the van-life community. Deepen your journey in to the simplicity and freedom of van-life!
Build a van-life community of fellow van-lifers sharing mindfulness on the road from the cosy freedom of your own van. Mindfulness and van-life culture share many commonalities: freedom, simplicity, going-against-the-flow, and minimalism. Aubrey will weave these aspects together in this course which is especially tailored to van life.
This six-week course will cover the Four Foundations of Mindfulness over six evenings with a particular focus on how these teachings interweave with and relate to van life. Through talks, experiential Mindfulness practices (sitting, standing, walking, lying), interactive triads (optional), gentle mindful movement (Qi Gong movements that fit in a van!) 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. For people living in vans, this is a profound deepening of the exploration and journey that we are already on!
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. No matter where you are!
Following the course there is the possibility of continuing as a group of online van-lifers sharing Mindfulness practice and van discussions, of meeting up in person (that's van-life freedom!) to go more deeply in to Mindfulness practice together, or to join one of Free Heart's van-camp workshops in the UK or Portugal (more to come soon!).
Week 1: Mindfulness of Breath
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.
Week 2: Embodied Presence
In Week 2 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. Find out how deeply pleasant it can be to just be, wherever you are, deeply sensing in to the places that you stop overnight, feeling a part of the landscapes that you find yourself in. Belonging rather than visiting. Though profound, these practices are short, simple and easy to learn and bring in to your daily van-life!
Week 3: Like or Don't Like
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 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 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.
Week 4: Reactive to Responsive
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 what happens when we begin to notice how emotions feel in the body, their texture and tightness and energy. Together we will learn to see our own unique habitual patterns of reactivity and how to work skilfully to unwind them.
Week 5: Inner Critic to Inner Care
Is there an Inner Tyrant in your life? 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.
This week we will 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 look at common types of Inner Critic and time-honoured skilful and caring ways of counter-acting them. This work can be profound and transformational, changing the very way you feel about yourself and how bright you allow yourself to shine.
Week 6: Heartfulness
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.
£50 for the full six-week twelve-hour course.
*Note that if the cost makes this out of reach for you do get in touch, I have a sliding scale fee to suit everybody's budget.
"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!"