Introducing Mindfulness

The Introducing Mindfulness course offers a brief taste of mindfulness practice and theory in a format intended to be accessible to anyone new to mindfulness. This course is designed to help you explore some key mindfulness themes and practices in ways that might support you personally, in everyday life and at work.

The simplest definition of mindfulness is: Paying attention, on purpose with curiosity and care.

Paying attention is the key because (as we learn when we begin to explore how our minds operate from moment to moment through mindfulness practice) whatever we pay attention to shapes our experience and in literally every sense, what we experience IS our life.

“Your attention is always bound up in something, we largely become what we pay attention to. We are building our minds in each moment. We're building habits and desires and worries and expectations and prejudices and insights, and mindfulness is just the ability to notice this process with clarity and to then prioritize what you pay attention to. Why not pay attention to those things that make you a better person why not free your attention from all of the trivial things that are clamouring for it”  Sam Harris

What will you be doing?

The sessions are group-based, and involve a combination of teaching, mindfulness practices, trying out what is learned in everyday life, and discussion.

• Attend 3 weekly sessions lasting one hour each week.
• This is a structured course where each session builds upon what has been introduced before. This is why it is important to attend all the sessions
• Each session will have guided and structured meditation practices. Many drawn from modern psychology
• Each practice or exercise is followed by a review of what you and/or other participants experienced or discovered in that practice/exercise. This review does not include a discussion of the participants’ past history but a gentle exploration of the practice.
• Each session is followed by suggestions for personal practice. This includes both recommended guided practices, and also ways to cultivate new habits of mindfulness in everyday life
• Each session (except the first) includes a review of the previous week’s personal practice
• You will have access to a web resource which gives you guided practices and written material to support each session

Learning Outcomes

The course takes place over 3 sessions, each of which explores a core theme:

• Learn why we evolved to be unhappy, paranoid and joy-blind and how, through mindfulness practice, we can train minds in the opposite direction.
• Understanding the mind’s natural tendency to be scattered and to wander; how we can train attention to create choices about where and how we place attention, and how this can fundamentally shape our experience
• Exploring different ways of being and knowing; recognising how much of our experience is shaped by thought; that other more experiential and observing modes are also available to us, and how we can learn to use them to help us flourish over time
• Recognising the difference between reacting and responding; developing ways to create the space to make choices between them, and exploring how this understanding can shape our experience and the quality of our lives