Mindfulness - a modern mindset.

This modern term simply means adopting a new mindset that is open, non-judgmental, and focused on the present moment. Although it is a modern concept, the roots and core ideas of mindfulness lie in Buddhism. Those who practice mindfulness also pay attention to their own thoughts and reactions and to the fact that change is constant. The idea of accepting change is very beneficial because much of our pain and suffering comes from not accepting or resisting change.

Mindfulness and meditation go together perfectly; one complements the other. Therefore there are some specific meditations integrated in this course, such as the body scan meditation or the seated meditation and so on.  If you have adopted a mindful mindset, it does not mean that you only need to practice mindfulness meditation; Any type of meditation practice works well with mindfulness.

The following would be a summary of what a mindful mindset is.

Therefore, mindfulness is the practice of being aware in every possible moment, while maintaining a non-judgmental view, and at the same time observing your own physical and emotional reactions. 

This is a 8 weeks course and I will guide you through. It is a great honor for me to be able to accompany you during this time. It is a very valuable and important path that I will walk with you.

Love & Light Martina

The objective of this first session is to familiarize you with the two most important building blocks of mindfulness, attention and the present moment. The cultivation of attention to the present moment is at the heart of mindfulness. The most common reason why people fail to pay attention to the present moment is because they are occupied by thinking, often about the past or the future. In this session, we introduce the role of thoughts and their relationship with the present moment.

The goal of this session  is to clarify the relationship between mindfulness and automaticity. This session is included in the beginning of the training because most problems that people experience involve automatic patterns or habits. Without becoming aware of these patterns, change is difficult if not impossible. Paying mindful attention to automatic reactions and routine patterns of thinking and behavior is a powerful way to decrease their effect. Awareness of automatic patterns creates room to choose other behaviour than the automatic behavior. You will experience the automatic nature of your thoughts, which in turn automatically cause emotions to emerge.

An important element of mindfulness is “open awareness”. Open awareness refers to a quality of consciousness that is not evaluative or actively shaped by pre-existing ideas or intentions but is fully receptive to allowing the experience to simply occur “as it is”. In this session, open awareness is introduced by addressing the evaluative nature of the mind. While open awareness involves non-judgment, countless judgments and evaluations cloud most of our daily awareness. By becoming aware of these judgments, an important obstacle of open awareness is removed. In this session, participants experience the judgmental nature of their mind and learn about the problematic aspects of judgments.

This session is going to introduce the concept of acceptance. Mindfulness promotes an accepting stance towards experiences. Rather than fighting or avoiding experiences, mindfulness requires willingness to experience them. Acceptance, however, is a complex and paradoxical construct. This session aims to clarify the essence of acceptance by learning to apply acceptance to difficult emotions and by explaining the goal of acceptance.

Concerning happiness, research has found that many people fall prey to what is known as impact bias, or the tendency for people to overestimate the initial impact and/or duration of an emotional event. Simply put, this means that many people believe that certain future events, like buying a new car or house, getting married, or passing an exam, will make them happier than it actually does. These events may enhance their happiness but the duration and intensity is often far less than expected. A possible reason for this is that we quickly adapt to new situations. In the literature, this is called “hedonic adaptation”. The goal of the exercise is to make you aware of the impact bias and the implications for well-being that emerge from faulty affective forecasting. To know this may help you to make aware that it is important to enjoy the present moment, rather than (continuously) believing that happiness will be found in the future if certain goals are achieved.

Mindfulness involves a kind and self-compassionate stance toward the self. Rather than a self-compassionate attitude, many people suffer from a non-accepting and self-critical relationship with the self. The nature of this relationship is perhaps most clearly reflected by the inner critic: an internal voice that criticizes the self. In this session, you will become acquainted with your inner critic and by increasing your awareness of the inner critic and practicing self-compassion through meditation and self-caring action, you will learn to effectively cultivate a friendly and caring relationship with the self.

At the deepest level, mindfulness practice cultivates a different relationship with the self. The observing stance that becomes stronger after repeated and consistent mindfulness practice allows you to take a step back from all kinds of thoughts, including identity related thoughts. Identity, which can be described as a rather static and thought-based story of “me”, creates a room for a more dynamic sense of self, which can be described as an ever-present observer. This observer is aware of the stories about the self, and it is thus by definition different from the stories themselves. In this session, several exercises allow you to experience the difference between the self as a story and the self as an observer.

During the past 7 sessions, you learned about and practiced many essential key processes underlying mindfulness. Mindfulness is a multi-facetted construct; thus, it is essential to understand the inner workings of the different processes that underlie mindfulness. In this final session, you will learn the connection between those different processes.