A friend asked if I had any recordings of my guided meditation, and I didn’t, but it inspired me to Google how to make a video and post it, and here it is on first take: a brief guided meditation for grounding and calming. This is the meditation I provide when clients are feeling emotionally …
Category Archives: Meditation Practice
Emotions Are Adaptive
I gave a talk yesterday at 4 a.m. on emotion-focused mindfulness therapy to One Mindful Breath, a secular Buddhist group in Wellington, New Zealand, at the invitation of Ramsey Margolis. It was 8 p.m. their time. I was labouring under the misconception that they were in Auckland which Ramsey freed me at the end of …
What matters to us
Emotion-focused mindfulness therapy encourages us to explore navigating meditation and life oriented to our values and what works. Carl Rogers taught that if we respond to people with empathy, prizing, and genuineness, people have deep capacities for orienting to their own growth and direction in life. People benefit from a sense of safety and encouragement …
The heart of practice
When the Buddha sat down in the meditation that led to his awakening, he was plagued by self-doubt. The Buddhist scriptures portray this mythologically as Mara, the evil one, sending his daughters and an army of demons to disrupt the Buddha’s meditation with grasping, hesitation and fear. Who do you think you are to try …
Experiential Focusing
We tend to spend a lot of time either preoccupied with thinking to the exclusion of feelings or getting too immersed in and buffeted and driven by difficult emotions and thoughts. Mindful experiencing provides an alternative, coming alive in a spacious, grounded way to the implicit, embodied feel of what is happening, what Jon Kabat-Zinn …
How we learned to suppress feelings
Softening and opening with kindness and gentle curiosity towards our inner vulnerabilities and pain is unfamiliar territory for many of us, because we didn’t learn how to do this growing up. Many of us had parents who didn’t know how to calm themselves down, let alone how to calm us down. Our parents may not …
Integrating Self-Compassion into Your Mindfulness Practice
If you find yourself struggling or beating yourself up in meditation, it can be helpful to remember to cultivate self-compassion. In my post, Emotion-Focused Mindfulness Meditation, I described how Kristin Neff highlights three factors in cultivating self-compassion: trying to be kind to yourself; remembering our common humanity (that whatever you are struggling with, many other …
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Emotion-Focused Mindfulness Meditation
This style of meditation emphasizes cultivating a gentle, participatory curiosity toward all the processes that weave consciousness and deepen experiencing, including bodily sensations and other senses, feelings, thinking, imagery, and needs. You are welcome to plan, remember and reflect on your experience.