Opening to the feel of things and deepening my practice
Bridgette O’Neill is preparing to lead the new eight-week course Deeper Mindfulness: Frame by Frame with colleague Taravajra. Here she writes about what she appreciates about this new course that was developed by Professor Mark Williams.
Have you ever felt that your mindfulness practice has plateaued? I know I have. Like brushing my teeth or exercising, formal mindfulness practice is part of my daily life and has been, and is, transformational for me. However, from experience I know that with familiarity I can move into a comfortable zone where my ability to see clearly can get foggy.
Of course, with time difficult life events will inevitably wake me up from this comfort zone and bring energy and new learning and unlearning into my relationship with practice. I’ve also learnt over the years that I don’t need to wait for life challenges to wake me up further; I can actively seek opportunities to deepen into a more compassionate aware way of being that we call mindfulness.
There are many opportunities for deepening and enlivening our practice. A good option is to engage in a structured course that focuses in more depth on a particular aspect of mindfulness and provides the support of a teacher and community of fellow participants. One structured course that I’ve appreciated in recent years is Deeper Mindfulness: Exploring Feeling Tone Frame by Frame which was developed by Mark Williams. I first took this course as a participant a couple of years ago and went on to do a weekend retreat and teacher training led by Mark Williams and Antonia Sumbundu.
The course has a particular focus on the second way of establishing mindfulness, that is the feel or feeling tone with which all our experience arrives, pleasant, unpleasant or somewhere in between. In both Buddhist and contemporary psychology, becoming aware of the feel of our experience moment by moment is considered the key to greater choice and freedom from habit. Before doing the course, I had experience of practices that focus on feeling tone and had done a retreat with this particular focus. Even so, I really valued this eight-week course. I loved the simplicity of its design and how each week adds one more element to practice and understanding, building on everything that has come before. The practices were guided in a very trauma-sensitive way and as a mindfulness teacher it was great to witness how this was done so clearly, and without too many words. Most practices had 10, 20 or 30 minute options which meant that I could combine them with other regular practices and I could easily choose to practice a couple of times a day to support greater integration and continuity of practice across the day.
Other aspects of the course that really help embed learning and awareness into everyday life are guided reflections for the end of the day, reflections on bringing mindfulness into speaking and listening and even a practice for times when you can’t sleep. Kindness is completely woven through the course with encouragement to bring appreciation rather than criticism to our amazingly active minds and to acknowledge that it’s ok to like or not like whatever is occurring without needing to jump into reacting. Another form of kindness within the course is that we are encouraged to deliberately turn towards aspects of experience that we appreciate and are grateful for.
I’ve been revisiting all the practices in preparation for teaching the course and I’m remembering all over again how helpful it is to foreground with fine-tuned awareness, the at times clear, and at other times more subtle feel with which my experience arrives. And how this can help me to notice with kindness when I’m acting out of habit in ways that deplete me, and can also enable me to savour moments of pleasure and nourishment.
I highly recommend the course as a way to refresh and deepen practice, to bring more understanding to how it is to be human and as a way to open to joy and greater ease in everyday life.
You can find more details and how to book here.