Work in Progress

As much as I really like mindfulness and all it stands for sometimes it can be really hard to practice what you preach!  Take last night for instance....

I spent 3 hours in the company of my lovely mindfulness colleagues under the guise of supervision.  We meet regularly to discuss mindfulness, it's problems, personal practice issues, working with mindfulness, that kind of thing plus, we eat lots of cake and nibbles and take the time to find the fun in life (that's my favourite bit!!).

So, our facilitator for the evening compiled our agenda then chose to work backwards...well that threw me off kilter straight away......woah!  Backwards.....but that's not straightforward ( I can be a bit obvious sometimes).  Anyway, I remained in the moment, went with the flow and the meeting turned out really well.  We discussed the retreat - fabulous!; our up and coming Saturday workshop - themed "The Senses" - We like a theme and for some reason they always begin with "S".  Soon we are really going to have to be creative with that one!  We also discussed how we integrate mindfulness into our work (not easy for me) and also about me hitting my metaphorical meditation "wall" at 16 minutes 57 seconds.  To explain, I've recently downloaded an app (so IT savvy) called "Zen Timer".  You can set it for a certain length of time and then it chimes bells when you are done (what's wrong with that!!!???).  Anyway, for some strange reason, each time I put it on, I think it's gone faulty.  Surely it must be 20 mins by now....I resist looking on several occasions but then when I do look.....it says 16 minutes 57 and has done so on several occasions!  Spooky or what.  So, we discussed this and the wiser and more experienced of our group put forth the idea that meditation comes in waves and sometimes it is necessary to ride these out to progress.   As I'm only practising for a relatively short length of time, I'm only really getting one wave!  So, I'm going to extend my time next week (via the Zen timer!!) and see if I can do some serious surfing!

The evening ended with a great meditation just simply focussing on the breath, hands on tummy, feeling the rise and fall.  It's really comforting feeling the warmth of your hands resting on you as you meditate and an easy place to focus on.  I left feeling really chilled........and then I lost my keys (arhghghgh where are they!???  Someone might find them and burgle the house!!!!).  Suddenly the "moment" was lost and I was hijacked by my thoughts, catastrophising over what might happen!!! 

I guess you could say I'm definitely "Work in Progress".

update:  Used Zen timer tonight and hit the wall at 15.05!  So much for my theory then!

Have a good week.

Mindful Missy