Tag: relational resilience

Accessing the Present Moment through Mindfulness Meditation

Diana Winston, Director Mindfulness Education at MARC, offers a guided meditation podcast on the theme, “Back to Basics”.  She reminds us that mindfulness is very much about the capacity to pay attention in the present moment and to do so with curiosity, openness and a willingness to be with what is, including our habituated distraction behaviours.  Without mindfulness meditation we tend to spend out time thinking about the past (replaying undesirable events/outcomes) or the future (worrying about possible negative events which rarely happen). 

Mindfulness meditation enables us to build our concentration by staying fully focused on the present. The beauty of the present moment is that it is always accessible to us if only we focus our attention.  However, our busy human brains are forever active – engaged in planning, categorising, criticising,  exploring, and many other mental activities that manifest our intelligence.  Diana notes that everyone gets distracted during mindfulness meditation but the power of the process lies in the ability to return to our anchor to restore present moment awareness and build our awareness muscle.

Diana suggests that if we become distracted by thoughts we can name what we are doing, for example, “planning” or “critiquing” and return to our anchor.  She reminds us of the research that demonstrates the benefits of mindfulness, including building relational resilience and relieving pain.  Neuroscience research shows us how mindfulness can increase our capacity to manage stress, enhance positivity and happiness and even alter the physical shape of our brains.  Dr. Dilip Jeste, Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, provides research to highlight the role of mindfulness in developing wisdom and compassion.  Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson in their book, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body,  explain that mindfulness research provides very strong evidence that meditation builds self-awareness, self-management and social awareness.   

Diana maintains from her research and extensive training of others in mindfulness practice, that “people who practise mindfulness report more gratitude, more appreciation and more connection with themselves and other people”.  Sometimes, a particular location can provide us with the right environment to develop mindfulness.  It may provide solitude and silence or reinforce our connection to country and community as Brooke Blurton frequently describes in her memoir, Big Love: Reclaiming myself, my people, my country.  Nature has a way of developing mindfulness because it stimulates wonder and awe and all our senses – sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste.

The guided meditation

In the guided meditation, Diana encouraged us to adopt a comfortable posture to enable us to sustain our focus throughout the 20 minute meditation.  She suggested we choose an anchor to enable us to restore our attention whenever we notice that we were distracted.  The anchors suggested were our breath, external sounds or bodily sensations.  I chose to focus on my joined fingers that were resting on my lap.  I find that I can very quickly sense the tinkling, vibration and warmth in my fingertips once I have them joined.  As I focused on the associated bodily sensations, I became aware of pain in my fingers and wrists which then became my focus.

Diana suggests that when you are starting out using meditation, it is best to maintain a focus on your anchor and not be diverted by strong emotions.  There are, however, specific guided meditations for dealing with challenging emotions. 

The guided meditation provided by Diana (which begins after 6.35 minutes of introduction) incorporates a 10 minute silent meditation.  Towards the end of the meditation, Diana encourages us to sense how we are feeling, e.g., whether we are experiencing ease or relaxation.

Reflection

After the meditation, I recalled that one of the first mindfulness books I read was that by Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now.   Also In an interesting occurrence of synchronicity, I had been listening to mantra meditations on Spotify (via a Janin Devi Mix) as I wrote the first draft of this blog post and Alexia Chellun starting singing The Power Is Here Now (a song I have never heard before).

As we grow in mindfulness through our regular mindfulness practice, we can access the power of the present moment to gain greater self-awareness, heightened creativity, improved emotional regulation and a deeper sense of happiness and ease.  There are many options available for us to choose, e.g., chanting, meditation, yoga, mantra meditations or movement meditations.  We just need to choose the modality that works best for us and enables us to sustain our practice.  I find that Tai Chi provides the greatest immediate benefits for me and that is my primary mindfulness practice (supplemented by other practices as well).

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Image by Ryan KLAUS from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Relational Resilience through Bodily Awareness

Christina Dohr presented on the topic of “Relational Resilience” during the recent Embodiment Festival.  Christina is a qualified somatic educator and embodiment coach, who aims to help people through bodily awareness (of breath, sensations, posture and movement) to achieve self-awareness and authentic connection and relationships.  She is a strong advocate of movement as a way to tap into the mind-body connection and emotions – her background includes dance, improvisation and a black belt in Aikido.

Relational resilience is a concept typically employed in research literature especially in relation to the development of girls and women and often refers to the capacity to bounce back in the face of trauma, difficulties and health issues.  The concept is also employed in the context of parenting and dependent child development.  In her presentation, Christina used the idea of relational resilience to refer to any relationship, intimate or friendship relationship.  She focused on sustainability of relationships in the face of life challenges and the role of deepening connection to facilitate mutual growth.  Christina also reinforced the research-based evidence that demonstrates the key role that supportive relationships play in healing from trauma and coping with personal difficulties.

Bodily Awareness

Christina, being an embodiment coach, offered bodily awareness as a way into relational resilience.  She highlighted the fact that the way we visualise and use our bodies impacts our relationships.  Throughout her presentation she introduced a range of embodiment practices designed to build bodily awareness and the messages we communicate in our interactions.  We can concur with Bessel van der Kolk’s concept that The Body Keeps the Score – not only in relation to traumatic experiences but also everyday interactions.

Christina focused on a number of areas that either sustain or dimmish relationships such as listening.  She suggests that we explore how we listen and whether or not we bring openness, curiosity and genuine interest to our intimate relationships.  Christina offered an embodiment practice to look at the relative give and take in a relationship – a key determinant of sustainability and resilience.  She suggested that participants in the Zoom workshop joined their hands together and visualise the balance occurring in their relationship by moving their joined hands towards themselves or away from themselves. At the same time, participants were encouraged to tap into their bodily sensations as they experienced this movement to or away from themselves.

Another key area that Christina covered is “ownership” in a relationship – the degree to which we own our words and action and their outcomes, intended and unintended.  She stressed the need “to take responsibility” and not deflect or deny when we make a mistake or “stuff up” in a relationship.  This could mean simply acknowledging that we didn’t listen properly or that we were not paying attention.  This genuineness and honesty contribute to trustworthiness which, in turn, develops relational resilience.  We can notice our bodily reactions/sensations when confronted with the challenge to “own responsibility” for our words, actions, inactions or omissions in a relationship.

Christina indicated that there are times when we tend to own responsibility when its is not appropriate – we might overcompensate, overdo giving (trying to anticipate a partner’s every need) or try to read another person’s mind.  She offered a simple embodiment exercise to illustrate this point.  If your shape your hands “to hug a tree”, the inner circle (or the imaginary tree) represents your area of responsibility – outside the circle is someone else’s responsibility.  She suggests that you can also embody this concept of responsibility boundaries (and experience it through accompanying bodily sensations) by facing one palm in towards yourself (your responsibility) and the other palm facing away from you (the other person’s responsibility).  Being conscious of how you feel as you do this can increase your bodily and emotional awareness.

Reflection

Christina encourages us to use our body as a mirror to our “inner landscape”.  There is so much we can overlook or ignore, but our bodies are registering everything – the way others look at us, avoid us or attend to what we say.  Our bodies are continuously sensing and reacting, often at an unconscious level.  One of Christina’s goals is to assist us to “uncover unconscious embodiment patterns” and help us to change what no longer serves our relationships and its resilience.  To this end she offers embodiment coaching and workshops to help people gain bodily awareness and develop mature and resilient relationships.

We can grow in mindfulness and self-awareness as we explore embodiment practices and pay attention to our bodily sensations and reactions in our daily interactions.  Christina’s presentation gives us some relationship areas to think about, focus on and experience bodily.  Other presentations at the Embodiment Festival can advance our personal insight by offering a variety of embodiment practices.

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Image by Holger Schué from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.