Bringing Mindfulness to Life
We will be exploring Breathe Easy in the next CommunitySHINE workshop scheduled on March 29. One young father (we’ll call him Robert) who participated in the SHINE program shared this story of how the practice helped keep him out of jail:
In court one day, I noticed myself getting angry and agitated as I listened to testimony about me that I knew to be untrue.
In my work at the PACT: Helping Children with Special Needs program, I’ve been guiding twenty staff through a SHINE program. Our goal is to integrate mindful awareness practices into the work of this group of diverse and dedicated clinicians. As a way of learning and practicing mindful listening and speaking, we share and use these Native American Council Guidelines in each of our SHINE sessions.
It’s so easy to compare and judge, thinking that YOUR mind is the least focused one around. You know – forgetting words, losing things, wondering why you’ve just gone upstairs, jumping from thought to thought. A question I hear in EVERY SHINE session is, “How can I keep my mind from wandering?”
Here’s how we teach this in SHINE, using awareness of the breath as the anchor for attention.
