Mindful Awareness

Mindfulness practice is the cultivation of the ability to pay deliberate attention to our internal and external experiences from moment to moment in an open, curious way that leaves judgment aside. Relating compassionately to life in this way and learning to direct (and re-direct) our attention towards the present moment allows for greater access to our own powerful resources for intuition, insight, creativity and healing.

Within the practice of mindfulness, thoughts and feelings are observed as events in the mind, without over-identifying with them, and without reacting to them in an automatic, habitual pattern of reactivity.  This non-elaborative state of self-observation introduces a ‘space’ between one’s perceptions and one’s responses.  In this way, mindfulness practices help us to respond reflectively to situations instead of reacting to them based on conditioned habits or reflexes. With mindfulness practice we can shift our relationship to ourselves and our life experiences in a way that allows for greater spaciousness, acceptance and compassion and in doing so can dramatically improve the quality of our life

"Between stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
-Victor Frankl, M.D. (holocaust survivor)