Guided Mindfulness Meditation Series 3

Description

Ten Guided Mindfulness Practices to Cultivate Intimacy with the Present Moment and Your Life In a world where our attention gets distracted and diverted at every turn, mindfulness brings it back and stabilizes it where it matters most in the here and now. With Guided Mindfulness Meditation Series 3, Jon Kabat-Zinn leads you with friendliness and care through 10 mindfulness landscapes, including: The Soundscape and Mindscape Bringing your awareness to the outer world and the inner terrain of your thoughts and emotions The Heartscape Cultivating lovingkindness, compassion, and healing for yourself and others The Nowscape Moving beyond specific objects of meditation to rest in the spaciousness of choiceless awareness The Lifescape Letting life itself become the meditation practice and the meditation teacher This program also includes breathscape and bodyscape meditations, a guided walking meditation, a restorative yoga-like lying down practice, and a study guide with suggestions for how to best use these practices. If you are seeking to explore new domains of awareness and healing, or to enrich and deepen a long-standing meditation practice, Guided Mindfulness Meditation Series 3 offers rich and varied terrain for you to inhabit and explore. Contents Breathscape and Bodyscape Meditations Soundscape, Mindscape, and Dying Before You Die Meditations Nowscape (Choiceless Awareness) and Walking Meditations Heartscape (Lovingkindness) and Lifescape (Everyday Life) Meditations How to Use Your Guided Mindfulness Meditation Practice CDs As with the Series 1 and Series 2 CDs, these Series 3 guided meditations are tools that invite and reward something more than a casual listening. They are designed to be use on a regular basis to help you develop and deepen a daily meditation practice and thus to strengthen the qualities of mindfulness (moment to moment non-judgmental awareness), compassions including self-compassion and lovingkindness in every aspect of your life. The programs vary from 10 to 47 minutes in length. The real challenge, no matter which track you choose to work with at any given time, is to step out of time altogether and into the timelessness of the present moment. All tracks include stretches of silence of varying lengths for being in relationship with your own experience moment to moment, based on the guidance you are receiving during the periods when I am talking. But again, the real challenge is to make the entire time, even during the guidance, into your own direct experience by dropping underneath the words to what, where and how they are inviting you to pay attention. In this way, the whole program becomes an occasion to cultivate mindfulness, and not just the periods of silence. The suggestion is to follow the instructions the best you can without getting caught in them, to perceive and open to what and where they are pointing rather than falling into thinking about them in a cerebral and conceptual way, or trying to figure out what they are for or what you are supposed to be feeling. Whatever you are feeling (and thinking) is what you are supposed to be feeling and thinking. The question is, can you be aware of it, and take up at least temporary residency in that awareness? These programs develop the array of mindfulness practices described in Coming to Our Senses, beginning with mindfulness of breathing and mindfulness of body sensations on CD # 1. We learn through practicing together to settle into and rest in awareness itself as the breath and other body sensations are featured within the field of awareness, almost as if we were awarenessing without doing anything, like a mirror, simply including what comes within its scope rather than being an observer of something separate from ourselves. Resting in awareness, and being the knowing that awareness is without any forcing becomes the unifying theme of all these guided meditations, even though they feature different aspects of the inner and outer landscapes of our experience. Through regular practice, we become more and more familiar and intimate with these landscapes and what unfolds from moment to moment within them. In the process, we become more intimate with the domain of being that aspect of what and who we are that is far more magnificent than the stories we tell ourselves about what and who we are."

Jon Kabat-Zinn Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, is the founder and director of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and associate professor of medicine in the Division of Preventative and Behavioral Medicine. His clinic was featured in 1993 in the public television series Healing and the Mind with Bill Moyers. Jon Kabat-Zinn is the author of Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life and Full-Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness.