Course outline
The eight sessions.
A guided arc, one session a week, that takes you from sitting still for the very first time to building a practice you can carry through the rest of your life.
Session 1 - Stillness in the Body
What you will learn: How to relax your body deeply and rest your attention on the breath, even for a few seconds.
This is the doorway. We start with the body, because the body is the only door the busy mind will open. You’ll learn the prone position, learn to sight the land of the breath like a sailor sighting the shore and you’ll do your first short audio practice every day this week.
Audio practice: Prone position, focus on the breath.
Session 2 - Making Space
What you will learn: How to find the time you swear you don’t have and how to use Zen counting to settle a busy mind.
“I haven’t got the time” is the most common thing I hear and it is almost never true. This session is part time-management workshop, part meditation. We sort out your house and your day, so the practice has somewhere to live, then we hand the monkey mind a small counting task to keep it busy while the rest of you settles.
Audio practice: Sitting position, Zen counting.
Walking with focus.
Session 3 - Meditation in Motion
What you will learn: How to meditate while walking and how to fold mindfulness into your everyday chores.
A monk once told me that any chore done with full attention is a meditation. This session is for people who cannot sit still, who hate sitting still or who simply have too many dishes to wash to find ten extra minutes. Walking meditation. The mindful chore. The novice and the broom.
Audio practice: Walking with focus.
Session 4 - The Mindful Day
What you will learn: How to bring presence to drinking, eating, brushing your teeth, hobbies, music and the small backdrops of ordinary life.
This is the session where the practice escapes the cushion and quietly takes over your day. The first cuppa. Mindful teeth. Mindful eating in noble silence. Music as meditation. By the end of the week, the kettle becomes a bell, the cup becomes a meditation object and life starts to feel a little more spacious.
Audio practice: Garden messages.
Session 5 - Believing Before You See
What you will learn: How to use visualisation to set a goal, picture a future and make it more likely.
You have already been visualising your whole life - usually the worst thing that could happen. This session teaches you to do it on purpose, on the side of the future you actually want. The four phases of visualisation. The trouble with the word should. The student in the lockers. The salesman with the tip.
Audio practice: Sleep readiness - designed to be used in bed at the end of the day.
Healing focus.
Session 6 - Wellbeing in Body, Heart and Mind
What you will learn: How to use the mind to support healing, manage anger, listen well and live in this body more kindly.
The body is your half-million-dollar Ferrari. You wouldn’t ignore the warning lights, so why ignore your knees, your sleep or your heart? This session is the most practical - gratitude meditation, anger as a bell, the gift of listening and a long passage on the whole self: physical, intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual.
Audio practice: Healing focus.
Session 7 - The Inner Life
What you will learn: How to deepen the practice into spiritual clarity, whatever your tradition - and how to sit with the bigger questions when they arise.
By Session 7 the practice begins to ask its own questions of you. We turn to peace, clarity, insight and stillness. We touch the language of the mystics, in particular - Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, secular - because most readers will recognise something of themselves in one of these mirrors.
Audio practice: Spiritual connection.
Session 8 - Bringing It Home
What you will learn: How to keep the practice going for the rest of your life.
The eight sessions take eight weeks. The practice takes the rest of your life. Session 8 hands you a sixty-minute mindful day - a template you can carry forward - and a closing thought that I hope stays with you: be present in the present, what a present that is to give yourself.
Audio practice: Four practices revisited - a longer recording you can use whole, or in pieces, depending on what you need that day.
What’s after Session 8?
When you have completed the eight sessions, you have several choices:
- Repeat the course. Most of my students do. Each pass goes deeper.
- Linger in one session. Spend a month in Session 5 if visualisation is what you needed. Spend a month in Session 6 if the anger work is what your real life is asking of you.
- Find a teacher. Books and audio can take you a long way, but a real human teacher, even occasionally, is invaluable.
- Go on a retreat. A two-day retreat is a wonderful next step. A five-day retreat is for further down the path.
- Read more. I keep a short recommended reading list at the back of the book.
- Eventually, teach. When you have practised for a few years, the natural urge is to share what you have. Don’t be shy of it.