Another weekend at the coal face of mindfulness.

That makes it sound hard, dirty work, which it wasn't. Infact Kim and Dylan showered us with culinary plenty (Sri Lankan Butternut Squash curry anyone?) and the water-meadow-flooding rain made everything in the Abbey gardens intensely green. We did have windows of sunshine too, which allowed us to wander/wonder at those incredible trees they have there: the most beautiful London Plane, cascading down those jig-jag branches heavy with doe-skin brown leaves and that massive beech with its bolus-bulging trunk and copper-green buds.

It was, however, a fruitful weekend in my thinking around mindfulness - which is ever-evolving.

I'm deep in the middle of a research project for my therapy training about the fascinating subject of dissocation and how it impacts our mindfulness.

Dissociation is like the hidden narrative that was air-brushed out of the history of psychoanalysis by the followers of Freud, who rejected it in favour of his theory of repression.

We've posted two new podcasts up on the website. They are shorter extracts and guided meditations from the course that is happening at Spa Road in London at the moment.
One is the body relaxation exercise that starts almost all Mindsprings classes. The other is a guided meditation looking at the nature of emotions.

Her favourite phrase was “I don’t know”. She told the Nobel audience: “It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended.” Without it, she said, Isaac Newton would have gobbled apples rather than pondering the force that makes them drop.

The Economist obit is here.

We like to try new stuff out at Mindsprings but the truth of running a course in a venue is that it can be expensive and it means we tend to run courses where we know we'll get a good showing of participants. That's a shame because it means that new things - things that perhaps are not on the radar - tend to get squeezed out.

So in 2012 we've decided - as much as possible - to be a bit more flexible and start running more spontaneous, pop-up workshops in cafes, in parks, on trains or in someone's office.

It works like this:

I’ve been working on the course that I’m giving this week in London - It’s about “poisoned patterns of the mind” and it seems to have caught quite a lot of people’s attention.

I’m interested in the patterning of the mind at the moment. I read Norman Doidge’s excellent The Brain That Changes Itself over December and it had quite a mind-changing effect. (Fittingly enough). The hope that neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to grow new neural pathways in adulthood) offers us is immense. Not just for phantom limb sufferers, or stroke victims, but also physically healthy humans who suffer from disordered thinking, depression and mood malfunction. And that latter category, of course, includes just about all of us.

Naturally, as a trainee therapist, I have a vested interest in neurobiological evidence that shows that the way we think and experience the world with our brains can be changed. Otherwise why would I bother practicing? As a long term meditator, I know for a fact that the brain changes. In the 10+ years I’ve been practising, my awareness of myself in the World has changed unutterably. Some of that is down to solitary practice, some to brilliant teachers, some to Ayahuasca. But the fact remains that I experience the world and my existence quite differently from the me from 1999. Qualitatively better, I would say.

So, what about “poisoned patterns”?

George Monbiot makes an interesting statement in this morning’s Guardian. He points out that there is a myth: that the people at the top of corporations are financial geniuses who got their wealth by merit of their brilliant minds and hard work. This myth is false, he says. It is a self-attribution fallacy, a myth of election. Not only do these people not have superhuman talents but:

they have preyed on the earth's natural wealth and their workers' labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.

I agree with Monbiot’s politics and I too believe that the unbridled greed of unregulated capitalism has put psychopathy in the driving seat of our culture with disasterous results.

But as I was running around Shoreditch park trying to shake of a turn-of-the-season cold, I was also reflecting on another myth-busting shift that is happening. It’s more subtle and slow-moving than the dynamic Occupy movements that are springing up all over the globe, but it is I believe complementary and phenomenally powerful.

The course up on Holy Island was truely wonderful this year. It was a great group and there was a palpable energy flowing round the Peace Hall, all conducive to some excellent work.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

I'm very excited about the workshops coming up this autumn - they're all pushing mindfulness into different directions. There's compassionate mindfulness and savouring at the Spa Road centre with me, Alistair, and then in a lovely return to the Special Yoga Centre in Kensal Rise, Kathy Osborne and I are running a weekend looking at how mindfulness can impact our relationships.