Wishing you all a peaceful and joyful Christmas

The year is again coming to a close. The article caught my attention and is perhaps something to keep in mind as we head into the next few hectic days.

This time of year it’s often hard to slow down—and, even when we do get a chance to rest, our mind skips ahead to the next task or event. But it’s good to let ourselves step off that inner merry-go-round by finding ways to savour these final weeks of the year.

Take time to slow down and wholeheartedly savour the season with these three mindfulness practices:

• First, allow yourself to fully experience the present moment
• Next, focus on what you’re doing right now
• Then, check in on how you’re really feeling

…Read more on Mindful.org

Mindful habits for the festive season

The holiday season is upon us, and it’s not always a winter wonderland. Practice these mindful habits to cultivate joy even when things feel tough. Many of the songs, stories, and messages we hear this time of year are about joy. But accessing joy can be difficult as we navigate the sometimes stressful moments the season also delivers (we’re looking at you, holiday shopping). This is your mindful reminder to take time to pause and connect with the here and now, so you can find moments of joy all season long—even when things don’t go to plan.  Read more in Mindful.org on these three ways to embody deep joy:

• Soothe your inner critic
• Don’t just gather, connect
• Rewire your mind for moments of joy

The Mindful Kitchen

As we head into December and the hectic festive season, it would be well worth reading and acting on the suggestions in this article.

Kitchens are the heart of the home. The place where we gather, enjoy wholesome foods, savour the richness of everyday ingredients and experiences. Kitchens are also a wonderful site to practice mindfulness off of the meditation cushion. By building moments of mindfulness into activities you already do each day, like cooking, you can turn mindfulness into a daily habit. Plus, focusing your awareness on kitchen activities makes it easier to remember the little things—like where you put the missing Tupperware lid, or whether you’re out of milk.

Food can be a source of joy and nourishment, self-expression, and sharing. Yet too often, conflicting messages and expectations around food can create feelings like shame, guilt, and anger that affect the way we eat. When we bring mindful self-compassion to the table, we can start to shift some of those habits, and feel a little less overwhelmed and more embodied in the act of eating.  Read more from Mindful.org

The benifits of mindful leadership

Learning to lead with composure, a deep sense of love, and a profound sense of meaning and connectedness to life.

We can experience great joy and great love right in the midst of pressure, exhaustion, and overwhelm when we practice mindfulness. In fact, it is possible for mindfulness practice, work, and leadership to be contextualized as one activity, right in the midst of many activities. This requires self-awareness, awareness of others, awareness of time, and awareness of the quality of one’s efforts. Mindful work and mindful leadership both require and cultivate the essential skills we need to thrive. The benefits of meditation and mindfulness support our entire well-being, far beyond the needs of the workplace. They help us thrive in any endeavour…Read more from Mindful.org

Mindfulness can improve work challenges

Mindfulness may seem like a luxury work perk, but in reality taking time to pause can make or break your work day.

Mindfulness can easily be thought of as a retreat from the outsized challenges leaders often face. But when things get tough, that’s when your mindfulness practice actually shines. Take the time to ask yourself if what’s actually happening can make or break your work day.

Read this Mindful.org article on Five Common Work Challenges Mindfulness Can Improve

How mindfulness can help with indecision

We all make bad decisions from time to time—mindfulness can help turn moments of indecision into moments of clarity. Braincraft host, Vanessa Hill, dips into psychology research to highlight the factors that impact our choices. Here are three reasons we make the wrong decisions, and the solutions to take your decision-making confidence to the next level:

1. You choose something you’ve already invested in, even if it’s not the best option – “We like to think that we always make rational decisions, but science shows that’s not always the case,”

2. You get caught up in your emotions – Another way that mindfulness might help you is in being more aware of the feelings influencing your decisions, since emotions like anger, fear, and sadness “can cloud our judgment without us even realizing it.”

3. You just need a good night’s sleep – It turns out, there really is a reason why your parents always told you to sleep on your decisions. People tend to make more accurate decisions in the morning, perhaps because they also made them more slowly. Later in the day, we seem to discern more quickly, but less accurately…  read more from Mindful.org

Changes and transitions, both wanted and unwanted, are a fact of life.

By choosing to pay attention to these experiences with curiosity, we begin to see these changes in a different light.

In this video, Dr. West talks about transition and change as a continuum and offers a simple mindfulness meditation exercise that highlights this ‘noticing’.

When stress manifests itself, our body reacts in predictable ways.

In this video, Dr. Carolyn West, Senior MBSR Teacher, Center for Mindfulness US, explains these reactions in the context of her own experience and offers a simple mindfulness meditation exercise to restore clarity and balance.

What is the best way to be there for someone when they are hurting or experiencing challenging times? How can we comfort them and ease their pain and suffering?

In this beautiful short animated video, Dr Brené Brown teases apart the difference between empathy and sympathy and shows us how empathy fuels connection, while sympathy drives disconnection.

She also shares the attributes of empathy and reminds us that we can only create a genuine empathic connection if we are courageous enough to truly get in touch with our own fragilities... Learn the four attributes of empathy here

Centre for Mindfulness Ireland You Tube Channel

Have you subscribed to the new Centre for Mindfulness Ireland You Tube Channel yet?

On this dedicated site we have talks from Saki Santorelli, Florence Meleo-Meyer and Judson Brewer and will continue to add more videos of interesting and helpful information from top CFM trainers. We also have meditation talks from Anne Twohig, founder of Centre for Mindfulness Ireland. Why not head over to take a look? The talk by Florence will be particularly interesting for those joining us on the Mindfulness Tools course in the autumn … You Tube