Highland Mindfulness Group

Online retreat / Study days – 7th and 8th November 2020 on Zoom
 “Living with Ease” by Peter Wilkes.

This page contains the meditations recorded during the online retreat  weekend of the 7th and 8th November 2020. The meditations were guided by Catherine, Jan and Peter and are presented in the order in which they were used during the retreat. There were some periods of silent practice but these have not been included in this summary of the proceedings of the retreat. The overall theme of the weekend was “Living with Ease” – what this means and how it can be achieved.
(There was also a Living with Ease study day in 2018 which you can listen to).

Saturday the 7th November.

The basic meditation techniques that underpin all of our meditation practice and provide the foundation on which all other “Living with Ease” practices are based.

Meditation techniques 1 – a 30min “being with” meditation practice Catherine).

Meditation techniques 2 – a 30min “letting go” practice (Peter) – “The Letting go meditation” – a 30minute meditation on the theme of letting go derived from and inspired by the work of Stephen Levine. 

 

Meditation techniques 3 – a 30min “seeing judgement” practice (Peter).

Meditation techniques 4 – a 25min “labelling” practice to look at how we can recognise judgements as they arise and begin to let them go (Peter).

Meditation techniques 5 – a 30min “allowing” practice (Catherine).

Self-compassion practice (Catherine) – a 30min practice based on Kristin Neff’s model of mindfulness of painful thoughts and feelings, our common humanity and the practice of self-kindness.

Sunday the 8th November.

More advanced meditation techniques leading to deeper realisations that can enhance the sense of peacefulness and calmness that arises from our basic mindfulness practice. “Living with Ease” includes the development of the immeasurable quality of equanimity.

Meditation 1 – a 30min “living with feeling” meditation practice (Peter). Learning how to feel into our meditation practice and indeed to feel our way through life without becoming caught up in thought all of the time.

Meditation 2 – a 30min “fabrication” practice (Peter). Looking at the processes of fabrication within the mind.

Meditation 3 – a 30min “resting with impermanence” practice (Peter). Learning to accept that everything that we experience is impermanent and coming to rest with the realisation of impermanence.

Meditation 4 – a self-compassion practice for 30mins (Jan)

And to finish here is a compassion meditation recorded earlier this year during our lockdown sessions on compassion practice – Universal compassion.