Thank you to everyone who came to our National Stress day Meditation Session in collaboration with the Kadampa Meditation Centre. Before I go on with this post I want to take this opportunity to say a massive thank you to Jindak for her kindness and delivering such a beautiful and insightful session. From this session I just wanted to outline a few of my own take-home messages and things that I have learnt from the session:
1. Both Happiness and Suffering are states of mind. We have the power to change our state of mind, and decide whether or not something is going to affect us.
2. We have the ability to determine the difference between outter and inner problems. For example, if your car is broken, this is an outter problem. That's the car's problem. Just recognising this rather than having that internal anger at yourself can help reduce anxieties.
3. When we start to notice symptoms of anxiety or stress, we can bring our attention to them. These are normal emotions, we can check in with ourselves in a non-judgemental way and engage in meditation to relieve these symptoms. Shut your eyes, breathe in and out slowly. Breathe in positive feelings and happiness, breathe out negative feelings and imagine these feelings like black smoke, drifting up into space, away from you.
4. Use the opportunity when showering not only to clean your body from dirt, but to cleanse your mind of any dirt (stress and negativity). This can be a beautiful act first thing in the morning to help you start off your day right! Bring attention to your head and try taking a mindful shower (it's surprisingly refreshing, trust me)!
5. The time to be happy is now. Take every day as a new opportunity to be happy. Everyday you wake up is a new day to live up to your potential and be happy. Do not wait your whole life to be happy or spend it searching for happiness.
To download the free e-book on the teachings from Jindak's session follow this link: https://kadampa.org/2017/01/free-ebook-download-transform-life
For more information from the Kadampa Meditation Centre follow this link:
https://kadampa.org/
Interested in Jindak's sessions? They run every Wednesday evening at Park House: https://learntomeditate.org/reading-university/
Free Open Mind membership:
https://www.rusu.co.uk/societies/openmindreading/
Like our Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/openmindreading/
Follow us on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/openmindreading/