Mindfulness week 5: Exploring difficulties

This is mid way through the mindfulness programme.   Up until now, different types of meditation have been covered including the body scan, the three minute breathing meditation and the sitting meditation and a number of practices including awareness, mindfulness eating and mindfulness walks.

In week 5 we explored difficulties. We deal with difficulties in different ways – we may try to block or ignore the difficulty or feel overwhelmed by it. But it may be niggling away at the back of our minds and at some point it will get to a critical level. By delaying facing the difficulty we are just prolonging the problem. We need to turn towards not away from a difficulty.

Using meditation to feel the difficulty and the emotion it provokes may be beneficial. You have to recognize the difficulty and let it in. During the meditation we thought about a difficulty in our life and tried to focus on where it was affecting our bodies. We then analysed where we felt the difficulty and what emotion it made us feel.

We allowed the thought or feeling of the difficulty to stay in the mind and feel the sensation in our body. We tried to breathe into the sensation to explore the feeling. And we let that difficulty remain, not trying to change the sensations, just to explore them.

Image credit – http://ied.eu/main-obstacles-difficulties/