The Calm Corner Update, Saturday 28th March 2020

Good morning fellow meditators.

How are you all today, and how’s your practice going? I hope you are still trying with your Mindfulness meditation and also that some of you are beginning to feel a tiny bit of benefit from it. It’s still absolutely fine to be sticking with 10 minutes at a time. Please don’t rush anything, but similarly, when you are ready, stretch yourself just by an extra minute at a time, if you can. If you can eventually reach 15 minutes at a time, that’s a decent practice to be aiming for permanently, unless you particularly want to learn to sit for longer sessions.

I want to add in one or two very small refinements today. Nothing dramatically different, I promise.

For those of you who need to peek at the time from time to time during your sitting, why not adopt the art of sitting with your eyes not quite closed, so that you don’t feel you are cheating every time you open them to see how much time is left? Of course it’s not good to obsess about how much time you have left, to the extent that you end up only fretting about when you will be finished, but it is absolutely human to feel sometimes that your meditation feels endless, and you just want it to be over. And that small adjustment might make all the difference to help you to stick with it.

And then, try a half-smile too. Not a fixed rictus grin, but just enough that the corners of your mouth are lifted rather than turned down. And it’s good to do this even when you aren’t particularly feeling like smiling. A conscious decision to adopt a smile can bring an extra dimension to your practice. Even if you aren’t feeling it at first, smiling a little brings a small measure of extra wellbeing.

Also remember to do a loving-kindness meditation now and again to centre and calm yourself.

If any of you have any questions, either about your own practice or Mindfulness meditation in general, please do ask and I’ll try to help.

But otherwise very best wishes for some successful meditation sessions over the weekend. Keep trying!

Happy meditating everyone!