Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D. is co-founder of The Centre for Mindful Living and the creator of the six-month online program A Course in Mindful Living. His books are available in 12 languages and include Uncovering Happiness, The Now Effect, Mindfulness Meditations for the Anxious Traveler and A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook with a foreword by Jon Kabat-Zinn.
Full-day online workshop
May 4, 2020 10:00 am – 4:00 pm
Creating a Practice That Lasts
In this workshop, we’ll not only be deepening into mindfulness and compassion practice but also explore playful exercises that are outside the traditional training of most mindfulness-based programs that you can do and teach to help yourself and others create the clarity and energy for consistent motivation and practice.
Many people want to engage in mindfulness because they’ve been told it will help them, but our experience and the statistics show that most practices after the program’s end don’t stick. As a result, we don’t optimize the impact of mindfulness in our lives, the lives of our students and society at large.
Most teacher training and mindfulness-based programs miss an essential foundation in helping students go deeper into the reasons for creating a consistent practice. They often outline the benefits of mindfulness and ask why people have come to the program, but not “why” they want a consistent practice. This is one underlying reason why the student’s practice doesn’t last. In this workshop, we’ll explore exercises that can help us and others better understand their reasons that can become fuel for motivation.
Another obstacle to practice is the student’s lack of understanding about where they actually want to take their practice and belief that they can actually do it. We’ll explore the power of preparing our minds to see the outcomes we’re looking for, an ongoing commitment to our practice on and off the cushion with visualization that professional athletes have been using for decades.
Everybody, even the most seasoned practitioner experiences obstacles to practice. We’ll explore some key implicit unconscious obstacles to practice that even a regular meditator can fall prey to, how to identify these and how to use our mind AND body to move through them.
Finally, the linchpin to our practice often depends upon the environments we’re living in. We’ll explore ways to optimize your physical, virtual and social environments in a way that will help the inspiration and motivation to practice become not just simpler, but easier.
Learning Outcomes:
- Understand the science of interdependence and how to curate your social circle
- Understand how emotion is the key driver to our perception
- Experience going beyond traditional self-compassion practice to fierce self-compassion for greater empowerment.
- Experience ways to use our bodies to create more energy and flexibility in our minds.
Agenda (*all times in EDT):
- 10:00 am – 12:30 pm – first session (15-minute break mid-session)
- 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm – break
- 1:30 pm – 4:00 pm – second session (15-minute break mid-session)