Séance 1

Très simplement, la pleine conscience est définie comme « prêter attention au moment présent sans jugement, et se caractérise par l’intérêt, la bienveillance et une vision claire ». C’est une invitation à être présent dans notre vie.

Nous pratiquons en recevant tous les domaines d’expérience avec une attention curieuse et ouverte. Ces domaines comprennent la respiration, les sensations physiques, les sentiments, les pensées et la conscience elle-même. Il n’y a aucune tentative de manipuler ou de contrôler l’expérience : nous apprenons à être présent à notre expérience telle qu’elle est.

Parce que nos esprits sont souvent occupés et réactifs, il est utile d’utiliser des supports a la concentration qui calment l’esprit et nous permettent de revenir vers le moment présent. Ces supports aident à détendre nos pensées et nos tensions physiques, et à créer l’ambiance intérieure qui est la plus propice à l’ouverture à la présence.

Cette première méditation est une pratique de recentrage qui consiste à se connecter à nos sens et à remarquer ce qui est présent en nous en ce moment.

Seance 2

Lorsque nous commençons à méditer, nous nous rendons compte que nous sommes très facilement emportés par nos pensées. 

Ainsi, pour stabiliser l’attention et calmer l’esprit, il est utile de sélectionner un ou plusieurs points d’ancrages qui nous permettent de calmer et de canaliser notre esprit, en nous concentrant sur eux. Les points d’ancrage que nous allons explorer ensemble aujourd’hui et lors des prochaines séances sont : la respiration; les sensations dans notre corps; les sons.

Aujourd’hui nous allons expérimenter avec la respiration comme point d’ancrage pour notre attention.

Utiliser la respiration pour se détendre

Si vous vous sentez très agité et anxieux, une respiration abdominale profonde peut être utilisée pour calmer votre système nerveux. Il suffit de 3 à 5 respirations profondes.

Une autre technique de respiration pour se détendre est la technique de la « paille ».  Commencez à inspirer par le nez en comptant jusqu’à 4, puis expirez à travers les lèvres pincées comme à travers une paille en comptant jusqu’ 8.  Essayez de rester confortable. L’idée est de se détendre. 

Si jamais vous ressentez une gêne, des étourdissements ou une désorientation avec cet exercice ou tout autre exercice de régulation de la respiration, arrêtez immédiatement et laissez votre respiration revenir à la normale.

Séance 3

Aujourd’hui j’aimerais vous parler de l’importance de pratiquer la relaxation profonde en période de stress.

Il existe deux types de stress : le stress de type 1 et le stress de type 2.

Le stress de type 1 disparaît rapidement, confronté à un animal dangereux par exemple, soit on se fait manger, soit on échappe au tigre. 

Le stress de type 2 est différent, il ne semble pas s’arrêter, on ne peut pas régler rapidement les problèmes. C’est ce que nous vivons en ce moment : un stress multiforme, continu, souvent vague, et nous ne pouvons pas faire grand-chose pour résoudre la situation. Ce n’est pas comme le stress de type 1.

Mais il y a des choses que nous pouvons faire pour protéger notre santé mentale et physique : bien manger, faire de l’exercice, rester en contact avec nos amis et notre famille, passer du temps dans la nature, écouter de la musique, lire des livres inspirants, et surtout, pratiquer régulièrement la relaxation mentale et physique, car cet état favorise la santé et la guérison. Elle renforce le système immunitaire et le développement de la résilience, et elle est facile à pratiquer et très agréable.

Pour être bénéfique, la technique de relaxation doit être pratiquée régulièrement.

Aujourd’hui nous allons pratiquer la pratique de relaxation progressive des muscles (PMR- progressive muscle relaxation).

Séance 4

 Aujourd’hui nous allons continuer à pratiquer avec le corps, et nous allons nous entrainer à nous concentrer sur les sensations dans les différentes parties du corps.

Cette pratique nous aide à stabiliser notre attention. Parfois des pensées vont nous distraire et nous entrainer ailleurs, c’est tout à fait normal. Il ne faut pas s’en inquiéter. Quand nous nous en apercevons, il nous suffit de ramener notre attention vers la partie du corps sur laquelle nous nous concentrions avant d’être distrait. Nous le faisons gentiment et avec patience, sans nous énerver contre nous-mêmes.

L’autre avantage de cette pratique sur le corps c’est qu’elle nous aide également à relâcher nos tensions et à nous relaxer.

Aujourd’hui, nous allons pratiquer le balayage du corps. Dans cette pratique, nous déplaçons systématiquement notre attention à travers les différentes parties du corps, avec l’intention de ressentir chaque partie de l’intérieur, plutôt que d’y penser, c’est la principale différence.

Au début, il est assez courant d’avoir du mal à sentir certaines parties du corps.

Séance 5

Nous sommes tous stressés à un moment ou à un autre. Être stressé signifie se trouver dans une situation dans notre vie qui dépasse notre capacité à faire face. Par exemple, une grande partie de la population est stressée pendant le confinement.

 Est-ce que tu as remarqué ce qui se passe dans ton corps quand tu es stressé ? Dans quelles parties de ton corps remarques-tu le plus que tu es stressé ? Comment change ta respiration quand tu es stressé ?

Si nous apprenons à comprendre et à sentir comment notre corps réagit quand nous sommes stressés, cela peut nous aider à faire face aux situations qui nous stressent.

Au cours des dernières séances tu as pu essayer diverses techniques pour aider à calmer ton corps et ton esprit. La respiration, la relaxation progressive des muscles, le body scan.

La méditation d’aujourd’hui utilise l’image de la montagne pour t’aider à te recentrer quand tu te sens déséquilibré ou stressé.

Séance 6

Nous sommes plongés dans un bain de mots dans la vie de tous les jours, les mots que nous entendons dans notre famille, avec nos amis, les mots prononcés sur les écrans, les mots que nous lisons, et les mots qui circulent constamment dans notre esprit sous la forme de pensées.

Sans que nous le réalisions, tous ces mots ont un impact sur nos émotions, comment nous nous sentons à l’intérieur.

 Nos émotions sont influencées par nos pensées, les mots que nous nous répétons et les mots que nous entendons autour de nous. Nous pouvons influencer comment nous nous sentons en choisissant des mots qui nous aident à nous sentir bien. Plus nous sommes conscients du pouvoir des mots, plus nous pouvons changer la façon dont nous nous sentons.

Je t’invite à remarquer les mots qui t’aident à te sentir bien, et les mots qui provoquent du stress ou de la tension en toi. Ce peut être les mots que tu entends autour de toi ou les mots qui circulent dans ta tête.

Session 7

Today we have seen 3 short practices that you can take anywhere with you, to help you when you feel stressed and you want to calm yourself.

The first one is a short progressive muscle relaxation using the acronym CALM: Chest, Arms, Legs, Mind. This short practice can help you notice if there is tension in your body, and what type of thoughts and emotions are here for you. Throughout the day, you can practice noticing where in your body or in your mind you are getting tense, and you can try squeezing and releasing to let go of tension in the body and the mind.

The second practice is a short sound relaxation with bell sounds. Simply listening to the sounds around you and to the silence in-between the sounds can be deeply relaxing, and you can do it anywhere!

The third practice is to remember to take 3 mindful breaths, at various moments throughout the day. Simply bringing your attention to the sensations of breathing in and breathing out, for three breaths. Slowing down your breathing for these three breaths. You might be able to notice the pause between the last out-breath and the next in-breath, and to relax in that pause.

Session 8

Today we talked about how we can use our mindfulness practice to notice the good in our life, and be able to have more fun, or enjoy the good moments.

We all have a negativity bias, which means that we have a tendency to focus more on negative things than positive things. The brain is Velcro for the negative and Teflon for the positive. This is due to how our brain has evolved over the years. We all have that tendency to focus on the negative, and mindfulness can help us see the positive in our life.

Activity: You could do a game whereby at the end of the day you try and recall 5 significant things that happened to you, and see if these events are more likely to be positive or negative. If they are more negative than positive, see if you can recall more positive events.

When we practice mindfulness we learn to pay attention to what is happening right here right now.

When we are fully present in each moment, we can notice and enjoy the little pleasures that happen throughout our day:

We can really taste the yumminess of our afternoon tea, when we can completely focus on it. We can practice being mindful when we eat so we can fully enjoy our food instead of being lost in thoughts of what happened before or what needs to happen after.

Another thing that helps us deepen our experience of the present moment is to have a sense of humour about what is happening. A funny moment is something that we can enjoy and be grateful for. When we smile, the facial muscles we use to create a smile send a message to our nervous system that it is safe to relax. Smiling helps us to relax both physically and mentally. When we see other people smile it also makes us feel good.

It can help to bring to mind 3 things that made us happy every day, share them with our family, ask our family members what made them happy, it helps to grow feelings of contentment, joy and happiness. Even when we go through difficult times, we can still train ourselves to notice the things that are good in our life.

Session 9

Today we spoke about becoming aware of your thoughts.

In meditation, we often use the image of the waterfall to describe this constant stream of thoughts that happens in our mind. The goal of meditation is not to stop the thoughts or get rid of them, but rather to develop a different relationship with them by becoming aware of them: the idea is to step behind the waterfall, and watch the thoughts from a distance, so we are no longer caught or lost in them.

If we stop to sense the nature of our thoughts, we soon realise that they are incessant and somewhat repetitive: apparently, we have 6000 thoughts a day and 95% of them we had the day before!

The other key feature of our thoughts is that they often make us miserable. Evolution has conditioned us to be vigilant about threats, so we tend to have a lot of thoughts in the category of worry, anxiety about what is about to happen that perpetuate an atmosphere of fear and negativity. So Our thoughts are like maps but they are not a true representation of the territory. 

Sometimes we get so into our thoughts that we get wrapped up in them in the same way we get caught up in a TV show. Our thoughts seem so powerful and real that we assume that everything we are thinking is true, and that we need to follow every thought that comes up.

Mindfulness helps us to choose which thoughts are helpful and which are not, and to stop being controlled by our thoughts. When we stop and notice our thoughts, we have a choice about what we do with them. Just like a TV show we can:

Mute: we can’t stop thinking but we can choose if we pay attention to our thoughts or not. When you press on mute, you can choose to turn your attention to something else. For example, you have a humanities assignment and you are finding it hard to start on it, then you notice the thought “I don’t like humanities, I am not good at it, I always get poor marks”. This thought will not help you get started at your assignment, on the contrary it discourages you. So you can choose to mute that thought and focus on something else, maybe tell yourself that you can ask your parents or your teacher for help. You don’t have to listen to thoughts that are unhelpful.

Pause: if a thought is important but you are not ready to pay attention to it, you can take a minute to pause and practice some relaxation techniques before you can focus on it. Like pausing a show and finishing it later.

Play: Watch the thought as if you were watching it on a screen. Notice what you see, what you hear, how the thought makes you feel. Then you can ask yourself, is this thought accurate, is it a true representation of the reality or is it missing something or exaggerating? For example, maybe it is not true that you are bad at humanities, you are just struggling with this particular assignment

Record: sometimes we get so caught up in our thoughts that we don’t even realise they are just thoughts, and we can not mute or pause them. But we can replay them later on and ask ourselves “what this thought true?” “was it helpful?” if I had this thought again, would it be helpful to mute it, pause it or watch it?”

So you can start reflecting for yourself:

Which of my thoughts are helpful?

 Which ones are not helpful? How do my thoughts make me feel?

What are my top ten tunes, the thoughts that I keep having? Sometimes the same thoughts keep playing on a loop.

Session 10 – The stories our mind tells us

As we pay more attention to our thoughts, we notice how often we are wrapped up in stories we make up from the reality. We take incomplete information that is available to us at that moment, and then we create a story that is part truth and part fiction about what is happening. Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves are helpful and sometimes they are not helpful.

For example, if you see two kids in your class talking and looking at you, you might interpret that as them talking about you, when in fact they might have been talking about something completely different.

Our minds love to tell stories. This is how we make sense of the world around us. In any given moment, we are taking in what’s around us and trying to fit it into a story to make sense of it.

As with our thinking in general, there is nothing wrong with our tendency to create stories, that’s how our mind works and how we make sense of the world. But sometimes the stories we tell ourselves are not a true representation of the reality. For example, we might assume that someone is mad at us when in fact they’re not. This type of story does not make us feel good. Our thoughts are very powerful.

Can you think of times when this has happened to you? You might have started telling yourself a story in your head, without having all the information to know if it was true of not.

There is something you can do when you notice that your thoughts are churning and telling you stories, you can say to yourself “the story I am telling myself right now is….” And you can pause, observe the situation more clearly, see if you’re missing some important piece of information and ask yourself if it’s true or not, is there a side that you are not seeing for example?

Today’s practice teaches you how to pay attention to your thoughts, notice how they make you feel,  and then move out of your head and into your body and to focus on a place where your thoughts can’t reach.

Session 11 – Our inner weather pattern

 We experience a wide range of emotions throughout our day, and sometimes it can feel as though our emotions were ruling our life. With mindfulness, we can learn to pay attention to our emotions and to know what we are feeling, without being caught in them. This allows us to respond to the events in our life with presence of mind instead of reacting blindly.

Why do we have emotions?

We are conditioned to assess instinctively every experience we encounter as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. When we encounter something pleasant we try and retain it or grasp onto it, when we encounter something unpleasant we try and push it away, and if its neutral we tend to ignore it and move on to the next thing. We do this automatically, and our body registers these reactions before we are even aware of it.

This automatic reaction to each experience is what gives rise to the whole range of our emotions, these are all the emotions we are familiar with, there is a list of 500 of them in alphabetical order!

Sometimes our emotions can be so strong that they totally unsettle us, we can always feel them in our body. For example, when we feel sad we might experience constriction in our throat, when we feel angry we might experience a rush of energy to the head, when we feel scared we might feel pressure in our chest….

As soon as we experience an emotion, we have thoughts or stories in our head about it: sometimes we think that we should not feel the way we feel, especially if we experience a strong emotion. But feelings are simply feelings, and they are all okay.

It can help to see our emotions as an internal weather system. Any emotion, like a weather pattern, is an experience that arises in our mind and body based on certain conditions coming together. When conditions change, that response fades and the emotion passes. Our emotions come and go just like another weather system. In fact, it has been shown that an emotion only last 90 seconds in our body if we don’t feed it with our thoughts, and just let it be. It’s our thinking that fuels our emotions and make them last a lot longer, the stories we tell ourselves (I am angry because such and such happened for example..)

We don’t need to identify with our moods, they do not define who we are. The important part is to allow ourselves to feel the way we feel, without denying our emotions, pushing them away or letting them control us. We can observe them like a weather pattern, let them come and let them go, without having to do anything about them.

Session 12 – Our strong emotions

Today I would like to continue exploring how mindfulness can help us be with very strong emotions. Sometimes our emotions can be so strong that they totally unsettle us, they can feel big and overpowering. Sometimes it’s like they explode right out of us and we feel like we can’t control them. Meditation can help us learn to experience our strong emotions without feeling overwhelmed.

Example of strong emotions are when we feel stressed, anxious, angry, or sad.

You can start thinking for yourself if there are particular emotions that you have a hard time holding or watching. One way we can hold our emotion in awareness is by breaking it down into its component parts. It helps us be less overwhelmed. We will try it now.

Can you remember a time when you had a really strong emotion? Close your eyes and remember the event that led to this emotion. Can you remember how you felt beforehand? And how did the event feel, pleasant, unpleasant?

What did you notice in your body? it is possible that you can feel it now by remembering what happened. How did your face feel / look like, your hands, arms, legs, feet, belly? See if you can notice the sensations that are present in your body right now.

See if you can also notice where in your body you are not feel the feeling? Our difficult feelings usually don’t take up our whole body, some parts are still okay.

Now see if you can notice what thoughts come up for you with this emotion ?

Now see if you can notice what happens to the emotion as you observe it: Does it get more or less intense, does it disappear or transform into a different emotion?

Do you remember what you did when you were feeling the strong emotion? Did anything help you feel better? Did you do anything that you wish you hadn’t done maybe?

What would you like to do next time you feel that way?

 Meditation for strong feelings

There are time when we feel frustrated, upset or very anxious. At those times it is helpful to pause and focus on our body and our breathing. So today we will practice a meditation that you can do when you feel that you are experiencing a strong emotion. Don’t worry if that’s not the case for you right now, it’s good to become familiar with the practice so it is easier for you to do it when you need it.