We are back after the summer break and have "hit the ground running".
It has been very replenishing to enjoy the New Zealand summer with family and friends and now we are gearing up for an exciting year, full of promise.
On site at the Insight International head office, the legendary "Brick Barn" is close to being finished and we are hoping to use it for this years IFT training that is about to start in two weeks time. We also have a vision for the six weekly mindfulness groups, creative workshops and other exciting events to take place here during this year.
The other exciting event that has been planned for June this year is the "Becoming Mindful" seminar in Austria. We have been gathering research, preparing the material and are looking forward to the prospect of seeing many of you there. Have a read of Jon Kabat-Zinn's blog post below, in it he explains what mindfulness is all about and why it is so life-changing.
We encourage you to register for the seminar. The early bird price will only be available until the end of February, so you have a small window of opportunity to avail yourselves of this. We hope that your practice of mindfulness and your use of IFT continues to enhance your life, and that more and more you will be able to give quality attention to the present moment and become enriched by the emergent riches that it offers.
2016, A new year, a new beginning. We all have hope that we can change and improve things. In our research we are discovering that having a sense of well-being is actually a learned skill. Richard Davidson, teaches that there are four aspects of well-being that are rooted in specific brain circuits that exhibit neuroplasticity. This means that we can enhance our well-being with practice. Have a listen to the video below to find out how.
Warm regards from the team at Insight International and stay in touch, we would love to hear how you are doing.
Pauline xxx
Richard Davidson: The Four Constituents of Well-Being
Richard Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains the four constituents of well-being. These constituents are rooted in specific brain circuits that exhibit neuroplasticity, which gives us the opportunity to enhance our well-being with practice.
BLOG - Mindfulness, what is it?
by Jon Kabat-Zinn (one of the founding father's of western mindfulness)
Mindfulness is a way of being in wise and purposeful relationship with one’s experience, both inwardly and outwardly. It is cultivated by systematically exercising one’s capacity for paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally, and by learning to inhabit and make use of the clarity, discernment, ethical understanding, and awareness that arise from tapping into one’s own deep and innate interior resources for learning, growing, healing, and transformation, available to us across the lifespan by virtue of being human.
Mindfulness usually involves cultivating familiarity and intimacy with aspects of everyday experience that we often are unaware of, take for granted, or discount in terms of importance. These would include our experience of the present moment, our own bodies, our thoughts and emotions, and above all, our tacit and constraining assumptions and our highly conditioned habits of mind and behaviour.
Mindfulness practices in various forms can be found in all the meditative wisdom traditions of humanity. In essence, mindfulness - being about attention, awareness, relationality, and caring - is a universal human capacity, akin to our capacity for language acquisition. While the most systematic and comprehensive articulation of mindfulness and its related attributes stems from the Buddhist tradition, mindfulness is not a catechism, an ideology, a belief system, a technique or set of techniques, a religion, or a philosophy. It is best described as “a way of being”. There are many different ways to cultivate it wisely and effectively through practice.
Basically, when we are talking about mindfulness, we are talking about awareness – pure awareness. It is an innate human capacity that is different from thinking but wholly complementary to it. It is also “bigger” than thinking, because any thought, no matter how momentous or profound, illuminating or destructive, can be held in awareness, and thus looked at, known, and understood in a multiplicity of ways which may provide new degrees of insight and fresh perspectives for dealing with old problems and emergent challenges, whether individual, societal, or global. Awareness in its purest form, or mindfulness, thus has the potential to add value and new degrees of freedom to living life fully and wisely and, thus, to making wiser and healthier, more compassionate and altruistic choices – in the only moment that any of us ever has for tapping our deep interior resources for imagination and creativity, for learning, growing, and healing, and in the end, for transformation, going beyond the limitations of our presently understood models of who we are as human beings and individual citizens, as communities and societies, as nations, and as a species.
In the past 40 years, mindfulness in various forms has found its way into the mainstream of medicine, health care and psychology, where it has been broadly applied and continues to be evermore extensively studied through clinical research and neuroscience. More recently, it has also entered the mainstream of education, business, the legal profession, government (witness this very report and the mindfulness programme in Parliament that gave rise to it), military training (in the USA), the criminal justice system, etc. Interest in mindfulness within the mainstream of society and its institutions is rapidly becoming a global phenomenon, supported by increasingly rigorous scientific research, and driven in part by a longing for new models and practices that might help us individually and collectively to apprehend and solve the challenges threatening our health as societies and as a species, optimizing the preconditions for happiness and wellbeing, and minimizing the causes and preconditions for unhappiness and suffering.
Jon Kabat-Zinn Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School Lexington, Massachusetts July, 2015
What's on? 2016 Events...
Becoming Mindful - IFT Summer Seminar, June 17th-19th, Austria 2016.
WATCH THIS SPACE... Over the next few days we will be sending out more information about the seminar, including a special invitation for our Insight Friends and Family to enjoy a further 10% off their seminar fee.
All you need to do to be eligible for this special discount is encourage any of your friends and family to also register. If they mention your name, and complete the registration, you get a 10% discount off your seminar fee! It's that simple!
Are you wanting to come, but not pay just yet?
We are currently building the programme and working out entertainment and activities, it would be really helpful if you could let us know if you are wanting to attend but are not able to pay just yet.
IFT - NZ Training Course 2016
Super last chance to sign up...please contact us with any queries.