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Guided Meditation CDs

Vidyamala Burch
Breathworks Mindfulness Courses PDF Print

Mindfulness - the core skill

All the Breathworks courses are based around mindfulness. This is a special kind of awareness that is attentive and warmly engaged with each moment of life, enabling you to be honest and objective about what is happening. This means you can be creative with your experience rather than stuck in the familiar groove of reactive habits.

Anyone can learn and practice mindfulness, and participants generally find they feel much happier and more in control through incorporating mindfulness into their lives.

Breathworks runs two types of courses

Plus a Residential Course for Gradutes, that is anyone who has completed a Breathworks eight-week course

In some areas, there are more general courses, suitable for people living with a wide range of physical and emotional difficulties. Please contact the trainer named in the course details if you are unsure if a course is appropriate for you.

Many trainers are also able to offer courses tailor made for a group of people with a specific condition. Again, please contact your local trainer for details.

Primary and secondary suffering

On all courses you will learn how to make the vital distinction between:
  • primary suffering – such as painful sensations or stressful circumstances – which we will teach you ways to accept; and
  • secondary suffering – all your reactions to these difficult experiences such as physical tension, anxiety or negative thought patterns. We will help you reduce or even overcome this level of suffering, which will improve your quality of life, often dramatically. The main way you will do this is by learning to be awake to your life in the present moment, even if it includes difficulty, so you can have more freedom of choice about how you respond to things. You will also learn how to ‘hold’ different aspects of your experience within your awareness, leading to a more balanced and stable perspective on life.

Course details

Courses usually consist of eight weekly sessions of 2½ hours and a full day session at the end of the course, although in some areas there may be an option of full day sessions at weekends.

The only condition for joining a course is a willingness and commitment to engage fully with the programme, which will involve practice at home between sessions for 30 - 45 minutes a day.

Help from your employer

Our experience is that some employers will release people from work to attend our courses, and in some cases will pay for them. If you wish to approach your employer for time off or for funding, we will be happy to provide a letter to verify your course arrangements and attendance, and arrange suitable payment arrangements if required.

Course materials

You will receive three CD sets of guided meditations and a handbook to help you get the most out of the course.

After the course

To help you keep up the practices you have learned, a range of support is available, including a networking website and residential retreats.

 

 

Residential Retreats

Each year we run a five-day residential retreat aimed primarily at people who have attended a Living Well with Pain and Illness or a Living Well with Stress course with one of our accredited trainers. This has become known as the ‘grads’ retreat – as it is aimed at Living Well programme ‘graduates’.