Discover Our Course on Mindfulness and Self-Compassion
In this post, I will be introducing my upcoming course, “Mindfulness and Self-compassion: Creating a Mental Health Posture”.
First, I want to dispel the myth that you can’t control how you feel. You can! But not in the way that most people think. We don’t have direct control over the way that we are feeling moment to moment. And it’s a good thing that we don’t! Our emotions are important sources of information and motivation.
Sometimes it’s good to be scared or angry when facing a threat. Sometimes it’s important to feel guilty when we’ve hurt someone. A lot of the time that’s not true, and our emotions are causing unnecessary suffering.
So you can’t directly control the way you feel moment-to-moment, but you can nudge your feelings in a positive direction slowly but surely over time.
Mindfulness and self-compassion can help with that. Mindfulness is an awareness of the present moment combined with an open and accepting mental posture. By adopting a mindful frame, we give our emotions and feelings the space they need to process and dissipate naturally. We aren’t actively dispelling them but instead taking our foot off that gas, so our mental engine can slow down on its own.
Self-compassion takes things a step further. It’s approaching ourselves and our feelings with warm supportive caring. It’s our active self-soothing process that warmly settles our unpleasant emotions and supports our pleasant ones. By cultivating self-compassion, we can learn to always be gently nudging our minds toward pleasant, warm calm.
Managing Emotions Mindfully (MEM)
In the course, I’ll be teaching the basics of mindfulness and self-compassion from a practical mental health perspective. This will include both theories about how these ideas work with emotions, mental health, and daily life and also specific concrete exercises for how to cultivate them and what to do when things seem not to be working.
The course will also be a vehicle for us to create some specific habits together, building a more mindful and compassionate approach to our lives day by day over the length of the course. By creating some brief daily habits of mindfulness and self-compassion, we will set a process in motion that can carry you out of the course and into the rest of your life. You’ll leave the course with momentum toward a more mindful and self-compassionate future.
Here’s a brief outline of what we’ll cover:
Basic mindfulness and how it relates to mental health.
Creating a mindful mental posture and installing it in your life.
Compassion, caring, and how to soothe yourself.
The basic emotions, what they’re useful for, and how to work them.
Befriending your emotions and slowly turning them from enemies to allies.
A very brief introduction to habit formation.
A very brief introduction to values, intentions, and life crafting