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Week 1: Introduction to Mindfulness
Hi there,
The page that follows is the translation of MiA Module 1. This English version is for our friends and donors to have a firsthand taste of our work, both in content and in style. We do hope you will enjoy looking around, reading, experiencing and noting the trauma informed design and metaphors chosen. Please note: there are some differences here - In the English version, for the meditations which are recorded and meant to be listened to, we have provided only transcripts. Furthermore, only the first of our eight modules will be available in English, as it is important for us, in the time being, to direct our resources specifically to the Arabic content. All that said, we would love to hear your feedback!
Welcome and congratulations! You've just made your first step towards more peace of mind. We're excited to share with you our very first module. To begin, please make sure you are in a quiet space, where you can read and/or listen with ease, for at least 15 minutes. We suggest using simple headphones! And maybe you would like to have a notebook and pen handy (though not a must). Please download and read the following document before proceeding to your first recorded meditation. Let's begin!
Hello!
Welcome to the Mindfulness course, a brain training for coping with stress and anxiety. My name is Juditta Ben-David and I am a psychotherapist, lecturer, and mindfulness instructor, and I will guide you in this course.
This course was designed for you to support your everyday awareness in life, and especially to deal with challenges more easily. The course is made up of recorded sessions, readings, and meditation exercises, for an eight-week process, which we call “The Eight Steps.”
Today we will begin the first week of the course with an introduction to the technique itself. We will understand the term Mindfulness, also called mindful attention, and the reasons why we warmly recommend learning and using this technique on a daily basis.
We all encounter challenges and crises in life and we can then be helped and supported by tools that will make it easier for us to cope. Some of us have encountered truly severe situations, and we would like to offer you experiences that have been shown to bring more balance and ease to walking through life after such changes.
Without the cultivation of new tools, most of our patterns for dealing with stress and crisis are not very effective. Most were learned at a very young age, and therefore use basic techniques of fight, flight or freeze. That is how our ancient (younger) brain operates when it is under threat.
We can react impulsively to intimidation in the environment or in ourselves, go into obsessive worry, or we can push over the stress and the story in a fight against sensations, feelings and thoughts that may come up with them, so that they disappear... But usually they do not disappear. We can try to avoid them one way or another, but usually this increases our inner tension even more, weakens us, and maybe even raises the environmental tension. But, there is another approach, another option that we can use.. and that is exactly what I would like to talk about in this course and invite you to practice for a few minutes every day.
" Stress and challenges are definitely part of life. In this course we will learn new ways to deal with them, and maybe even learn how to enjoy life a little bit more. "