Freedom

During the 19th Century, African American slaves who escaped to find freedom from the southern United States were supported by a secret network of routes, safe houses, and brave individuals. This was called The Underground Railroad, which is also the title of a book and film, which does not hold back on the brutal and inhuman cruelty of the plantation owners.

Freedom can be defined as the absence of compulsion, coercion, or constraint in our choice or action. In the Western world, we are fortunate to live in relative freedom, which is all too easy to take for granted. Freedom is relative and personal, and, as Nelson Mandela pointed out, also includes the freedom of others. We have relative economic freedom but still have to work to pay the bills. We have political freedom, but we may find that our votes do not always count. We have freedom of expression but find that it’s not always wise to speak out against the status quo. We have freedom of movement but may need to get a visa to visit certain countries. We have psychological freedom but sometimes experience limiting thoughts and unpleasant feelings. Of all of these freedoms, it is the ones that are closest to us, the thoughts, emotions, body, and senses that determine our relationship with the world and other people, which are the most relevant for mindfulness practice.

Thoughts
There are various estimates on how many thoughts we have in a typical day, from 25,000 to 70,000. Even if the former is true, that means our brain is like a busy city transport hub with thousands of passengers coming and going. No wonder we sometimes feel agitated and full of noise and stress.

Knowing that we are not our thoughts, mental freedom is about noticing:
Where our attention is at any moment
The difference between intentional and unintentional thinking
Whether thoughts serve us and other people, or not
Whether thoughts are useful, expanding, and nurturing. or not useful, limiting and depleting
When we become attached and bound to thoughts

Emotions
We may not experience as many emotions and feelings as thoughts during a day, but they can easily have a powerful impact, especially when they remain unacknowledged. Like the weather, we are always in some kind of mood, so noticing if our mood is bright and sunny, or overcast with occasional downpours, is a good start. Emotions come and go over the day. From experience, we know that positive emotions are non-stick like Teflon and negative emotions are like Velcro and hang around for much longer than needed.

Knowing that we are not our emotions, emotional freedom means:
Being more aware of the mood we are in
Acknowledging feelings and emotions as they arise, if possible
Allowing feelings to be just as they are
Creating the conditions for emotional stability
Being kind and compassionate with ourselves and others

There are many ways that we can experience freedom through practising mindfulness: letting go of past habit patterns that no longer serve us, releasing held tightness and tension in the body, and knowing that we are always more than our thoughts and emotions. And by becoming more awake and aware of what it is to be human, we may even discover greater freedom in other areas of our lives.

Suggested weekly practice

Take the time to discover areas of your life where you could find greater freedom
Notice thoughts that cultivate freedom and those that are limiting
As a human you have the most potential of any creature in the known universe, so explore and appreciate the freedom that you already have

Guidance

Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.

Play the first settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then close your eyes while this meditation plays that explores freedom in our mind and emotions.

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New Year of compassion

At the beginning of a new year, we reflect on the past twelve months and look forward to the next three hundred and sixty-five days. This can be at a personal level, as well as collectively across the world.

Reflecting on 2024 we see many global conflicts, the hottest recorded average annual temperatures, and many environmental disasters caused by climate change. These conflicts and disasters led to an upsurge in the number of people forced to leave their homes and migrate to safer areas. There was also positive news. Greenhouse gas pollution in the European Union was reduced to 37% below 1990 levels. Many coal-fired power stations closed, and renewable energy sources are on the rise. Many nations acted to reduce biodiversity loss. In the EU, the nature restoration law requires all member countries to restore and protect wildlife on a fifth of their land and sea by 2030. 2024 also saw a rise in protecting children from the dangers and risks to the mental health of smartphones and social media.

Looking to 2025, we can expect the world to become more chaotic, as the rise of powerful nationalist leaders changes the world order and increases geopolitical and economic uncertainty. Whatever happens, humanity is going through change and transition. Let’s hope 2025 brings greater peace and stability and that we collectively re-assess how we live on this beautiful, but fragile planet. In this context, it is useful to experience compassion as expanding circles of care, kindness, and understanding that begin with yourself, then your family, community, and country, and then to all people and living creatures, nature, the environment, to encompass the whole of the living planet we call home.

At this time of year, on a personal level, it’s traditional to make resolutions, commit to doing more exercise, improve our diet, take up a new interest, or progress in our career. The fact is that most resolutions are forgotten by the end of January. Although setting personal goals is useful, we can often be hard on ourselves if our plans falter. In mindfulness practice, we tend to set intentions rather than goals. Taking the bigger, as well as personal challenges into account, one useful intention for the year is to start from the first circle of compassion, to be kind to yourself and others.

We all have faults and make mistakes, which is part of being human. Self-compassion is about accepting our imperfections and relating to the complete and whole sense of who we are, rather than a limited part of ourselves. In the time-poor, stress-bound world we live in, many of us entertain and identify with the harsh-voiced inner critic; although we may consider ourselves generally kind to others, there are many times when we could have responded with greater kindness, even to the people we are closest to.

Although the culture many of us grew up in taught us that we’ll only succeed by being hard on ourselves, the reverse is true. Self-criticism erodes our self-worth and increases anxiety, anger, and low mood. Leading a good-enough, rather than a perfect life means practicing self-compassion. It also means realising that in the Western world, we are embedded in a biased culture that encourages competition and challenges our self-worth, so that we become compliant consumers. Recent research on people who developed greater self-compassion found that they performed better at tasks and were generally a lot happier.

So, here are some tips on bringing self-compassion and kindness into your year:

Don’t assume that you’re naturally kind to yourself; really listen to the quality of the self-talk you identify with, using curiosity, kindness, and beginner’s mind – as if you never really heard your self-talk before.
Cultivate greater awareness, appreciation, gratitude, care, and compassion for your body, for all of the stress, strain, and negative judgements you impose on it. Try relating to your body with similar compassion as if it was a favourite child or pet you care about.
Bring moments of peace and calm into your day by pausing between activities and bringing your attention and awareness to your body and breath.

Learning to be more self-compassionate takes time; it’s a marathon, not a sprint, which is why setting the intention for the year is a useful timeframe. Many hidden aspects of ourselves are worth exploring and self-compassion can help light the way. As the 14th Dalai Lama said, “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.”

Suggested weekly practice

Review any New Year’s resolutions, goals, or intentions and weave in some kindness and self-compassion.
As well as resolutions, review your intentions for mindful self-development for the year. For instance, to meditate every day, to notice more, to be less reactive, or to bring kindness and compassion into each day.
Watch out for difficult things that you habitually tend to avoid and instead, find the inner courage to move towards the difficult, and befriend it with kindness and understanding.

Guidance
Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified, and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes or lower your gaze while the meditations play.

Play the first settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then play the second practice to explore and experience self-compassion and set intentions to be kind to yourself over the coming year.

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Revitalise over the break

In this time of dark evenings and cold temperatures in the northern hemisphere, we need to stay warm, safe, and protected. The season we call winter happens when the 23.4-degree tilt of the earth is furthest away from the sun. Almost all religions and cultures in temperate climates have some way of celebrating this time of year by giving, feasting, and being kind to others. The roots of this festival go back to when our ancestors celebrated the shortest day and longest night of the year; people were completely dependent on their knowledge of the changing seasons for survival. The winter months were cold and dark, and food was scarce. Food was prepared and wine and beer would be ready to celebrate what it meant to be alive in the heart of mid-winter. In the developed world, most of us are lucky enough to live at a time when we have ready access to food, heat, and light, although the commercial influence of what we celebrate today may have drifted some distance from the origins of this annual festival.

Although it’s not all joy and happiness for everyone. Research shows that many people suffer from stress, anxiety, and depression at this time of year. The changing seasons, like the onset of winter, can affect our moods. This is not surprising given the darkness, cold, wet weather, and scarcity of food most of our ancestors experienced. Within the body, the reduction in sunlight affects the production of the neurotransmitter, serotonin, which, among other things, contributes to our well-being and happiness. This is why people who suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder are often prescribed lightboxes that simulate sunlight.

Whatever you’re doing over the break, practising a bit of mindfulness can help you stay connected with the present moment, rather than replaying painful memories, or worrying about the future. Being mindful helps maintain emotional balance and stability, a more positive outlook, and better relationships.

Suggested practice

At this time of year, our ancient ancestors celebrated renewal, new life, and vitality, which are all relevant to practicing mindfulness. Here are some suggestions for revitalizing yourself over the break:

Explore nature: Go for a mindful walk in the countryside, woods, or coast and open yourself to nature. On your walk, take some long, deep breaths as you look out at the horizon and feel energised and alive.
Meditate: Get into the habit of finding time and space for a 10–15-minute meditation each morning and see what difference this makes.
Let go: If you feel tense, tight, and limited within yourself, take a few deep breaths and allow the tension to soften and release your posture to be more open and relaxed. Use curiosity to connect with the sensations in your body, as you let go of any limiting thoughts, beliefs, and feelings.
Be kind: Give the “gift that keeps on giving” by practising kindness, understanding, patience, and compassion with everyone you encounter, even strangers and difficult relatives.
Savour the moment: remember to keep bringing yourself back to appreciate the moment, which is the only time you can experience happiness.
Stay alert: Watch out for semi-conscious mind-wandering – especially negative automatic thoughts.
Feel gratitude: Be open to gratitude when people give. This is not only gifts; it could be that someone gives you their full attention, a helping hand, kindness, or understanding. You could also feel gratitude for people who are working during the break, on whom we’re dependent – like the emergency services.
Befriend emotions: Spending time with extended family can sometimes open up old wounds. Maybe you’ll be thinking of the people who are no longer with us, or this time of year reminds you of a painful past. Embrace and acknowledge whatever feelings arise, using curiosity to explore what they are about, seeing where they resonate in your body, and relaxing and releasing those areas, knowing that you are not your emotions and allowing the feelings to dissolve in their own time.

Whatever your personal views and feelings are about this time, your mindfulness practice can help you navigate through the break and come out the other end wiser, happier, and revitalized.

Guidance
Find somewhere undisturbed and sit in a comfortable, dignified and upright posture, where you can remain alert and aware.
There are two guided practices for this session. You can close your eyes, or lower your gaze while the meditations play.

Play the first settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then play the second practice to relax and revitalise the body, emotions and mind, ready for the break.

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Befriending

For all our faults, there are many stories of groups and individuals offering kindness and compassion to others. The recent extreme weather that brought flooding in South Wales has seen many acts of kindness within the community, from electricians volunteering to restore power to people making sandbags and flooring specialists relaying damaged floors for free.

Kindness and compassion towards others and ourselves are important parts of mindfulness practice. Our daily lives are not always full of joy and harmony; we sometimes experience unpleasant, difficult, and unwanted experiences. The unconscious, habitual way we deal with difficulty is to avoid or resist what we experience. We can reverse this by moving towards the unpleasant and difficult with openness, care, and compassion.

A newborn gazelle will be on its feet within moments of bonding with its mother. In contrast, a human baby is one of the most helpless creatures to be born in nature. So, we begin life as a very vulnerable baby, develop through the challenges of childhood and adolescence, and then somehow emerge as a fully formed adult, who, as the collective narrative goes, are sensible, capable, grown-up, and invulnerable. The paradox is that we can end up defending the idea that we should be a perfect adult, at the cost of avoiding the vulnerable child within us, hidden beneath the surface of our experience. As we grew up, we sometimes experienced an aversion to difficulty as it helped to protect us and kept us safe and well at the time. Taking the same approach into adulthood does not always serve us well, as emotions remain unacknowledged and unresolved, they become stuck within us. Nothing changes when we hold onto aversion.

Like many acts of kindness in society, befriending a difficult experience can be a radical and courageous act. It is much easier to stick to how we have always dealt with things in the past. Befriending is about becoming intimate with, getting closer to, caring for, and being curious about our difficult thoughts and feelings, without becoming overwhelmed; like becoming our own caring and supportive parent.

In practice, befriending means becoming aware of and noticing times when we feel vulnerable. These could be emotions like anxiety, sadness, low mood, stress, frustration, or negative, depleting, and limiting thoughts about our self-worth or abilities. Ironically, when we strongly identify with our negative and limiting thoughts, moods, and emotions, we disown them, which is a form of emotional self-harm.

By befriending our unwanted and negative thoughts, emotions, moods, feelings, sensations, and behaviour, we engage in a closer, more intimate, caring, and compassionate relationship with ourselves. This helps resolve held emotions and creates a bit of space for joy to enter our lives. As we bring habitual patterns into a clearer view, we can discern between the patterns that support, enable, and expand our well-being and those that no longer serve us.

We can also bring the kindness and compassion of befriending the difficult people in our lives, making sure we hold no one as an enemy. Befriending does not mean that we become invulnerable to life’s challenges; there are times when we need to protect ourselves, using our own inner resources and wisdom. Using befriending as an attitude, we learn to embrace whatever enters our experience in a more heartfelt and fearless way, which enables our capacity to bring friendly openness, kindness, and compassion to the whole of our experience.

Suggested weekly practice

Really notice times of low mood, irritability, annoyance, anxiety, or limitation, and befriend whatever thoughts, emotions, and feelings are around for you.
Notice the situations, people, and things you habitually feel aversion toward and work on befriending them.
See how many small acts of kindness you can make over the week. For instance, opening a door for others, being patient with people, really listening, giving someone positive feedback about doing a good job, or being the last out of a lift.

Play the settling practice, then read through the session content
Then play the second audio to explore befriending your experience

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Time travel

Many Western cultures view time as linear, from the past to the present to the future. In contrast, many Indigenous cultures, such as the North American Hopi, see time as cyclical. Events, like seasons, are cyclical, and the past, present and future are deeply interconnected. Where cultures like the United States or Japan emphasise the future, Latin American and African cultures focus more on the present moment, where spontaneity, relationships, and living in the “now” are valued more than long-term planning.

Although there have been many films and books on time travel, the actual possibility is open to debate. Some physicists say, in theory, it is theoretically possible to travel into the future, but not into the past. One interesting challenge is that although the Earth orbits the sun, our solar system orbits the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, which moves through space at over a million miles an hour. So even if you could travel in time and wanted to remain on Earth, you would also need to travel across space.

Of course, we all already travel in time, the flowing moment of experience. We are a year away from this day last year and are moving forward at a rate of 60 seconds per minute. There’s also another kind of time travel that’s possible, which is when we access past memories or imagine what might happen in the future in our heads.

Our ability to recall the past is dependent on episodic memory, which uses the same networks in the brain that simulate future events. Thinking about the past and future is something we all do and is a natural process for the brain to engage in. The ability to imagine future scenarios provided an important evolutionary advantage for humans. One of the main purposes of the evolving brain was to anticipate threats in the environment, which remains a primary process today. And it’s not just thinking that’s involved; when we explore future situations, we can also get a sense of how we would feel emotionally in the future. This gives us the power to adapt our approach as we encounter the actual situation.

For instance, imagine a future job interview where, as well as the people and questions involved, we may also have some anxiety. Imagining this can then help us acknowledge and work positively with the feelings before the actual session. So, on the way to the interview, we may think, “It’s quite natural for some anxiety to arise in a situation like this, but I’m a strong candidate, and acknowledging how I feel, while connecting with my body and senses, will help me remain calm and confident.”

When we’re conscious of our mental time travelling, we can use it as a useful resource. But when our level of conscious awareness drops and our minds wander away from the present moment, into the past and future, it’s sometimes not so useful. There are times when emotions from the past resonate with a situation, which causes painful and unresolved feelings to re-energise below conscious awareness. Negative thoughts then arise, which makes us feel even worse, so our mood lowers, and we entertain more negative thoughts and enter a downward spiral. Similarly, mindlessly drifting off in our imagined, anticipated future, we’re more likely to experience fear, worry, and anxiety about what might happen.

By developing mindfulness skills, we can:

Ground ourselves into the present moment by connecting with our body and senses.
Notice when we mentally time-travel, making the most of any useful learning and insights about the past or future.
Know that the thoughts and feelings we have about the future, however useful, are not facts and the future may not materialise in the way we imagined.
Respond skilfully if memories from the past are affecting our present state of well-being.
Allow the emotions to be just as they are without resisting or avoiding what we feel.
Let go of energising the downward spiral of negative thoughts and emotions that maintain anxiety and low mood.
Notice the link between worrying thoughts and feelings of anxiety.
Meet each moment with openness, flexibility, balance, kindness, and self-compassion.

While physical time travel may have its challenges, the mental equivalent can sometimes take us into a space that no longer serves us well. We spend almost half our waking lives distracted and disconnected from the present, mainly in automatic thoughts about the past or future. Learning to become more aware of what’s going on, by witnessing our mental time travel, opens the possibility of living an easier, happier, and more fulfilled life.

Suggested weekly practice

When you notice your mind wandering during the week, note whether this tends to be about the past, present or future.
See how skilfully you can work with your own mental time travel, knowing that thoughts and feelings about the future are not facts and are exploring a range of possibilities, not defining them. Also. that working through past memories and feelings with awareness and self-compassion allows you to acknowledge and release what you may have been holding onto.
Contemplate time with wonder and curiosity, as a natural phenomenon that affects all living creatures, from how the sunrise and sunset define each day, to the flowing moments that we travel through. [/private]

Play the first settling practice, then read through the session content, which you can print off if that helps.
Then play the second practice to explore mental time travel, as well as the difference between thinking about the past and future and present-moment awareness.

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