I first learned meditation in the early 1980s, when I took a Transcendental Meditation course.   I found this very helpful to me at that time, and I maintained a good home practice for many years.  I found it gave me a great sense of calm and an ability to deal with day to day stresses and setbacks with greater detachment and focus. Nobody spoke about ‘awareness’ or ‘mindfulness’ then, so I, along with others, simply meditated without realising quite what could happen – we were all just happy doing what we had been trained to do, meditating with a mantra twice a day.

In 2001, I went to Pune in India for a holiday at a meditation resort, and to my surprise I was immediately given “special”  treatment.  I felt like royalty as the staff and management took me to their hearts, giving me a ceremony that saw me taking a new sanskrit name, and the title Swami (which means master in the sense that the swami strives for the mastery over his or her smaller self and habits).  I later found out that they had recognised a special quality of awareness in me which came from a mental state achieved by focusing my awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting my feelings, thoughts, and physical sensations.

This was the first time I realised the impact of my years of meditation (other than the overall calmness my practise always gave to me).  While meditation had changed my life in deep and subtle ways, none of this change was getting in the way of leading a normal, vigorous busy life with plenty of interest and excitement.

These days, we call that quality of awareness  ‘mindfulness’; to me I had simply embedded meditation into my life so deeply that it had become part of me, not something I did.  I had no name for the change, and indeed it felt so much a part of the ‘real me’ that it didn’t seem to need a label. It made me realise how whilst different to mindfulness, meditation plays an integral part in developing mindfulness.  These days, mindfulness is deliberately taught alongside meditation, which is a real joy to see and to be part of.

Years passed by, and now I have the opportunity to pass on my experiences.  I took teacher training with Zenways, the top UK trainers of the tried and tested mindfulness practices that have been used successfully for centuries.   Translated into the current social context, the training  provides a solid and easily accessible basis for mindfulness, and once you have a basic ability in mindfulness, you can progress further and further in your development, whatever your goal.

I continue to meditate  and practice mindfulness in a range of ways daily. I enjoy continuing to develop my knowledge and understanding of mindfulness. I am also excited about the extent to which recent medical research is showing the benefits of mindfulness in many aspects of our health and wellbeing, and in so doing catching up with what many of us have known intuitively for years.