I’m so pleased to be working with the incredible staff and volunteers at Switchpoint in St. George, who are doing so much to change the face of poverty in Southern Utah. It was great to be with you today, and I look forward to the coming weeks.

Here are some resources to supplement what we worked with in class today.

Some invitations for practice:

1. Make a mindfulness contract with yourself for the next week: I will practice mindfulness ___ times this week, for ___ each session. I plan to practice –––– (when during the day). Mindfulness is a practice. The more often you do it, the more it will sustain you. It can be hard to establish a practice, but is easier when you are clear with yourself about what you want to do.
2. I strongly suggest you take advantage of Mindfulness Daily, a 40-day program of 10-minute sessions offered free by Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach. It is a delight and leads you through each step so you don’t have to decide what to do each day or however many times a week you have decided to practice. Just click on the next session and listen.
3. In addition: consider choosing some action that you do several times a day and using it as mindfulness time. This could be brushing your teeth, or listening to the turn signal at a stop sign. One thing we are all doing a lot lately is washing our hands. We are supposed to do this for forty seconds, so look at it as a break instead of a chore. Give it your full, mindful attention: the feel of the warm, sudsy water, the massaging of your own hands. Let everything else go for those 40 seconds while you breath deep and enjoy!

We talked about what mindfulness is. Here is a great little summary sheet, provided by MindfulSchools.org, a group that works with educators to bring mindfulness into the schools. You can read “Mindfulness: What It Is, What It’s Not” here.