May we all live and practice with care. Care for ourselves and care for others.

#stayhome #alonetogether #mindfulness

The meditation is led by Danny Ford, an Integrative Psychotherapist and Mindfulness Teacher. Recorded at a live class.

The meditation is led by psychotherapist and mindfulness teacher, Danny Ford.

Danny specialises in supporting people with complex or relational trauma, including sexualised trauma and emotional neglect.

A guided meditation led by psychotherapist and mindfulness teacher, Danny Ford.

Settling into a comfortable posture and asking yourself: How do I know I have a body?

This open question is a way of mindfully enquiring into your experience.

Knowing your body from the inside, moment to moment. Softening tension. Tuning to the breath, wherever it is most clearly known in your body.

Recorded in 2012 at a mindfulness meditation class in Leeds.

This short talk was recorded at a mindfulness class in Leeds, called Mindfulness: Embodied Attention and Wholehearted Living.

Danny Ford is a psychotherapist and mindfulness teacher in Leeds.  

We begin with receptive listening, before gently shifting to mindfulness of breathing. We spend the last few minutes practicing metta or loving-kindness. 

The meditation is led by Danny Ford, a mindfulness teacher and psychotherapist in Leeds. Danny specialises in helping people living with symptoms of complex or relational trauma, including sexualised trauma or emotional neglect.

This guided meditation was recorded at a meditation class in Leeds.

If you enjoy this meditation and know someone who might find it useful, please take a minute to share it with them.

In this episode of the Mindfulness Meditation Podcast with Danny Ford, we invite you to rest in the naturalness of awareness and simply sense your heart.

If you know someone who would enjoy and benefot from this meditation, please take a moment to share it with them.

Relaxing and allowing your breath to be natural, we can also give caring attention to how we are sitting. 

Thank you for listening to the Mindfulness Meditation Podcast with Danny Ford. If you enjoyed this meditation please take a moment to share it with someone you know who may also find it helpful.

We are sitting in different times and places, yet we are also sitting together.

In this 10-minute guided meditation I invite you to gently incline your attention to rest in your body, receiving sounds and feeling breathing.

A bell is rung once at the beginning and three times at the end of the meditation. There is no spoken guidance in this episode.

In this episode, we begin settling into meditation with receptive listening before practising mindful breathing and then concluding with metta or compassion practice.

We offer metta for ourselves, for all people in our city, for all immigrants and refugees, for all those protesting the U.S. Muslim Ban and for all humankind. Love Trumps Hate!

This short meditation practice can be used to support mindful presence and invite some relaxation at any time during your day.

In the meditation, I offer encouragement to care for the way you return to the breath. We are cultivating a caring, kind and non-judgmental awareness.

Breath is the object we are training our awareness with but the breath is not what we are developing when we practice mindfulness of breathing. We are developing mindfulness, not breath itself.

I hope you enjoy the meditation and find it helpful. If you know someone who may find this meditation helpful in some way, please let them know about it. If you have any questions or want to write to me about the podcast, please get in touch through my website at mindfulnessandpsychotherapy.com/contact. Thank you for listening!

If you enjoy this meditation, please share it with someone you know who might also find it helpful.

As I was leading that meditation and reflecting on those themes, Jo Cox was being murdered less than a mile from my home.

This week, I felt I had to say something about Jo, and the importance of practising mindfulness meditation in a way that deepens us.

This episode of the podcast is dedicated to Jo Cox, MP.

I opened the meditation class on Thursday with some brief words of reflection in the wake of the Orlando shootings last weekend.

The practice of mindfulness prompts us to open to suffering. The meditation I led invites you to open to the pain of tragedies in the world as well as the more private pain of each of our personal situations.

Mindfulness meditation is not a goal-driven practice. When practising meditation you are opening to the natural unfolding of our moment-to-moment experience. You are developing mindful awareness. Mindful awareness is not just any kind of awareness, and it’s not self-consciousness. When awareness is mindful, there’s a quality of care, friendliness, warm-heartedness. There isn’t harshness, self-judgment, or an ongoing commentary about what’s happening.

I encourage you to practice simply and with sincere friendliness and care for what’s happening in your experience, moment-by-moment. May your heart open to your experience, meeting whatever is happening with caring presence.

Mindfulness of body and mindfulness of sound. The periods of silence are part of the instruction.

If you find the meditation helpful, please take a moment to share it with someone you know who might also enjoy it.

If you enjoyed this guided meditation and know someone else who might find it helpful, please take a moment to share it with them.

We are all touched by grief and losses in life. May this guided meditation be of support.

Inviting yourself to just be as you are, feel your breath, release your thoughts, and return to your breath in your body, again and again.

In standing meditation, the basic practice is to stand comfortably, feeling the sensations in your feet, the points of contact with the ground beneath you, and sensing the uprightness of the standing posture.

In this guided meditation, I invite you to leave your eyes open, though it’s also possible to practice standing meditation with the eyes closed.

Please excuse the sounds of me moving around the room towards the end of the meditation – I’d mindlessly left the bell at the other side of the room.

Equanimity is a quality that develops and strengthens as mindfulness deepens. It’s not indifference or detachment.

Rather than becoming closed down, equanimity is a sense of balance, a sense of home in your own being, from which you can respond with creativity and presence.

I think it’s especially helpful in the midst of feeling difficult emotions, like resentment, anger, or jealousy. The balance of equanimity isn’t about not feeling particular emotions, like anger. It is but a balance that allows you some space with the difficult feeling and gives you an enhanced capacity for responding with creativity and skill.

This guided meditation was recorded at a meditation class in Leeds.

Mindfulness of breathing is commonly taught as a foundational practice, but isn’t suitable for everyone: Mindfulness of sound is an excellent alternative to the practice of mindful breathing.

Even in mindfulness of breathing works for you, you may enjoy practising with sound as an anchor sometimes.