Proactive Mindfulness in Everyday Life
For many people, the word mindfulness connotes being passive, like a dispassionate spectator of the movie of your life. Well, if you approach mindfulness this way, this is what you get.
On the other hand, if you think of mindfulness as active engagement in your life, things unfold differently. Proactive Mindfulness is about engaging your own experience moment by moment.
Engagement in everyday life involves being present in the moment. and you become more present as you engage in what you do.
Making mindfulness come alive for your listeners
Being in the moment is not some sort of spiritual state. It means dealing with life’s challenges. It means being aware of the uncertainty, and even danger, present in the situation. It includes doing our best to disentangle ourselves from the impact of past baggage but not taking for granted that we can do so. It means being as alive as we can be.
I aim to give listeners something they can begin applying in their life right away. Here are some possible entry points for a podcast conversation on how to engage more deeply with life:
- How mindfulness in everyday life is different from mindfulness in meditation
- How to enrich meditation practice with proactive mindfulness
- You already know Proactive Mindfulness: Some ordinary examples of it in everyday life
- Simple practices that give you a taste of it.
- Understanding inner conflict as information, not obstacle
- How an active pause can become a doorway to change
I’m comfortable with conversations that are conceptual, conversations that stay close to moment-by-moment experience, or a mix of both.
The embodied process of mindful change
My sense of mindfulness as active engagement is informed by the practice of experiential psychotherapy, as a therapist and somebody who trains therapists.
I help people get actively engaged in the living process of change. This happens by leading them through an experiential and embodied exploration. What makes this process so alive is that we track experience moment-by-moment. So there is a sense of ongoing experimentation and directly learning from experience.
I have become good at putting into words what happens in the moments that make change possible, in such a way that people can get a taste of it and are motivated to apply it in their life.
A book about the mindful process of lasting change
I’m the author of The Proactive Twelve Steps. Stephen Porges, developer of the Polyvagal Theory, says this book “brilliantly and succinctly provides a map to disentangle the individual from the pervasive constraints which have limited opportunities to enjoy life.”
Podcast & conversation style
I’m quite familiar with podcasts, as a guest and as the host of a podcast with 200+ episodes.
Making the podcast happen
Recording: remote-friendly (Zoom, Riverside), flexible scheduling
Location: USA, near New York City
Contact me at: info (at) proactive mindfulness (dot) com