Mindfulness Book Club

## Mindfulness Book Club & Practice

## 🧠📖🌿

This group is a space to study mindfulness deeply and practice it concretely — not as an abstract philosophy, but as a set of skills that shape how we relate to thoughts, emotions, the body, and one another.

We work from a simple premise:

If the contents of your mind determine the quality of your life,
then learning how to relate to those contents matters. ✨

Rather than reading for inspiration alone, we read to practice 🧘‍♀️.

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## 📚Core Books We Explore

### Mindfulness & Awareness Expansion

We draw primarily from the work of Mark Williams and colleagues, including:

• Mindfulness
  by Mark Williams & Danny Penman 📘
• Deeper Mindfulness
  by Mark Williams 📗

These books explore how awareness interrupts automatic mental loops and restores choice, clarity, and balance — especially in moments of stress or overthinking 🌀.

### Ethical & Relational Foundations

We also use:

• The Yamas & Niyamas
  by Deborah Adele 🪷

Here, ethical principles are understood not as rules, but as relational capacities — ways of being that reduce harm, increase clarity, and support steadiness in practice and daily life 🤝.

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## 🪷The Yamas & Niyamas (Our Living Framework)

These principles are woven into every gathering — not taught abstractly, but experienced directly.

### The Yamas — how we relate outwardly

• Ahimsa — non-harming 🕊️
• Satya — truthfulness 🪞
• Asteya — non-grasping ✋
• Brahmacharya — wise use of energy 🔥
• Aparigraha — non-clinging 🍃

### The Niyamas — how we relate inwardly

• Saucha — clarity & simplicity ✨
• Santosha — contentment 😊
• Tapas — steady engagement 💪
• Svadhyaya — self-study 🔍
• Ishvara Pranidhana — letting go of control 🌌

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## 🧠Key Mindfulness Capacities We Practice

Across sessions, we repeatedly return to core skills drawn from the mindfulness literature:

1. Feeling Tone (Vedana) — pleasant, unpleasant, neutral 🌗
2. Reactive Pulse — the urge to fix, avoid, or grasp ⚡
3. Reflective Pulse — the pause that allows choice ⏸️
4. Body Scans — grounding awareness in sensation 🦶
5. Focused Awareness — stabilizing attention 🎯
6. Open Awareness — allowing experience to arise and pass 🌊
7. Loving-Kindness (Metta) — cultivating goodwill 💗
8. Noticing Thought Patterns — without believing or suppressing them 👀
9. Responding vs. Reacting — increasing choice under pressure 🧭
10. Embodied Presence — keeping awareness in the body 🫶
11. Self-Compassion — meeting difficulty without self-attack 🤍

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## 🧘‍♀️Creating Your Own Meditation Practice

A central aim of this group is helping you design a personal meditation practice that actually works for you.

We explore:

• why different practices suit different nervous systems 🧠
• how overthinking softens through awareness, not force 🌿
• how ethics, attention, and embodiment reinforce one another 🔄

Rather than prescribing one method, we support you in discovering what brings steadiness, clarity, and kindness in your own life.

***

There is no pressure to speak or perform.
Listening 👂 and silence 🤍 are full participation.

🗓 Thursdays · 6:00 PM EST
📍 Online (Zoom)

Come curious 📖
Leave with practices you can actually use 🌱