Jim Dalton, Mindfulness Mentor
Mindfulness Training and Practice
What's New?
 | Mentoring Available by Appointment
Classes Available
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New Thought Center for Spiritual Living (NTCSL) -- OngoingNew Tai Chi classes starting:
Embodied Mindfulness Practice
What does it mean to to be a Mindfulness Mentor? To me it means cultivating and sharing an inner awareness that enriches all aspects of life. It means linking meditation practice, which is often considered a passive, self-absorbed endeavor, with mindfulness in daily life. It means living a balanced and harmonic movement practice. My overall goal is to share what I have learned about embodying physical awareness, calming the emotions, and resting in the mind.
The science of mindfulness can be taught. It includes several key points:
- Establishing a training methodology
- Learning to bring an insightful point of view into the workings of the mind and the body
- Sustaining a practice with consistency of intention and rhythm
- Examining our assumptions about the realms of the body and the mind
- To what degree are they, indeed, separate realms?
- How might they be integrated?
- How do we rest in the body? In the mind?
- How do we tease apart the elements of thinking and feeling and sensation in our awareness?
- What sort of momentum is needed in our spiritual practice to learn to enjoy the peace that passes all understanding?
Some of us have been working with these questions for a long time, and we can point the way for others who are drawn in the same directions.
At various times during the 20th Century numerous attempts were made to bring Western science in touch with Eastern spirituality. The results have been incomplete and disappointing to some. How do we forge a dynamic spiritual synthesis in our current post-modern world? What tools are required? How do we best learn to use them?
Those of us who can look back at the various experiments and courageous explorations have some ideas about what works and what actually energizes our spiritual practice. As mentors we are compelled to share the lessons, the failures, the victories, and the disappointments we have learned.
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Embodying Enlightenment
My sense is that there is a very real problem among Western Buddhist practitioners. We are attempting to practice meditation and to follow a spiritual path in a disembodied state, and our practice is therefore doomed to failure. The full benefits and fruition of meditation cannot be experienced or enjoyed when we are not grounded in our bodies. The phrase from the early text, when understood fully, implies not only that we are able to touch enlightenment with our bodies, but that we must do so--that in fact there is no other way to touch enlightenment except in and through our bodies.
-- Reggie Ray, Touching Enlightenment
