Mindfulness with Multiple Anchors - Divided and Steadier?

This is the return to the evening sessions that are using educational and clinical frameworks to critically reflect on how mindfulness is often taught. See this Youtube channel for the workshops from 2021: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLJa_A_xgslDanbozcs7ONA

Please subscribe to our Youtube channel if you can as, when we reach 100 subscribers, we get access to more options and, more importantly, can stop making tedious requests like this....

Feel free to pass details of this event onto interested friends and colleagues - it is open to all.

____________________________________

Mindfulness with Multiple Anchors - Divided and Steadier?

The language used to guide mindfulness often holds an underlying implication that all the attention is brought to a focus, for example: “…return the attention to the breath…”.

This phrasing suggests that the attention was somewhere in its entirety and is now returned in its entirety to the chosen focus.

A quibble perhaps but does this language reflect how their attention behaves for many people? It certainly is not how mine typically behaves.

For me my attention is often like a swarm of bees – the swarm divides to buzz around a bunch of different focus points: some exterior sensations, some bodily sensations and some internal mental stuff. Some points attract a few attentional bees, some a lot. My attention, if undirected, will have different experience brought centre stage where the bees cluster most.

Practicing mindfulness with an intent to consciously direct all the attentional bees to one focus seems to have a different quality of practice to one where those attentional bees get intentionally spread around different focus points: there is a steadier quality for me somehow with more focus points. This is not to say one is better and I do practice in both ways.

The feel of a multi-anchor practice for me is where there usually are a set of ‘secondary focus points’ that seem to absorb much of the intensity of the activity of the attentional bees. Much of the remainder of my attention can then settle on a primary focusing anchor in a way that often has this quality of stability.

Of course, my attention will get hooked by stuff so that those bees go off elsewhere. But there can be a sense that as many of those bees are still settled on secondary anchors, there is a less dramatic flow of attention to what has hooked my attention away from the primary focusing anchor and a more easy-going quality to bringing some of that flow of attention back to the primary focus.

I think many people bring a number of anchors together in their mindfulness practice – distributing those bees.

For many people a form of multi-anchor mindfulness practice can be a radically different experience to single anchor practice. 

My plan for this session is to start with a multi-anchor practice and then explore the different ways people experience this.

I'll send out the Zoom links in the week before. 

Tim Duerden is a senior lecturer at the University of Salford where he has been delivering training in trauma-responsive mindfulness for over 15 years as part of our psychotherapy training pathways. He is also a lead trainer for Integrated Mindfulness, a mindfulness teacher-training organisation that has been providing training in a person-centred approach to trauma responsive mindfulness teaching for over 13 years.

To receive details of our other training events and further Thursday evening workshops, when we have the dates, please sign up for our newsletter: www.integratedmindfulness.com/newsletter/

You can find videos of the previous sessions here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLJa_A_xgslDanbozcs7ONA

Audio tracks of the practices from each talk can be found here:

https://soundcloud.com/resilienceplus/sets/thursdaytalks