Living Life Deliberately: Mindfulness Meditation in Daily Life

Robert Dove has been teaching mindfulness and compassion meditation for 26 years. He is a clinical social worker with a psychotherapy practice in Memphis

Robert writes that meditation is about paying attention, with compassion, to the world around us and to our our inner lives. Meditation offers us the chance, in our daily lives, to do what that Thoreau achieved in his year of mindful living in the New England woods, “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Each class opens with a brief conversation focused on the practical aspects of daily meditation: paying attention, letting go, non-judgment, acceptance, patience, and non-striving. The majority of each class would be devoted to the practice of a variety of mindfulness meditations. Meditations practiced during the course would include focused breathing, body scans, muscle relaxation, visualization, and walking meditations.