✻ Understand the foundational practice of mindfulness from two perspectives—and learn how diving deep into experience and broadening awareness can lead to seeing anew.
✻ Increase self-reflection to enhance inner orientation and coherence among thoughts, feelings, and actions.
✻ Recognize the importance of using deliberate choices and action to consciously create responses to life instead of reacting habitually.
The practice is self-directed, which means you can start at any time and engage every day, whenever it’s convenient for you. Renew the practice by repeating it again and again, as you’ll have access for an entire year. Make it a year of positive change!
This practice introduces the idea that we all want to lead a life of meaning—to live on purpose. We look at the importance of listening to the inner call for something more, and then use personal narrative to understand what mythologist Joseph Campbell calls “the hero’s journey.” The big-picture overview is laid out, setting the stage for a deeper dive in subsequent weeks.
✻ Week 2: Experiencing Life
Pulling from research on mindfulness and in neuroscience, this week’s practice explores how staying present in your current experience is the doorway to an enriched sense of the moment. Fully experiencing your experience provides an embodied sense of your place in space.
✻ Week 3: Being Aware of More
Consciously expanding awareness uncovers possibilities outside your habitual patterns. In this week’s practice, you’ll play with perspectives and paradigms. We review studies on creativity and novelty, and do exercises that invite us to see and act beyond ingrained habits of thinking and behaving.
✻ Week 4: Self-Reflecting on Values
This lesson explores the value of your unique stake in the ground—what’s really important to you, the values you choose to live by, the way of being that resonates throughout your entire being. You’ll practice self-reflective exercises, including uncovering your own character strengths, in order to consciously decide how to shape experience and awareness around a central core.
✻ Week 5: Enacting Your Ideal
Creating a deliberate life takes effort, energy, and action. This week, the focus is on moving the ideal into the real, through cultivation of everyday behaviors and thought patterns that reinforce your desired trajectory. Enacting your deeply held values grows into an embodied knowing, as you come to know and live that which is meaningful. The concepts of attentional weight and orienteering are introduced as tools to guide actions.
