Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World

by J. Mark G. Williams

You come to the profound understanding that thoughts and feelings (including negative ones) are transient. They come and they go, and ultimately, you have a choice about whether to act on them or not.

Mindfulness meditation teaches you to recognize memories and damaging thoughts as they arise. It reminds you that they are memories. They are like propaganda, they are not real. They are not you.

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panoply pronounciation

Picture yourself on a suburban hilltop in the rain and looking across a gray cityscape. It could be the town you grew up in or the one where you now live. In the rain it seems cold and inhospitable. The buildings look tattered and old. The streets are clogged with traffic and everyone seems miserable and bad-tempered. Then something miraculous happens. The clouds part and the sun comes streaming through. The whole world is transformed in an instant. The windows of the buildings turn to gold. Gray concrete changes to burnished bronze. The streets look shiny and clean. A rainbow appears. The mucky river becomes an exotic, glistening serpent threading its way through the city. For one fabulous moment, everything seems to stop; your breathing, your heart, your mind, the birds in the sky, the traffic in the streets, time itself. All seem to pause, to take in the transformation. Such beautiful and unexpected changes in perspective have a dramatic effect—

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” W. H. Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition, 1951

rodalemindfulness, so that you are taken through the meditation on a moment-by-moment basis, and don’t have to worry about when the time is up. Hannah followed