Laurel Vespi wants to show how mindfulness and meditation can help people in their daily lives. “If I could tell you that there is a simple – and I mean simple – way to reduce stress and increase your sense of well-being, make you more responsive, less reactive, and be more conscious about your choices, would you be interested in that?” she asked rhetorically.
Laurel Vespi wants to show how mindfulness and meditation can help people in their daily lives.
“If I could tell you that there is a simple – and I mean simple – way to reduce stress and increase your sense of well-being, make you more responsive, less reactive, and be more conscious about your choices, would you be interested in that?” she asked rhetorically.
“Most people are going to say yes.”
She describes the two as a way of living that can allow anyone to centre on themselves and become more present in their lives. They have become more widely known in North America over the last few years, even making the cover of Time magazine.
But Vespi, a life coach, has known about the benefits for many years now. She said that she dabbled in it to start but one day realized that she was the mother of three young children – including a set of twins – and her hands were more than full. It was downright chaotic, she clarified.
“At that time, I really leaned back into all of the mindfulness practices that I knew. Those twins and their older sister are all now wonderful, healthy, successful adults, which I attribute in part to the fact that I had a practice that allowed me to not package them up and send them off somewhere at certain points when it was very, very stressful.”
Now a certified lifestyle meditation teacher, she is hosting a monthly series of mindfulness meditation circles, starting tonight.
She said that it's because the community at large needs to be more aware of being more aware.
Through her work, she has noticed a pattern among many of her clients.
“At first it was coached in terms of life balance. People were stressed, ‘Is this all there is?' and work, and on and on. A year and a half ago, I really started focusing with clients on how we can bring mindfulness into their lives, and it's been great.”
Mindfulness practice, she continued, is pretty simple and one of its foundations is having a community: “Somewhere you can go once a month and practice a little bit in a group of like-minded people that just helps to keep you reminded, ‘oh yes, this is why I'm doing this,' ” she said.
Since there was nothing like that happening already around St. Albert, she took it upon herself to start the ball rolling.
Each session will start with a short introductory talk on a specific theme before the assembled get down to business of the meditation. She clarified that it will be a guided meditation. “People won't just sit there and think, ‘I don't know what I'm doing,” she joked.
Attendees also don't need to worry about getting involved in something she called “the kind of woo-woo California meditation where we all have to put on Lululemon pants.
“Meditation is one of those words that people can get uncomfortable around. They start to think this is Buddhism or transcendental meditation and we're all going to sit around a lotus and float up above the ground, or something. Not at all. Formal mindfulness practice is learning the skill of focused paying attention. We say to people all the time, ‘You should focus on that. You should pay attention.' We don't really teach them what that means. How do you pay attention? What is the skill?”
She noted that there are two schools in St. Albert that have introduced mindfulness practices to help students with focus.
“We have all kinds of thoughts in our heads. We are not going to empty our heads of thoughts. Far from it. What we want to do is recognize that we have a lot of thoughts and which are the ones we want to pay attention to. There's also the informal practice of mindfulness creating momentary pauses in our day where we teach ourselves to just stop for a minute, breathe for a moment, and refocus, rather than running flat out, which is what most people are doing.”
The first Community Mindfulness Meditation Circle takes place tonight at 7:00 p.m. at the Star of the North Retreat Centre. The session is free and is open to all from newcomers to seasoned practitioners. Registration is encouraged but drop-ins are welcome. There will be a jar for cash donations to the St. Albert Food Bank.
The next monthly session will take place on July 22. More information can be found at www.stonecirclecoaching.com.
