Welcome to Monkey Mind

Here’s how Managing Our Monkey Minds will work

Each Monday I will post the following program materials which you will have the week to work with:

  1. A checklist/log to help you keep track of your weekly activity (first week only since it’s a 5-week log which will cover you for the duration of the program),

  2. That week’s info sheet (10 minutes to read and absorb),
     
  3. That week’s homework activity (15 minutes or less to accomplish),
     
  4. A link to that week’s meditation recording (10 minutes or less to do),
     
  5. A Zoom invitation link to Catch Your Breath, a ten-minute breathing session every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 8:30 am. You can substitute Catch Your Breath as your weekly meditation if you like or you can be a superstar and do them both. The Catch Your Breath sessions will also be recorded if 8:30 doesn’t work for you.
     
In addition, the Monday material will include:
  1. A list of a few OPTIONAL complementary sessions on Virgin Pulse’s Whil program if you happen to be a Northern Light employee/spouse who participates in Virgin Pulse and would like to take advantage of more excellent mindfulness programming while earning some additional VP bonus points.


All told, you should be able to take care of your monkey business in about 30-35 minutes per week.

That’s all there is to it. You carve out 30 – 35 minutes a week and in return you get a noisy monkey off your back!

Okay, that’s not true. If only. In reality you will just get to know your monkey better, learn how to better quiet it down and see things differently. You will probably have some true moments of peace and stillness as we go, giving you enough evidence that there really is something to this mindfulness -- that there really are ways to improve your relationship with your mind and, therefore, your experience of life.

A word of advice: Be patient with your monkey. Respect that it’s just doing what monkeys do. Put your money on the knowledge that it’s (pretty) trainable and, in time, you will call more of the shots.

Let’s go meet our monkeys.

*”Monkey mind” is a term coined from an ancient Buddhist observation about how our mind is as prone to jumping from thought-to-thought as a monkey is jumping from tree-to-tree.