Last week my organisation farewelled ‘May’ and ‘Charles’, two librarians from China’s Shandong Province who have spent the last ten weeks working here in Adelaide with the State Library of South Australia on an exchange program. I hadn’t had a lot to do with May and Charles during their stay, but before they left for home,…
Tag: mindfulness
My little weakness
There was a time when I was too proud to admit any form of weakness. My time in the military taught me never to let my insecurities or vulnerabilities bubble to the surface for fear of being judged by my peers, superiors and subordinates in what was a highly competitive milieu. With my recent study…
Mindfulness on a treadmill
I try to run regularly to maintain some vague semblance of fitness. Or at the very least to assuage some of the guilt that I feel for eating and drinking whatever I like, in spite of my waning metabolism. Having been introduced to mindfulness through my current MBA class, I wondered whether it was possible to…
The ‘ping’ of email, dopamine and mindfulness
This week our MBA mindfulness exercise was to monitor our emotional reaction to email arriving in our inbox. The idea was to classify each arrival into three categories: pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, and to identify the body’s sensations at the precise moment the email is received. This was always going to be hard job for…
Is mindfulness supposed to cause discomfort?
Tonight I moved on to the next stage of my mindfulness journey – I attempted a 25 minute ‘body scan’ meditation. Now, those people who know me well understand that I have great difficulty sitting still for more than several minutes at a time. Indeed, I have been flat out sitting still for the introductory 10-minute…
Me and Mindfulness – An Unlikely Pairing?
The practice of ‘mindfulness’ seems to be all the rage in contemporary business and management circles (and in wider society too). Before commencing my MBA degree, I hadn’t had any exposure to it whatsoever, but at least two of the study units that I have undertaken in the past year have included mindfulness exercises as part of…