Wednesday

Trigonos Wales

 

While in Trigonos, at the Mindfulness Teacher Training Retreat organised by Bangor University, one of my fellow home group participants, Lindy, shared a wonderful poem with us, that she had written during the day of silence. As this poem really expresses what a day of stillness can be about and with her permission, I am publishing it for you below. Enjoy!

 

Wednesday

A day of silence
What a wonderful day
A present to myself
A time to take back the child that was me
Stare at the trees blowing
Listen to the distant dogs barking
Think and wonder and be
A precious day for me

 

One step at a time


Being away a full week on a teacher training retreat for mindfulness approaches organised by Bangor university wasn’t that easy as I first thought… Meeting a whole group of new people, moving out and into stillness, teaching, exchanging, enquiring and receiving feedback. Not to forget the room sharing and the tight daily schedules: quite overwhelming at times.

Now I really understand why ones own practice informs the teaching and why you cannot simply buy a mindfulness related book and start to integrate the tools right away. You can only hold the space for other people and really enable personal development and inner growth when you are connected to your own self, curious, open and non-judging.

What an intense and enriching week, where own development and insight is so closely linked with the ability to inform ones own work, i.e. for me,
integrating the tools and methods into communications and leadership development!

Trust: An Important Ingredient for Effective Communications

Touching the stone wall
Having worked lately with various groups of people on effective internal communications and  team building it struck me again how the trust factor remains of major importance for any successful intervention.

Not only trust and confidence in the capabilities of the facilitator but also trust in team members, collaborators and most and foremost trust in the participants themselves and in their own capabilities. Obviously, this trust has to be established and participants need to be ready to listen to their inner feelings and intuitions….this sounds like an easy exercise but as a matter of fact, for many it is the most difficult  – as the most unusual – part.

As we all know, it is not possible not to communicate: our non-verbal signs and behaviour already give clues to our counterpart about what is going on (even if this often happens unconsciously), before the conversation per se has started. Being aware of how your own body behaves and moves in space and how others might perceive this, is in fact a first step towards more self-awareness and from that to trust in your own abilities and capacities. Adding empathy, curiosity and openness to others, you will have a strong basis for building relationships of trust and thus effective communications and effective intercultural communications.

Are you willing to trust and be mindful about how your own body relates to external stimuli and how you and your actions are perceived by others?