Mindfulness Together: A Simple Guide to Exploring Our Inner Selves with Friends

By Alainnah Robertson

What does it mean to be mindful?

Mindful people are attuned to their feelings and well-being. At ease with the world, they focus on the vitality of the present moment rather than on past upsets or future worries. And they have the emotional and rational skills required to support themselves and others.

In short, mindfulness is the meditative and psychological state of being that we all desire as we face life's pressures and distractions. However, there's a problem: cultivating the habits required for mindfulness can be tough, lonely work.

But what if it didn't have to be?

Mindfulness Together: A Simple Guide to Exploring Our Inner Selves with Friends is about making the journey toward mindfulness in comfort and good company. A comprehensive guide to running a mindfulness group, it contains full session plans, meditation routines, learning materials and self-reflection activities for 10 group sessions that will equip you and your fellow group members with the habits and insights of a mindful person, at the same time as you become a community of friends.

Themes and techniques covered include meditation, lucid dreaming, emotional intelligence, rational maturity, personal relationships and gratitude. No experience in teaching or counselling is required to lead the sessions, which can be run in almost any social environment, from apartment buildings and village halls to youth centres and seniors' homes.

If you've been curious about mindfulness but have never known where to start, you are not alone. Mindfulness Together may well be the beginning you and the people around you have been looking for.

 

Alainnah Robertson was born in the Scottish Highlands in 1933. Across nine decades spent in the United Kingdom, southern Africa and Canada, she has been many things: hairdresser, homemaker, swimming  pool director, trade unionist, municipal councillor, business owner, typographer and church elder. There have been two constants throughout Alainnah's rich and varied life: the pursuit of universal truths about the human mind and spirit, and the drive to build a sense of community and contribute wherever she has settled.

From 2015, and living in downtown Toronto, Alainnah founded various groups, including a community mindfulness group, in her high-rise condo building. These gave birth to a community of friends who to this day are continuing on the journey toward mindfulness together.

Mindfulness Together: A Simple Guide to Exploring Our Inner Selves with Friends is the blueprint of the sessions she designed for her group. Alainnah shares them with you here so that you too can develop mindfulness in the company of your neighbours, friends and loved ones.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robertson Publications
• Release date: Sep 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215970997

Book preview

Dedication

To my darling daughter, Jacoline, who pushed me into writing this book, and to my favourite grandson, Ross, and my very special grandson, Craig, who both ably abetted her in all that pushing.

Acknowledgments

My grateful thanks go to Quinn Lawson of communityandcompany.com. When I first met Quinn, I had so many ideas for books that I didn’t know where to begin. He told me that completing Mindfulness Together would make everything fall into place. He was so correct.

Quinn introduced me to Tom Corkett, my editor, and it has been my great pleasure to work with him. Tom inspired me to turn my notes into a manual that can be shared and easily understood by everyone. One thing always leads to another, and I’m looking forward to putting out many more books with him in the future!

Thanks to Morgan Kovachis of mavisandko.com, who created the beautiful visuals for my website, which I love. And thanks to Camille, Quinn’s able assistant, who patiently worked with me to fine-tune the site’s content.

Introduction

A friend once told me that there’s a price to pay for living a long life: the downsizing that we ought to do as we enter its final furlongs. A few years ago, I discovered that she knew what she was talking about.

Not wanting to leave my children a huge mess to clean up after I died, I had downsized. Acting on various sources of expert advice, including Die Broke by Stephen Pollan and Mark Levine, I whittled my possessions down to the essentials, put my finances in simple order and sold my home. The last of these steps was the one that really changed my life. I moved into a high-rise apartment in downtown Toronto.

Plenty of people value high-rise living in a city, and there are many wonderful things about it. You get easy access to almost anything you could imagine wanting, and you can live in complete anonymity, if that’s what you’re looking for.

But for some of us—for instance, the over-60s who spent decades sharing a roof with a partner and children, living on a street with people who became close friends—that anonymity can feel a lot like isolation. And it’s all too easy for it to become loneliness.

There is only so much visiting family, doing hobbies, volunteering, attending performances and travelling you can do, and none of it quite replaces what you once had: a sense of community and belonging that binds you to the people and spaces around you.

In my case, the threat of living without a community stemmed from my circumstances as a downsizing retiree. Nevertheless, across the social spectrum, so many aspects of modern life create isolation. For some, it hits when they first leave their parents’ home, while others encounter it when they move to a new city for work, lose their job or split from a partner. A feeling of not belonging to a community can hit all of us, old or young, rich or poor.

But things don’t have to be that way. It is possible to make an environment such as a high-rise have the communal spirit of a village—that feeling that, if you’d like to join the local church or book club or sports team or whatever, the locals will welcome you with open arms and treat you as a friend, as one of them.

I know that it’s possible because I made it happen in my high-rise. This short book is in part about how you can create this kind of community spirit, wherever you may live.

When I moved into my 800-suite high-rise, I realised that many of the people who came in and out of its entrance each day seemed to have similar life circumstances to my own. I thought it would be inevitable that they all knew each other well. Not so. I could see friendships and congeniality, but only at the level of little networks of people within a big, disconnected mass of strangers.

It was not difficult to understand why this was the case. You can only have a community when there are opportunities for everyone to come together, and our building offered none. Actually, that is unfair on the building itself, which has spaces where gatherings can take place. The problem was that not many people were using them. There was a club room with a billiard table and large TV, which the residents could book to use privately, and a party room, which could be rented by anyone, including outsiders, for functions. Neither of these spaces was being used to encourage the people who lived in the building to hang out with each other.

I found this situation disheartening. I love people, and I love to do things with people. I love to be part of a community. And I have always been happy to volunteer my time.

So I approached the building’s management and asked whether I could organise a couple of social groups and hold their meetings in the building’s party room without charge. They gladly gave me permission, and they were extremely supportive of my efforts. Soon I was running a bridge group on Wednesday afternoons with three, sometimes four, tables, and then also a monthly book club on the fourth Friday of each month, and a weekly film group on Mondays.

These groups encouraged others in the high-rise to offer to run their own. A friend in the building whom I had met through my groups had once been a professional ballet dancer and teacher, and now she is a Pilates instructor. She offered to facilitate a seated Pilates group, which ran on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

Friendships were being made—and with them, the beginnings of a community. The atmosphere in the building became happy as people greeted each other in the elevators and foyer. We were getting to know each other. Often, if a new person came to live in the building, the first question my friends would ask was whether the newcomer could play bridge or was interested in joining the book club or film group. The seated Pilates group became so popular that people were being turned away because there wasn’t enough space for all of them in the club room.

However, I had to acknowledge that groups focused on a hobby or an interest are by definition self-limiting. It’s unlikely, for example, that a community built around playing bridge is one to which someone who dislikes card games will ever belong.

I came to realise that to build a community that included everyone in the building, we needed a group that every resident could benefit from. For a while, I kept my eyes open for an activity that had universal appeal. I did not find one, but in the end I discovered that the answer lay within me.

A constant in my life has been the philosophical and psychological search for wisdom, maturity and the blueprint for a happy and fulfilling existence. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we all probably