Catherine Polan Orzech - A Moment for Me: 52 Simple Mindfulness Practices to Slow Down, Relieve Stress, and Nourish the Spirit

Mindfulness can often feel beyond our reach, as if it is one more thing we have to do. Catherine Orzech has an unparalleled ability to go to the heart of mindfulness and make it accessible, clear, and approachable. Catherines style reflects respect for the depth of the topic, but in the tone of a dear friend with warmth, compassion, and humor. An outstanding companion for anyone seeking peace, ease, and clarity.

Steven D. Hickman, PsyD, clinical psychologist, executive director of the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion, and founding director of the UC San Diego Center for Mindfulness

In your hands, you hold a beautiful and nuanced guide to living in deep harmony with your true, wise, compassionate, perfectly imperfect, and ever-loveable self. Catherine Polan Orzech offers a fresh look at wisdom teachings, inviting us to look through a new lens at our lives, and see ourselves and others with deep compassion and forgiveness.

Doris Ferleger, PhD, mindfulness-based psychologist, and award-winning poet and author

A Moment for Me is a like a smorgasbord that you digest slowly in small, delicious pieces over the course of a full year. Catherines inviting language has a sense of lightness and poetry to it that gently leads you to weekly practices that can have deep, transformative effects. Little by little, this book expands our sense of ourselves, and our ability to live from love and see that we are all connected in the web of life.

Martin Wikfalk, founder and CEO of The Mindfulness App

A Moment for Me is a true treasure, a shining light full of wise, heartful reflections and mindfulness practices that will nourish your body, mind, and spirit. May you savor the gifts of care, kindness, and compassion offered in this beautiful book.

Diane Reibel, PhD, director of the Myrna Brind Center for Mindfulness at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, coauthor of Teaching Mindfulness, and coeditor of Resources for Teaching Mindfulness

These mindfulness rituals open us to the beauty, goodness, and potential for awakening that is available every day of our lives.

Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance and Radical Compassion

With clarity and heart, Catherine Orzech has offered a practical, accessible guide to mindfulness practice. Weaving poignant stories with experiential practice, shes created a beautiful road map that highlights the best of contemporary teachings. These are grounded, well-earned insights that will surely serve you in your practice.

David Treleaven, PhD, author of Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness

Publishers Note

This publication is designed tow provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services.

Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books

Copyright 2020 by Catherine Polan Orzech

Reveal Press

An imprint of New Harbinger Publications, Inc.

5674 Shattuck Avenue

Oakland, CA 94609

Cover design by Amy Shoup; Acquired by Ryan Buresh; Text design by Michele Waters-Kermes and Amy Shoup

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

For Michelle Kalmanmy constant friend and companion in exploring the inner workings of the heart.

Contents

Introduction

Many years ago, I underwent months of rehabilitative vision therapy after a concussion. As part of the treatment, the doctors had me wear all different types of lenses that distorted and changed my usual way of seeing in order to activate different parts of my brain.

Not surprisingly, things looked different. But more than that, I found that simply changing the lenses through which I looked at the world altered in some profound way my entire experience of myself and the world around me.

It is the same with developing mindfulness. If you wear a lens of striving or fixing, you will create a certain result. If you meet your life as it arises with a lens of affectionate interest, that will have a different outcome. The very attitudes we bring to mindfulness change our perception of reality and, therefore, our experience of life.

Depending on which lenses of attitude and perception we use to encounter our lives, our experience of reality can be transformed. Mindfulness enables us to study the human heart and mind and to understand the conditions that either give rise to stress and suffering or to the causes that give rise to their release. What we find when we look inward can lead to a deeper understanding of ourselves and a greater ability to live from love. But this requires a kind of curious, investigative attention. If you were a biologist and wanted to learn about the nature of some animal, youd let it just do its thing in its natural habitat while you carefully observed it. The data that is collected through this study reveals the animals true nature. We use mindfulness to study the mind and heart to allow us to know their nature and to be liberated from living in a trancethat unconscious state of being carried along by our own mental stories and habitual reactions to life. Mindfulness can provide the clear lens through which we can see the causes of our suffering.

This book does not aim to teach you the specifics of how to meditate. It is a collection of reflections and invitations, along with practices that can help us investigate and develop small and subtle shifts in our attitudes and perceptions in relation to our lives. But these small shifts can have a huge impact on our clear seeing and thus the quality of our lives.

The reflections and practices offered in this book are a deep dive into the heart and soul of what mindfulness is really about. Instead of delving into the popular notions of self-improvement, better concentration, and increased productivity, they aim to cultivate self-knowledge, wisdom, and compassion.

This book is for you if you have never meditated or thought about practicing mindfulness. Its also for you if you have been dabbling in mindfulness but havent yet developed a focus on the attitudes of mind and heart that will enrich your learning. And if you have been meditating for years, you can use it to reacquaint yourself with what supports your practice and as a springboard for deepening inquiry into specific areas. The chapters that follow invite all of you into a rich friendship with your own heart and your own life.

A Moment for Me is laid out in fifty-two chapters with monthly themes. Each chapter contains a core concept, along with a reflection on that concept, and suggestions for practicing and incorporating that concept as a ritual into your life. The reflection and practice sections are marked by icons:

You can use this book in a variety of ways. Choose the one that works best for you:

• Develop a weekly ritual of following the chapter that corresponds to the week in the calendar year.
• Get a group of friends together and support each other each week, using the book as a discussion platform.
• Look through the themes and focus on whatever calls to you right now.
• Read the whole book and then go back to what stood out to you and specifically focus on that theme for a while.
• Pick up the book and randomly open it to whatever page asks to be read.

The approaches are endless and entirely up to you.

Although I am a teacher and therapist, I am still very much a student of my own teachers. Their wisdom is alive in me, and I have attempted to draw on it in writing this book. I hope that I have represented what I have learned from them faithfully. And if in any way I have not, I ask forgiveness.