Terry Fralich - The Five Core Skills of Mindfulness: A Direct Path to More Confidence, Joy and Love

With this book, you hold in your hands one of the great medicines of the 21st century for finding joy and peace. While The Five Core Skills of Mindfulness offer a proven path for transcending stress and finding happiness, it goes further by offering a daily, sustainable approach to enhancing personal growth and deepening relationshipswith others and the very planet that provides for our well-being. Terry Fralich shows his immense skill as a longtime meditation and mindfulness instructor by using a sensible, step-by-step process that gently guides the reader forward. Woven together with masterful blend of stories, reflection, practices, and neuroscience, The Five Core Skills of Mindfulness is not a quick fix, but a sure, steady road toward living a life that mattersa life that you determine moment by moment. Why not give it a try?

Donald Altman, M.A., LPC, psychotherapist and author, One-Minute Mindfulness, The Mindfulness Toolbox, and The Mindfulness Code

Copyright 2014 by Terry Fralich

Published by

PESI Publishing and Media

CMI Education Institute, Inc

3839 White Ave

Eau Claire, WI 54703

Printed in the United States of America

Cover Design: Documation

Edited: Marietta Whittlesey

Page Design: Bookmasters

ISBN: 978-1-936128-55-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo copying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission from the author (except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review).

To Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, whose guidance is such a blessing in opening more fully to the richness of the spiritual path

To Dirk, whose courage, faith and practice through challenging times have been a profound inspiration to me.

To my wife, Rebecca Wing, whose warmth, creativity, humor, conscientiousness and love sustain and inspire me

I want to be clear from the very first words on these pages. The reason I am writing this book is because I believe you can experience more confidence, joy and love in your life. This isnt some nave or fanciful thought. It is a belief supported by the latest advances in neuroscience, the best psychological research and literature, the lessons from wise teachers in many great traditions and more than 35 years of personal exploration of the skills, insights and practices I am going to share with you in this book.

Stop for a moment before we go any further and imagine what it would be like to have confidence, joy and love more consistently in your life. Dont rush. Start with one of the qualities and give yourself permission to connect with the nature of it before moving to the others. Close your eyes and imagine, for example, a time when you experienced a special sense of joy. Maybe it was at the wedding of a loved one or at the birth of a child or at the unexpected sight of a magnificent rainbow forming a luminous arc in the sky. How did that feel in your body? What changed in your energy? Can you imagine opening to the felt sense of that joy right now?

Maybe there are additional qualities that are equally important to you, such as patience, kindness, compassion, delight or awe. Pause again and open your imagination even further to include one of these qualities that is especially attractive to you. Really take a few moments and let yourself reflect in a relaxed way on what might change in your life if any one of those qualities were more available to you. Can you imagine how it might change your relationships, your experience at work or even your vision of yourself?

Now do a second reflection. What came up for you in just imagining more of these qualities in your life? Was it fear, intimidation, doubt, self-judgment or lack of hope? Or did something else begin to move in you something like curiosity, interest, attraction, motivation or a sense of possibility. If your first reaction was a sense of possibilities or hopefulness, thats wonderful. Allow that sense of hopefulness to sink into you. Open your heart to it and invest in it.

On the other hand, if your reflection was colored more by fear or doubt, be kind and dont judge yourself. Our minds are so conditioned by fear that it is difficult to really believe that something more positive might actually be available to us.

Heres a straightforward question. Whatever your first reaction was, if you could make a choice, which set of reactions would you choose? Not really a tough question, is it? So lets begin with the first practice of the journey we are going to share together. I encourage you to practice being intentional right here at the beginning and choose to invest in possibilities. Focus on the aspiration of cultivating more confidence, joy and love and continue to imagine the impact they would have on your life if they were more consistently a part of your daily experience. Practice choosing to invest in your positive aspirations.

I have heard some teachers say we should not have a goal regarding our personal growth. In my view, that suggestion is a confusion. Lets change the word goal to the word I have already used aspiration. If we dont have aspirations, we dont have a vision for the direction of our lives. Without an emerging vision, it is all too easy to just plod along, doing the same old things or experiencing our life in the same old way. It may not be too bad or unpleasant; but without aspirations and a vision, we are not likely to manifest our full and rich capacities.

Here is one way to think of a vision for our lives. I think there are two classes of human beings those that are fully and totally enlightened and those of us who are not. I have had the delightful experience of having more than 15,000 people in the seminars and workshops I teach around the country. I always enjoy asking if anyone qualifies for the fully-and-totally-enlightened class. Its so disappointing! No one has ever eagerly raised their hand to say they are in that class. The Dalai Lama says he is not, and I have heard on good authority that the Pope would say that he isnt either. So the vast majority of us, even if we occasionally have enlightened moments, are in the not -fully -enlightened class. It is a very big ship we share and we are all traveling along together. We each have our own stateroom with our own personal experience, but we are all in the same boat.

The point is this. If we are not fully and totally enlightened, there are things (often many things) that we do not yet understand and have not yet worked out. There are many ways in which our experience is not manifesting our full capabilities. To stay close to the themes of this book, we are not experiencing as much confidence, joy, love and other positive qualities as we would like and certainly not as much as is possible for us.

We might say that our aspiration is full and total enlightenment, but that is a little overwhelming for most of us. For the time being, lets just stay with the aspiration of having positive qualities and experiences more consistently in your life. Even that more modest aspiration can be intimidating. I can almost hear the thoughts some of you will have as you read this. They might go something like this:

This must be for someone else. I have so much on my hands now. I am just barely keeping my head above the water as it is. I dont think I can take on anything else. Besides, even if I were up to it, I wouldnt know where to start with such an aspiration.