Our Practices
Forget your perfect offering
Our three core components - meditation, mindfulness and qi gong - focus on nourishing the mind, the body, and that mysterious component known as the soul.
Meditation
is the art of gently paying attention to inner and outer experiences. The style we teach is based on the principles of acceptance, awareness, compassion and contemplation, and incorporates elements such as body scans, breath exercises and visualisation.
Whether you’ve been meditating for 20 minutes or for 20 years, it’s always called a practice. There’s no perfect form of meditation that you’re trying to achieve, and each time you meditate it will feel different. Mindfulness meditation is the practice of learning to accept whatever experience you’re having.
Learning how to be comfortable with discomfort and uncertainty is the foundation of impulse control, resilience and emotional intelligence.
Mindfulness
employs the components of meditation but executes them in a broader manner; it can be applied to any activity, in any moment. Mindfulness is most simply defined as anything that brings you back to the present - to right here, right now. It's the practice of purposeful living.
It can be easy to think that life consists only of the big moments - finding a new job, partner, home, etc - but they tend to be few and far apart. It’s the moments between that matter most: the way you eat, walk, dance, love, create. Often, however, we are caught up ruminating on the past, or worrying about the future, and miss the opportunity to truly enjoy those moments as they’re occurring.
Mindfulness is the tool that helps you to be here, now.
Qi Gong
is an ancient Chinese practice of cultivating energy. It's a gentle yet dynamic form of exercise that combines mindfulness and breathing techniques with physical movement.
Qi gong creates harmony within the body, cleansing and strengthening the life energy (qi) in the meridian system to manage stress, increase vitality and improve the immune system.
There are many different styles of qi gong: ours consists of a set of four movements that, though very simple and easy to perform, are incredibly powerful.
During the practice you’ll be able to have a direct experience of your electromagnetic field (a somewhat awe-inspiring occurrence for first-timers).
“In every human being there is everything; the only question is what the light falls on”
— Helmar Lerski
In each of these three practices, we work through paying attention to ourselves, both the light and the shadow: the parts of ourselves that we are comfortable with, and the parts that we are uncomfortable with and find harder to accept.
We have a choice in which parts of ourselves we nourish and allow to evolve and grow; those we throw open to the fresh air, and those which we sequester or suppress.
Toolkit
We believe that building a personal toolkit - of books, quotes, music, films, art, poetry and so forth that hold deep meaning to you - is an essential complement to these practices.
The items in your toolkit act as antidotes, helping you alter your mood, motivation and mode of being.