Realise Mindfulness

In the season finale, we delve into the connection between mindful compassion and our innate capacity for self-healing. This episode is a reflective journey that brings together the insights and practices we've explored throughout the season, highlighting how they help us connect with our inner gold and navigate life’s challenges with grace. We begin by examining the archetype of the wounded h...

How can we thread kind, wise and compassionate action into the very fabric of our daily life? This is what we explore in Episode 9, as we take a deep dive into the theme of living with a heartful mind and a mindful heart. We revisit our emotional regulation systems, acknowledging that what we incline the heart & mind towards becomes the inclination of the heart, guiding our thoughts, words and...

We explore deepening compassion with a special focus on the quality of equanimity as Kate joins in conversation with Frits Koster, renowned meditation teacher, author and course co-developer of the Mindfulness-Based Compassionate Living course for this episode of the Realise Mindfulness podcast. Frits begins by sharing his fascinating journey to mindful compassion and talks about his time as a Bud...

In episode 7 of our Mindful Compassion season, we explore the essence of "Growing Happiness." Grounded in ancient wisdom and modern psychology, join us as we walk the sometimes-illusive pathways to joy and fulfilment. Throughout the episode, we illuminate different routes to happiness: the pleasant life, the engaged life, and the meaningful life. We demystify these concepts by aligning w...

In Episode six we continue our exploration of mindful compassion, as we delve into the interplay of giving and receiving compassion, culminating in a transformative compassionate breathing meditation practice. We explore the essence of compassionate exchange, drawing insights from the Mindfulness-Based Compassionate Living course. Our core meditation, Compassionate Breathing, is inspired by the an...

How can we embody the many skills and attributes of compassion? In this episode we explore the answers to that question. Inspired by the Mindfulness Based Compassionate Living course, we embark on a journey to understand and cultivate compassion in our lives. We begin by harnessing the power of imagination through mindful imagery, laying the groundwork for compassion to flourish. Discover a practi...

How can we mindfully and compassionately relate to our desires and habits? In this episode we talk about common human patterns of mind, how we can recognize them and how we can make a shift to treating both our patterns and ourselves more kindly. We begin by looking at how we can compassionately relate to resistance and share a story to help us recognise how, with mindful compassion, we can make c...

What stops us from practicing self-compassion? We begin today’s episode by exploring some common blocks to self-compassion and look at how the research addresses these common concerns. We identify the three defining characteristics of self-compassion and share some embodied compassion gestures to help us fully step into this way of being. We build on this with a short ‘on the go’ practice: the Sel...

Our mindful compassion season continues with an exploration of how the evolutionary development of our brain can mean we are actually wired for surviving rather than thriving and how mindful compassion can help us redress that. We consider our 3 emotion regulation systems & how, because of both evolutionary design and modern culture, the threat and drive systems can become overactive resulting...

We begin our mindful compassion season with an interview with Erik van den Brink, codeveloper of the internationally recognised Mindfulness-Based Compassionate Living course. We talk about how mindfulness helps us address the universal mechanisms contributing to suffering and how self-compassion supports us to relate kindly to our inner critic, opening possibilities to transform our relationship w...

We focus on Mindfulness for life as we reach the milestone finale of Season One of the podcast. It’s a perfect opportunity to reflect on the journey so far, as we have explored the themes of an 8-week mindfulness course together, and how we can intentionally create conditions to maintain our meditation practice and enable mindfulness to flourish in our lives. I invite you to think about what has r...

We focus on caring for ourselves, with a deep dive into mindful movement, during episode 9 of the podcast. Together we explore why movement practices are an integral part of the 8-week course and how we can also bring mindful awareness to the ways we move our bodies in everyday life, both through our leisure pursuits and the sports we enjoy and in our day-to-day activities. Being with the body in...

Kindness and compassion are underpinning attitudes of mindfulness. In fact, mindful awareness and compassion have been described as 2 wings of a bird – just as a bird needs 2 wings to fly, our mindfulness practice needs the clear vision and wisdom of awareness and the open heartedness of compassion to take flight.  So it’s no surprise that kindness and compassion are gently threaded through the fa...

When we allow difficult feelings to held in awareness, it means that, rather than reacting on auto pilot with habitual patterns, we register their presence and have the space and possibility to make a choice about how to respond to them.  We will experiment with embodying this attitude of welcoming all experience Episode 7 as we explore Being with what’s here .  And, of course, that will be easier...

Mindfulness not only helps us to pause and recognise moments of reactivity, as we explored together in the previous episode, It opens up ways of being to help us respond skillfully. One of the ways it helps us do this is by becoming an objective observer of our experience. Rather than being lost in thought, washed away by a wave of strong emotion, or simply compelled by our human urges to grasp af...

In Episode 5 we begin to explore some of our very human habits around reactivity and look at how Mindfulness can help us shift from habitual reactions to a wiser and kinder way of responding. We build on the foundational mindfulness meditation practices explored in episodes 1-4 and, from this place of grounded mindful awareness, we share a shorter practice called the 3-Step Breathing Space. In thi...

How would you like a way to begin to befriend the antics of your busy mind? With consistent practice, mindfulness can offer us a way to relate to our thoughts without getting carried away by them. This is our focus in today’s episode. For our first few episodes we explored our body and breath as a gateway to Being mode – a way of being with our direct moment-to-moment experience.  No doubt, as we...

How does it feel to fully come home to our body? And how do we even achieve this? Mindfulness offers some straightforward guidance on this.  Being present with our breath and our body offer an anchor to the present moment. So, to start the episode, Kate guides us in a short breath awareness practice.  We go on to discuss how and why the breath and body can be so helpful when it comes to mindfulnes...

Directly experience coming home to your senses as Kate guides the raisin practice. So often we can be going through life on autopilot, missing out on the very moments of our lives. Mindfulness invites us to wake up to this and offers us a way to consciously come back to the here & now. In today’s episode, we will be exploring that for ourselves through the raisin practice. During the practice...

In this episode, we lay the groundwork for the intent and flow of the podcast. Kate shares a bit about her own journey to mindfulness and why she is so passionate about sharing it with others. It can be helpful to be clear on the science and evidence behind why mindfulness can be so effective, so we also spend some time exploring this territory. We outline the flow of the episodes which follow a r...