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A Reflection on Personal Practice Mentoring

The following is a post written by a mentee and shared recently with the Mindfulness Network.

For further information about personal practice mentoring:https://www.mindfulness-supervision.org.uk/personal-practice-mentoring/

“I’ve been practising mindfulness since I did my ten-week course with a local Buddhist centre in 2004. I came to mindfulness because I felt a desire in myself to experience life in a new way – a way that was more open to awareness of the experiences of life as they unfolded. Since then, I have undertaken various mindfulness training courses and retreats. In 2016, I completed the distance learning MBSR course with Bangor as a refresher. Afterwards I found it difficult to find people to practise with and so when an opportunity arose to take part in personal practice mentoring I jumped at the chance.

A mentoring session is a very gentle experience and has evolved into its present structure as a result of a dialogue between the mentee and the mentor. My overriding experience of the process is that it is centred around the needs of the person receiving the mentoring. The mentor acts as guide and facilitator and allows the person receiving mentoring to navigate their own course.

Each session is an hour in length and I usually have one session per month, although at times I prefer to have two sessions if I am working through some more complex experiences. We begin with a short check-in to see where I am at and then move into a time of guided meditation. This mediation is always focused on what is most relevant and necessary for me right now and is based upon what I have told the mentor that I would like the session to be. After the meditation, we spend the remainder of the session reflecting on the experience – searching for the nuances at the edges of my experiences. We finish by exploring what might be helpful to me to allow my practice to deepen.

For me, the benefits have been immense. The personal practice mentoring sessions have become an island in an often turbulent and fast flowing river of experience. They have been an opportunity to deepen my practice and to weave it into the fabric of my daily life. Most of all, practice mentoring has been an opportunity to remain engaged with practice in a way that I never could have done alone. My mentor is a person I can trust and whose wisdom and generosity of spirit I deeply value.

I would highly recommend personal practice mentoring to anyone who wishes to deepen practice and integrate it into their daily lives. In short, I’d recommend it to anyone who really wants to live a mindful life.”


Fr Martin Bennett OFM Capuchin is a Capuchin Franciscan Priest, Chaplain, Life Coach and Mindfulness Practitioner.


Keeping Practice Alive Through Personal Practice Mentoring

As we continue our journey of mindfulness practice, it is vitally important in the long term that we keep our engagement and motivation alive, with a wind of enthusiasm and purpose at our back. We need to nurture a clear intention of why we’re practising and how we are engaging with what arises along the way. In so doing, we keep close to the possibilities that practice offers us for leading a meaningful life, of benefit to ourselves and others.

Whether you have recently completed an eight-week MBSR or MBCT course, or have been practising for some time, the journey of practice involves a continuous enquiry in to how we relate to our practice, as well as specific considerations about the experience of practice itself. It matters that we maintain interest in what happens, even when the journey seems boring, frustrating or irritating, when we lose inspiration or experience bouts of laziness and discouragement, when we question what we’re doing and perhaps encounter difficulties with practice.

As mindfulness-based teachers, it is especially important that we keep closely connected to the roots of our own practice and maintain an active and clear interest in how our practice unfolds and develops over time, as this will naturally inform our teaching practice, and allow it to be authentic and vivid.

The Mindfulness Network has recently launched a new provision in the form of personal practice mentoring to facilitate the exploration of ongoing mindfulness practice in our everyday lives and work. The aim of this provision is to support ongoing personal mindfulness practice within a secular framework and context, through one-to-one sessions, with an experienced mindfulness-based teacher/supervisor.

As a mentor, I greatly value the richly creative space that mentoring offers for sharing the unique journey of practice with others, and enquiring into something that is so fundamental to our human growth, development and evolving potential.

Our mentors at the Mindfulness Network have a wealth of practice experience between them and they are all deeply committed to offering this opportunity for an enhanced focus on personal practice and to providing supportive connection and guidance along the way. However long you have been practising and however you feel your practice is going, practice mentoring can encourage you in your endeavours, and offers valuable space for reflection, fresh inspiration, and renewed enquiry.

Do you think this might benefit you? For further information about practice mentoring, how it works and who it is for, and to see a list of mentors, please go to www.mindfulness-supervision.org.uk.