Experiential Response in Coursera Journal

They wanted a response to how the first module was for you, basically.

I found the first module of this course to be quite informative, even though I’ve been working at mindfulness for a couple of years. I had only been coming at mindfulness from the angle of, to use a archetype, the buddhist monk; it was all about quieting my mind to get closer to enlightenment. I had so strongly connected mindfulness with meditation that for all intents and purposes, I interchanged them in my mind. I am beginning to see that while the two are very closely related, they’re not exactly the same, which is comforting to me, as I’ve struggled a great deal with meditation in the past. Since I so closely related the two, I also struggled with mindfulness. Now that I can separate the threads a little bit, I’m finding mindfulness comes more easily to me.

One of the other things I’ve learned in the first module is that there are so many aspects of mindfulness that I hadn’t considered, so many stereotypes that I didn’t recognize as such. For instance, I never thought about mindfulness from a scientific point of view, only from a more “new age” perspective. I also had never related to mindfulness from in a zombie style, although now I can clearly see why that stereotype exists after listening to the lectures of this module.

When I first saw that one of the first meditation exercises was 40 minutes, I almost turned back and withdrew from the course. No way would I be able to sit for 40 minutes with my mind and not end up injured at the end of it! But the rest of the material had been so engaging, I decided to give it a try and lo and behold, I did manage to do the body scan in a much more present way than I’ve ever been able to do in the past.

I have already learned so much, I could stop this course now and be satisfied! But I am excited to forge ahead and see what the next modules hold in store.