Welcome to the weekly insights post for this week.
I post a Weekly Insights article each week. Each article is a compilation of the insights I posted the previous week across all my social media platforms. Each insight is a micro-learning post offering practical guidance on mindfulness, meditation, and resilience.
This week, we take a diversion from the Frictionless Way framework (more to come in the New Year) to segue into another teaching framework of mine: Loving Awareness.
There is also a post on Sleep, Rest & Energy and a post I missed from last week's insights on Present Moment Reminders.
About Loving Awareness
Loving Awareness is a set of techniques and concepts that combine mindfulness and meditation.
The Loving Awareness practices cultivate awareness, acceptance, appreciation, gratitude, compassion, self-compassion, forgiveness, and self-forgiveness.
The Loving Awareness techniques and concepts are a combination of practices which have developed over thousands of years. Science has identified the benefits of meditative mental training and the perspective that arises from the realisation of our actual relationships with our thoughts and emotions, with nature, with others, and with ourselves.
I have selected these practices because I have learned they have helped many of my students and me.
Acceptance
The Key to Loving Awareness
What Acceptance Really is
Acceptance isn’t putting up with bad things, tolerating difficult people, or enduring emotional discomfort.
Acceptance isn’t about approving of your circumstances.
It’s about fully experiencing them.
Acceptance is allowing yourself to feel however you feel in the present moment.
- Eckhart Tolle
Interoception is your inner awareness. It is the ability to sense what’s happening inside you.
With practice, interoception can become like a dial you can turn up to fully check in with your body.
Any body-centred meditation teaches you this over time. The more you practice, the easier it becomes to:
- Notice physical sensations arise and subside
- Identify whatever sensations or emotions there are
- Allow emotions to move through you naturally (experience the flow of an emotion)
Acceptance is the foundation of Loving Awareness (a set of practices that help us connect to our warmer emotions).
When you can fully feel your inner experience, you create the conditions for a journey into Loving Awareness, such as gratitude and compassion.
Appreciation
Appreciation in Action
✨ Focus on an object nearby, whatever catches your eye
Notice if there’s a reflection or a shadow, or any other detail of that object that draws your attention to it
Now focus on the reflection or the shadow
Rest your gaze on this detail
⏳ Notice your breathing moving through time. Be open to whatever sounds there are, notice that all these background sounds are also passing through time.
✨ Continue resting your gaze on the detail of the object
💚 Notice what happens inside you
🌱 Only by appreciating these small things can we lay a foundation to build gratitude on
Gratitude
Gratitude is not about feeling thankful. It’s about realising something unique: out of all humanity, only you can appreciate what you’re experiencing right now.
Appreciation is anything you enjoy spending time doing.
Gratitude is the realisation that you are uniquely able to appreciate that experience. Only you.
Our culture limits what we should feel grateful for. We are left with a small set of “big” things.
🌱 Of course, we want to feel grateful for those, but there is no reason why we shouldn’t feel grateful for more “small” things:
- The way the light shines on a surface
- A feeling of comfort in your clothing or from your furniture
- Warmth
- The wind in your face
- The calmness that the breath brings
Take a moment now to find something small around you that you appreciate, no matter how small, and notice that only you can experience it as you are now.
🌟 And repeat that as often as you wish with as many "small things" as you want.
Meditation for Sleep, Rest and Energy
Some Tips on Sleep Rest & Energy You Won't Hear Elsewhere
Have you noticed that when you’re exhausted and drift off during the day, you go straight into dreams?
Sleep consists of 90-minute sleep cycles. When your alarm wakes you in the morning, it’s cutting into the final dream phases, which tend to occur later in the night.
Night after night, when you wake to an alarm, dream sleep is what you’re losing.
So when you finally let yourself drift off during the day, your brain goes straight to what’s missing most: dreams.
Here is some practical advice about getting rest during the day
If you nap, pick your timing:
• Less than 20-25 minutes: a quick refresh before deep sleep kicks in
• 90 minutes to 2 hours: a full sleep cycle
• Anything in between (like 60 minutes) and you’ll wake groggy - you’ll be pulled out of deep sleep.
Even better than napping?
A short meditation where you drift in and out of that drowsy dream-like state. This is called the hypnagogic state. I refer to these meditations as hypnagogic meditations.
The trick is: sit upright with your back unsupported. When you drift into sleep, your head nods, waking you. This stops you from falling into deep sleep.
You can get a significant benefit from this dream sleep - paying back some of your sleep debt - in just 5-15 minutes.
Five minutes of this can leave you sharper than an hour of fighting to stay awake.
My next 'four-week meditation for sleep rest and energy' course begins on Monday, January 19. Check out the Bromley Mindfulness website for details here:
Bromley Mindfulness
https://bromleymindfulness.org.uk/sleep-course/
Present Moment Reminders
The Simple Hack That Changes Everything
How To Get Back To Now
Most of us spend our days on autopilot 😵💫.
We move from task to task, preoccupied with the past or the future. The present moment – where life happens – slips by unnoticed.
Here’s a simple fix: place physical reminders in your environment.
How it works:
- A pebble on your desk (or a small stack of pebbles!).
- A Post-It note on your mirror.
- A small object by your kettle ☕.
- Anything similar that is out of place and will catch your attention.
Each time you notice these items, they interrupt your autopilot and gently bring you back to now.
🔔 The reminder doesn’t need to say anything profound. Its job is to break into your habitual thinking and create a moment of awareness
Why this matters:
Your mind naturally drifts toward rumination, worry, or planning. These mindloops run constantly without interruption. Physical reminders act as pattern breakers – small triggers that snap you out of autopilot and into the present.
🚀 Why not try it right now?
Choose a spot where you spend time on autopilot. Maybe it’s your desk, your kitchen, or by the bathroom mirror (this works really well because it can break into our mental hamster wheel when we clean our teeth in the morning).
🌟 Place something unusual or unexpected there – a coloured stone, a small note, or an object that doesn’t normally belong. Each time you notice it, take one breath and check in with your present moment.
Notice the reminder, take a breath, and you are one step closer to a calm day.
Over time, these brief moments of presence accumulate. They become openings where you can actually experience your life rather than just thinking about it.
Stop scrolling for a moment! Get a pebble or sticky note and set up your first reminder RIGHT NOW! Then you are ahead on the day! 🔥
