Good morning and welcome to our weekly Sunday meditation.

We began this season with mindfulness approaches to managing stress and anxiety in difficult times, and now after a couple weeks of honoring the Day of the Dead and Remembrance Day with loving kindness meditations, we are moving on to a new theme: the mindful exploration of depression.

Meditation isn't "enough to fix" depression, especially if people are really struggling with long term or major depression, but it can provide an opportunity to understand what we're feeling and thinking.

Often when we're feeling down, it's accompanied by a chronic substream of very negative thinking of which we are unaware. Mindfulness of both the body and of our thoughts, can help us reconnect with awareness to our experience, so that we can develop knowledge about our bodies and our thoughts. What are the negative thoughts that hold us prisoner? How can we interrupt the repetition? How do these negative thoughts make me feel--do I feel them as tension in my shoulders, abdomen, heart area? How would I feel if I could let this go?

In today's 15 min practice, we explore mindfulness of our thoughts: what are we thinking that is rooted in fear?

In the next several meditations we will explore these other ideas.

For more information about Calgary Mindfulness, or to join our weekly practice, please write [email protected], where we welcome your questions, comments and intentions for future meditation practices.

We offer workshops and instruction and much more!

For information, please visit www.CalgaryMindfulness.ca Kind regards, Rosanna D'Agnillo, Founder and Lead Facilitator, Calgary Mindfulness

To watch today's practice, please visit youtube at https://youtu.be/i7_ENCXSGSM