Meditation Coaching

Individual sessions with Joseph Emet.

• Location Pointe-Claire or at the Padua Centre in Montreal for your convenience
• Session duration: 1h15
• Registration: by appointment. Contact Joseph Emet

Why Coaching?

Over the years, many people have found individual coaching helpful. While the reasons may be as varied as the people who have come, here are a few good ones for using this service:

1. Your schedule. Perhaps your time is very limited, or perhaps available group sessions do not coincide with your free time.

2. You have been trying to meditate for a while, and have not been satisfied with the results, or you want to get a quick start in establishing your practice.

3. You feel more comfortable in an individual setting than in a group.

4. You are experiencing strong emotions, under stress, having difficulty sleeping, addicted, feeling depressed or anxious. Perhaps you have read, or have been advised by a health professional that meditation can be helpful (indeed, studies confirm that this is so). In these individual sessions, you control the length of the meditation interval, and the discussion is centred around your concerns, and focuses on your needs.

"Right Meditation" is one of the eight life skills prescribed by the Buddha in order to help us live a happy and fruitful life. Developing one's own mindfulness is beneficial, and it was originally developed for overcoming ill-being. Its main drawback is that it takes some practice. Many people, however, find that the advantages are rewarding enough to compensate for this initial and ongoing expenditure of effort.
Here are some of these advantages:

* Mindfulness, once developed, inspires all areas of life, enriching other life experiences such as relationships, work, leisure, and parenting.

* Research into Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression has demonstrated that awareness of one's mental processes and early precursor symptoms prevents future episodes of depression in a way that drug therapy does not (with drug therapy depressive episodes have an 80 % chance of recurrence).

* Life is full of stressors; the present trigger of stress is not the only one that one is likely to encounter in life, nor is it the last one. Loss, illness, and old age will continue to provide challenges for all of us throughout our lives. Developing one's mindfulness will give us a way to deal effectively with these stressors beyond the current one — as they arise.

* With mindfulness, a more authentic lifestyle becomes possible. As one sheds old compulsive mental habits that do not bring happiness, different vistas open up. One often becomes more creative, more compassionate, and more open.

Mindfulness empowers the practitioner, so that she is able to use her own resources to gain relief, and eventually shed her dependence on a therapist, counselor, or pharmaceuticals.
Mindfulness training is different from counseling; it involves acquiring a skill, a life skill.
The process starts with learning basic echniques such as mindfulness of breathing, walking, and other everyday activities such as talking, working and driving.

A FRAMEWORK FOR CHANGE

The understanding behind Mindfulness training is that everything is interdependent and subject to change. Our personalities, habits, the way we react, our tastes and cravings are not engraved in stone; they are fluid and changeable. They are also interdependent: our genetic makeup, upbringing, schooling, present lifestyle, diet, and thinking patterns all contribute to what we refer to as "ME." This understanding is sometimes referred to as the holistic view.

Change comes in two ways:
1. As we let go of patterns that do not bring us happiness. Attachment and clinging to habits, and identifying with thoughts instead of the thinker are all roadblocks on the road to change. We are born anew each moment as we accept life's challenges instead of turning our back on them.
2. As we accept and make peace with ourselves as we are at each moment. At first acceptance and change seem like opposites! If we are at peace with ourselves as we are, why attempt to change? Yet the reality is different. It is only when we accept ourselves as we are this moment that we can move forward. Many people are stuck in a permanent state of war with themselves. This self-disapproval takes so much energy and effort that there is none left for awareness, there is only exhaustion. The will to change is paralyzed.
Self-acceptance is a prerequisite for change.

PRACTICALITIES

To make an appointment, please e-mail a rough idea of your availability (such as weekends only, evenings only, etc.) to josephemet at gmail.com (please revise this address, it is in this form to avoid attracting spam).