Empowering Mindfulness for Women

Empowering Mindfulness for Women is centred around a a 5-day intensive mindfulness course attended by eight women from different backgrounds. The reader is invited to imagine they are actively participating in the teaching and learning moments and turning points encountered in teaching and learning mindfulness around themes such as making space for mindfulness, safeguarding mindfulness for women, engendering mindfulness, mindfulness dreaming and a mandala of wisdoms. Evocative accounts of experience bring to life the women's growing awareness that mindfulness can be both a separate practice and a natural part of life and that it can help them to nurture what they have neglected in themselves by not tapping into the full spectrum of their experience. Each chapter provides useful follow-up activities and questions for individual or group reflection, journaling, sharing and conversation. Empowering Mindfulness for Women is aimed at those who teach mindfulness to women in educational, community or clinical settings and at women who want to learn mindfulness in a manner that positions them as experts in their own learning.

Leigh Burrows is Senior Lecturer at the College of Education, Psychology and Social Work, Flinders University. She has been teaching, researching and publishing on mindfulness for over a decade, but believes she was practising mindfulness from a young age without realising it. She has a particular interest in assisting women and men to access the empowering potential of a 'full spectrum' of mindfulness possibilities rather than being locked into limiting binaries of 'masculine-feminine', 'east-west', 'spirit-nature', mind-body and 'active-passive'.

Chapter One. Polarity Mindedness. Chapter Two. Creating Space for Mindfulness. Chapter Three. Safeguarding Mindfulness for women. Chapter Four. Engendering Mindfulness. Chapter Five. Mindfulness Dreaming. Chapter Six. A Mandala of Wisdoms. Chapter Seven. Full Spectrum Mindfulness