Imagine being able to change your life, forever, in just a few minutes a day?
52 Mindful Moments helps you to do just that. It brings you an inspirational mindfulness technique, each week, to help you to de-stress, feel calmer, feel happier and feel more at peace, in under sixty seconds.
It’s a weekly online mindfulness course – and much, much more!
All you need to do is to experiment with each week’s mindfulness technique and message for a minute or two a day, and you’ll soon notice a real shift in the way you experience life.
52 Mindful Moments makes it really easy for you to weave mindfulness exercises into your daily life, no matter how busy you are. By focussing on one clear technique each week, you avoid getting overwhelmed and you build up a de-stressing toolkit that will stay with you for life.
Clare Josa – Meditation & Mindfulness Teacher52 Mindful Moments has been created by Clare Josa, an experienced and formally-certified NLP Trainer (‘User Manual For Your Brain’ / Practical Psychology) and Meditation & Mindfulness Teacher.
She is a specialist in accelerated learning techniques that help you ‘get stuff’ at an unconscious level, rather than having to remember ‘lists of things to do’. So she makes it easy for you to learn these life-changing, fast-acting mindfulness techniques.
She has taught and mentored thousands of people, worldwide, over the years, in most aspects of how to change your life. And for the next 52 weeks she is offering to guide you through an amazing mindfulness journey that will transform your experience of life – easily.
Get Started Today:
As always, our Conscious Pricing Policy applies to this course – so you get to choose how much to donate, based on what you can genuinely afford. I trust you to be fair and there’s no judgement.
The suggested donation for this 52 week course is:
Suggested Donation
Use coupon code:
High Income
£52
No code needed
Average Income
£26
Ichoose26
Low Income
£13
Ichoose13
If you genuinely cannot make a donation, to be able to join in, please contact us to agree an alternative energy exchange.
Here’s what to expect over the next 52 weeks:
A Specially-Designed Kick-Start Guide
This kick-start guide lays the foundations for the rest of this course, so it’s worth taking half an hour or so to read through it and do the couple of exercises it includes. It will explain how to get the most from this course – for the least effort! And it will help you figure out how to stay motivated for the coming months – and beyond.
A Weekly Message With All You Need For That Week’s Technique
Each week you get a new, inspirational mindfulness technique, to help you make shifts in your life in under sixty seconds.
The idea is that you play with that technique, each day, for a week. And watch the magic happen! 🙂
Some of these will be short & sweet inspirational messages, relevant to that week’s theme. Some will be essential ‘how to’ resources. Some will be articles to help keep you motivated and to help you get past blocks.
Regular Guided Meditations
If you want to take mindfulness to the next level, a guided meditation is ideal.
As we move through the core mindfulness topics, you’ll get regular 15 minute guided meditations to experience (a new one every few months). It is completely optional, but it will help you really fast track your mindfulness journey. These are designed to be relevant to the current topic, building on each other, to help you go more deeply into experiencing mindfulness, gently releasing any blocks and resistance and to inspire you along the journey.
Deep Relaxation MP3
If you’re feeling too stressed or tired to do your mindfulness exercises, it could be that you need a deep relaxation, instead.
That’s why I’m giving you a lovely 20 minute guided relaxation MP3 audio, as part of this course.
Exclusive Videos For Key Techniques
Sometimes it’s easier to ‘get’ a technique by watching a video, rather than just reading about it.
And that’s when you’ll have videos, ready and waiting for you. Each week, they will help you go deeper and make the key techniques easier to weave into your everyday life.
Moral Support In The Forum
You get your own exclusive members-only area in our online community, Soul-Sized Living.
This is a private area only for people who are joining in with 52 Mindful Moments. It’s the ideal place to get answers to your questions, share your experiences and offer moral support to others, too.
Facebook Page
If you’re into Facebook, you can also get the reminders of the extra goodies, members-only resources and links to inspirational articles via your Facebook news feed by ‘liking’ the Facebook page: Soul-Sized Living ~ on Facebook.
Note: the Facebook page is publicly visible – even to Google 🙂 If you want to share things only with other people on this course, then the forum is the place to do it.
“Love It!” Guarantee
To help take the risk out of your decision to join in with this course, we offer a “Love It!” guarantee.
It’s really simple:
Try 52 Mindful Moments out for the first five weeks, to see how it fits for you.
That’s five weeks of emails, insider secrets, life-changing techniques, videos, meditations, audios and forum membership. .
Let us know if it’s not right for you, before your week six email arrives.
If, by the end of week five, your heart is telling you that this isn’t the right course for you, reply to one of the weekly emails and let us know that you’d like to stop. .
We would then arrange for your membership to stop and give you a full refund.
No quibble, no hoops to jump through, no sulks, no awkward feelings. It’s ok.
We can’t say much fairer than that, can we?
So you’ve got nothing to lose – and a lot of de-stressing and inner peace to gain!
Get Started Today:
As always, our Conscious Pricing Policy applies to this course – so you get to choose how much to donate, based on what you can genuinely afford. I trust you to be fair and there’s no judgement.
The suggested donation for this 52 week course is:
Suggested Donation
Use coupon code:
High Income
£52
No code needed
Average Income
£26
Ichoose26
Low Income
£13
Ichoose13
If you genuinely cannot make a donation, to be able to join in, please contact us to agree an alternative energy exchange.
If you have a coupon code, please enter it in the box below, before clicking ‘Buy Now’.
Discover how many games it likes to play while you’re meditating.
Hi %%FIRST_NAME%%,
I don’t know about you, but most of us seem to have what the meditation world calls a monkey mind. I call it my grasshopper mind, because it can flit from one thing to the next with an amazing level of skill, constantly hopping around, making plenty of noise and rarely still.
When we sit for silent meditation, or try to practise mindfulness, we often find that our biggest challenges, such as knees hurting or back aching, are nothing compared to the chattering of our mind. Yet, although we might not be aware of where the thoughts come from, we can do something about them.
You don’t have to ignore your monkey mind.
And remember the #1 meditation myth? Meditation and mindfulness are not about making your monkey mind shut up!
Sometimes our monkey mind is trying to get a message through to us. It might be worried that we’re going to forget to do something; sometimes it’s telling us about things we are afraid of; sometimes it’s just used to filling in the chatter so we don’t feel lonely; sometimes we have just got into the habit of having an unconscious commentary running of everything we are seeing and doing.
When your monkey mind is shouting and yelling, it’s worth sitting quietly for a moment and asking yourself why. Is there a message it’s trying to get to you? Is there something you need to know?
Often, if you listen without judgement or interaction, the monkey mind can have its say and then relax. Sometimes it helps to jot down the thing it wanted you to remember, so you can let go of it and get on with your meditation.
What Are Some Of The Games A Monkey Mind Can Play? And What Can You Do About Them?
I’m curious: what are the games that your monkey mind plays, when you’re trying to meditate or practise mindfulness?
Here are some of the ways that previous students on How To Meditate – Made Easy have experienced it:
Getting bored
Your monkey mind tells you it’s feeling bored. It tells you that meditation is boring. It can be pretty convincing.Of course meditation is boring for a monkey mind that is used to running the show, at faster than the speed of sound…But accepting that your mind is playing the ‘bored game’ and allowing yourself to go more deeply into your practice will prove to your monkey mind that meditation is far from boring!
Playing music
Your monkey mind has usually been trained to be scared of silence. So, even if you manage to accept your thoughts, it might try new tactics, such as playing music or singing a catchy song.Again – just accept this. Stick the music on the conveyer belt or whichever other technique is working for you.Turn down the volume. Slow down the tempo, if it starts yelling for attention.Don’t engage. Don’t get annoyed. Don’t play the game. Just practise accepting it and let it go. It will eventually get the idea.
Reminding you about your ‘to do’ list
Classic trick, this one! Again – you know it’s not true. It’s VERY rare that something won’t wait 10 minutes.Stick it on the conveyer belt!
A previous student shared:
“For the first time *ever* in lots of ‘trying and failing’, I got some sense of what it is like to watch thoughts and actually observe them, moving on. I love the conveyer belt.”
Another shared a great tip for accepting – and not engaging, with your thoughts:
“I chose to sit outside a cave, in the sunshine, while my thoughts stayed in the cave. They seemed quieter; more distant. And it made it harder for me to interact with them – easier to accept them and just let them be.”
Quick Exercise:
What are your monkey mind’s games? They’re different for each of us.
And how do you deal with them?
What has worked for you?
What could you do differently, to make peace with your monkey mind?
Do You See What’s Going On?
Often we’re not even aware of the fact that we’re living our life according to the whim of the monkey mind. It is triggering our emotions and filtering our experience of life, without our conscious permission. Sounds scary? Yet this is what we have spent many years training it to do!
And we have spent a lifetime, learning to ignore its behaviour and pretend it isn’t there.
The mind’s ‘default setting’ is thinking, not awareness, peace, stillness or being. So it’s no wonder that it objects, when we dare to suggest it might quieten down for our meditation time…
How to tame a multi-tasking mind
Many of us have trained our mind to need to think of many things at once. It’s a real skill. But it doesn’t help you to relax, de-stress or learn to meditate. An interesting question (that sends your mind into a spin!) is:
“What won’t happen if I don’t think of three things at once?”
What won’t happen if your mind doesn’t chatter three conversations at once? Just let an answer bubble up for you, without analysing or judging it. This can help you unlock the key of why you have been feeding your monkey mind. Are you scared of silence? Are you scared things won’t get done? Are you trying to avoid thinking about something else?
Usually the answer to that question contains hints on how to set yourself free from that old grasshopper mind habit. If the answer feels uncomfortable, don’t dive into the drama.
Thinking isn’t ‘bad’.
But an out-of-control mind produces thinking that is ‘unconscious’, ‘unaware’. This feeds our love of drama, creating painful emotional states and keeping us stuck worrying about the past or stressing about the future.
So it is ‘untamed’ thinking that is the issue, not the presence of the thoughts.
It is our attachment to the thoughts that causes the pain, not the fact that they exist.
Be gentle, but firm, with your monkey mind.
Remember that with every breath we can choose to make a fresh start. Anything the monkey mind is telling us about our past belongs just there.
Having chosen to go on a meditation journey, you’re already taking positive steps towards creating a new future.
Meditation and mindfulness can really, really help calm a monkey mind, but you need to be careful which kind of meditation you pick. For example the types of meditation where you sit silently for hours might not be the best place for you to start, if your monkey mind stresses you out.
Mindfulness, which we are looking at next week, is about being fully present and aware of the moment – including your thoughts. It can be a lot easier for somebody who’s running a strong monkey mind pattern.
Practical solutions for today
You might like to experiment with some subtle tweaks you can make to remind your grasshopper mind who’s boss and calm it a little. You are the boss of your monkey mind, whether it accepts it or not!
If your thoughts are mainly words:
How about telling your thoughts to slow down? Cutting the speed at which your mind is speaking can help cut your stress levels dramatically.
And when you have played with that, how about changing the volume, making it quieter?
You could experiment with changing the tone of the conversation that you are hearing in your head and making it sound kinder and softer.
If your thoughts are mainly pictures:
How about slowing down any movement in the pictures? This can really help you relax.
If the pictures are bright and colourful, you could tone them down a little.
If they are big, you could make them smaller.
All this – and plenty more – is possible. You just need to play with the techniques.
Don’t wait till you’re meditating – practise these techniques at any time of day when you want to quieten your mind and de-stress.
If your monkey mind is a bit rebellious, there’s something you can do to get it to help you, instead of hindering your meditation journey:
Give your monkey mind a job to do, while you’re meditating!
For example, it could be ‘in charge’ of reminding you, when your attention drifts. Or perhaps it might like to be the ‘boss’ of letting you know how your big toe on your left foot is feeling. The job doesn’t have to be serious!
Your mind is used to working very hard and, like any workaholic, it finds it hard to switch off. It deserves your compassion – but not your sympathy! It’s time for you to get back in the driving seat….
So my invitation to you today is to play with understanding what your monkey mind might be trying to tell you – and then to remind it who’s boss – lovingly, but firmly.
Beyond Alchemy Ltd is the business arm of ClareJosa.com
All transactions via this website are processed through Beyond Alchemy Ltd, which has been trading since 2009.
It also runs Beyond Alchemy Publishing, a publishing house that specialises in helping authors with a world-changing message to reach a wider audience.
To contact the team at Beyond Alchemy Ltd, please use the Contact Clare page.
Have You Had Enough Of Your Inner Critic Yet? (3 Things You’ll Want To Start Today!)
We’ve all got one – that critic on your shoulder who makes sure you know exactly how rubbish you are in life, just when you most need to find your cheerleader-in-a-closet. And we do everything we can to eliminate that inner loudspeaker of negative self talk. But what if there were a way to sort your inner critic, once and for all? And what if you could get started – and make a noticeable difference – in the next five minutes? [Read more…] about 3 Surefire Ways To Let Go Of Negative Self-Talk
Insider secrets that make meditating less painful!
Hi %%FIRST_NAME%%,
Welcome to day 2.
One of the most common objections I hear when talking to people about meditation, is that they can’t sit still for that long; it makes their legs hurt and their back ache.
We live in a society where being busy and multi-tasking are badges of honour that we wear with pride. The idea of sitting still and doing nothing can be a real shocker!
As you’ll remember from yesterday, one of the keys to enjoying meditation is acceptance:
accepting your surroundings
accepting your mind
accepting your emotions
accepting your body
accepting your breathing
But if meditation hurts, it’s worth getting advice on your posture.
Meditation shouldn’t hurt!
It’s not about turning your legs into a pretzel.
In fact one of the best places to do meditation, when you are starting out, is on a chair, rather than on the floor. But many of us find it uncomfortable to sit still.
Why is that?
Often it is down to tension.
It might be physical tension in the body or due to stress, which is effectively mental tension.
How Should You Sit To Meditate?
We often think we have to sit in a particular way to meditate, conjuring up images of über-serene models, with their legs contorted into the lotus position. Yes, certain traditions have their ‘usual’ postures. But if they don’t work for you, that’s ok.
There’s no such thing as ‘should’ or ‘have to’, when it comes to getting meditation to work for you.
I have a wonderful, inspirational friend, Rosa, who is in her eighties. We studied together to become meditation teachers. Rosa suffers from genuine physical pain when she sits, and it can take her over an hour to get her body moving in the mornings.
But despite all that, she is still able to find a way to sit still and meditate. I figure that if she can do it, there’s no way I’m entitled to any excuses!
The most important way to sit when you are meditating is in a way that allows you to feel comfortable, but awake, to make it easy to accept your body. Sometimes if, at a deeper level, we are resisting our meditation, it can make our body tense up, causing discomfort and physical pain – all caused by mental tension. But sitting still for ten minutes is perfectly achievable – think about a typical day:
when we are driving, we sit for more than 10 minutes
when we are at work, we manage
at mealtimes, most of us do it
watching television, we can sit for hours
on Facebook. . . well. . . ’nuff said!
So we know we can sit still for 10 minutes.
But there is something about meditation that can make us tense up into an artificial sitting position.
What To Do If Meditating Hurts
The first tactic in dealing with meditation pain is to notice whether it is ‘real pain’ or ‘give me attention’ pain. If you make a slight movement of the bit of you that is aching, does the pain go away? Yes? Then it’s most likely ‘give me attention’ pain – your monkey mind trying to distract you from your meditation. And that’s ok!
In that case, here’s a solution:
Imagine you’re breathing into the area that feels tense.
As you breathe in, imagine filling that area with a soft, golden light.
As you breathe out, imagine the tension and discomfort melting away, allowing the area to relax.
Do that for three breaths and the discomfort almost always goes.
Even the simple action of renaming this ‘pain’ as ‘discomfort’ takes away its potency.
If it’s ‘real’ pain…
If pain doesn’t go away when you make a small movement, then it’s ‘legitimate’ or ‘real’ pain. Don’t ignore it! Change your position. If it happens regularly, ask for help with your posture. A good meditation teacher, chiropractor, osteopath or physiotherapist should be able to help.
What About ‘Pins & Needles’?
This is a really common problem for meditators. If a part of your body has its blood flow restricted, the familiar sensation of ‘pins and needles’ will be the result.
If you get this during your meditation, don’t be a martyr. Change your position, let the blood flow return and then go back to meditating. If it happens regularly, then you need to revisit the posture advice in today’s message and in the ‘Getting Started’ section. If you are really stuck, then ask for help with your meditation posture, as for the ‘real pain’ advice.
Good Posture Is Key
Sitting with good posture is key to enjoying your meditation.
Meditation isn’t supposed to hurt. It’s not about turning your legs into a pretzel!
If you’re sitting on a chair, it is important to have your back quite straight, rather than slouching. You want to be feeling relaxed, but alert. The easiest way to achieve this is to have the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems in balance. The parasympathetic nervous system is about relaxation, the sympathetic nervous system is about the body’s stress response.
To get them in balance, hold your back quite straight, with a slight tension at the midpoint. This activates both the nervous systems and helps to bring them into balance, leaving you relaxed, but alert.
That’s why we don’t meditate lying down – lying down is how we fall asleep!
Also, poor back posture during meditation can make you feel breathless. If your back is curved and your belly is squashed, your diaphragm will struggle to work properly and your lungs will also be squashed. This can trigger the uncomfortable feeling of breathlessness, which becomes more obvious when you’re sitting still and silently during meditation.
If you notice yourself feeling breathless, you might like to take 3 deep, sighing breaths – as we do at the beginning of each meditation – and to stretch your back gently. This should sort things. It’s also worth checking you’re not holding your breath – easy to do when you’re concentrating!
Note: persistent breathlessness should not be ignored – go and get appropriate medical help!
What Does Good Posture Feel Like?
To get a sense of what good meditation posture feels like:
Imagine a string is connected to the crown of your head.
Imagine someone is gently pulling that string, to help you lengthen your spine, from the base all the way up to your neck.
Then tuck your chin slightly under – you’ll feel your neck and jaw relaxing.
Make sure your shoulders aren’t around your ears, but are feeling relaxed.
There you go!
This might feel a little strange at first, but it can really help with your meditation practice.
The key to good meditation posture is stability.
A stable posture allows your body – and mind – to relax. Once you are used to it, it takes very little effort to maintain it, allowing you to get on with your meditation.
How To Make Meditation More Comfortable
Playing with this at regular points during your day, when you’re not meditating, will help your body get used to relaxing into this posture – as well as gently strengthening your back muscles. Improving your posture generally during the day will make a big difference. Good posture releases tension and strengthens the muscles you use during seated meditation practice.
When you’re meditating in a chair, you might want to:
add a cushion, just under your pelvis, to tilt it slightly forwards.
If you are like me, with shorter legs, you might want to:
add something under your feet, so that your thighs can be level, your back relaxed and your feet firmly resting on something. Dangling feet and meditation don’t go well together. I often use the phonebook, but you could use a cushion or a rolled up blanket.
If you have the opposite problem – long legs – then you might like to:
use a cushion under your bottom, to raise yourself up, so that your knees aren’t pointing towards the ceiling.
Longer term, if you are finding meditation uncomfortable, you might want to consider chiropractic or osteopathy treatment, or consulting a posture expert, to correct any structural problems and to give you exercises to strengthen your back muscles.
If you really find you can’t sit still, for physiological reasons, don’t worry. There are other types of meditation, such as mindfulness, that you can easily practice while you are moving around. We will be covering those in week three.
In the meantime, if you have any questions, please make sure you visit the online forum, to get your answers. There’s a special Q&A thread to cover how to sit, so you can enjoy meditation:
Aside: It’s not uncommon for people to find it hard to get started, when they’re beginning a new habit, such as meditating for 10 minutes a day. If that resonates for you, there’s a bonus article, which shares how others have handled it and made a start:
I choose a comfortable position, to help me meditate.
I hope you really enjoy today’s meditation!
Namaste,
Got questions? Pop by the forum or email hello@clarejosa.com 🙂
P.S. Each day has an image, with a key quote, as you saw above.
All of these are available for you to download, free of charge, to print out and use around your home, if they inspire you. You could even share them with your friends. Just click on the image to go to a high resolution version of it, then right click on that one and choose ‘save as’ (or similar), to save it to your computer.
This kick-start guide lays the foundations for the rest of this course, so it’s worth taking half an hour or so to read through it and do the couple of exercises it includes. It will explain how to get the most from this course – for the least effort! And it will help you figure out how to stay motivated for the coming months – and beyond.
Each week you get a new, inspirational mindfulness technique, to help you make shifts in your life in under sixty seconds.
If you want to take mindfulness to the next level, a guided meditation is ideal.
If you’re feeling too stressed or tired to do your mindfulness exercises, it could be that you need a deep relaxation, instead.
Sometimes it’s easier to ‘get’ a technique by watching a video, rather than just reading about it. 
You get your own exclusive members-only area in our online community, Soul-Sized Living.
If you’re into Facebook, you can also get the reminders of the extra goodies, members-only resources and links to inspirational articles via your Facebook news feed by ‘liking’ the Facebook page: Soul-Sized Living ~ on Facebook.
To help take the risk out of your decision to join in with this course, we offer a “Love It!” guarantee.
Beyond Alchemy Ltd is the business arm of ClareJosa.com
