Hi, everyone. I'm really excited to bring Mark Coleman into the Mindfulness.com family. Mark is a meditation teacher, a contemplative nature guide, author of multiple books, including Make Peace With Your Mind, Awake In the Wild, and From Suffering to Peace. He's founder of Awake In the Wild and co-founder of the Mindfulness Training Institute. Mark, it's a, it's a real joy to be able to do this and offer your teachings on this platform.

I'd love to give people a sneak peek into some of this content. And you have a really fascinating journey. Just wondering if you could share a bit how, how this content has impacted your own life, these teachings have impacted your own life. Yeah. Well, thanks Cory.

Thanks for the introduction. And also very delighted to be joining this family, Mindfulness.com and excited to be sharing teachings and getting to know people on the platform. Yeah, so my journey. I'm English. I grew up in Northern England and moved to London, was a punk rocker, was a very disillusioned, disenchanted, angry, confused young man.

And was part of the punk scene back in the Eighties, which was really fun. And thought that was, you know, one way of trying to understand reality. And, but basically was really suffering and, was really hard on myself, was critical, judgmental of everything and everyone, but particularly myself. And what I found was I, I actually accidentally sort of stumbled into a meditation center. And they were offering these teachings of which I'd never heard of before called mindfulness and loving kindness.

I thought, well, I'll give it a try. These people seem to be together and presence full. And I walked in there with my pink massive, wide hair and earrings and crazy clothes. And, and I closed my eyes, as you do in meditation, you turn that lens of awareness inwards. And suddenly I was like, Oh my God, my mind.

My mind is crazy. My mind is unruly and beating itself up and cruel and harsh. And, and that was a real wake up point to like, Oh, there's another way to be. There's another way to understand myself and life and why I'm so unhappy. And that really began a lifelong search, exploration, inquiry into the mind and meditation.

And here I am today, many, many years later. Wow. And, and so, you know, that was your particular journey at a particular point in your life and time, you know, a number of years ago. I'm curious if you, if you could speak to the relevance of what that was like for you to other people and how these teachings are impactful for people right now, these days, with what's going on in the world and what people might be navigating. Yeah.

Well, what's beautiful with these teachings is their timeless, right? They've, they've been taught for thousands of years. They're practiced now. They're studied in neuroscience labs. They're practiced in boardrooms and jails and schools and you name it. That's the, they're making their way into every field and every discipline.

And the reasons for that is that the, the helping anyone and everyone understand themselves, bring awareness to their own mind and heart, to really look at what does it mean to be human. And what does it mean to be present? What does it mean to be awake? What does it mean to understand why we suffer psychologically, mentally and otherwise? And so for me, and I think for, for millions of other people, it's, it's been a life support for particularly in these times where, you know, our attention super pulled away in this attention economy, super distracted with our devices and media and social media and whatnot. And I think there's a hunger and a longing for becoming present, becoming grounded, understanding why we get so reactive and triggered, and to understand ourselves, to understand the deeper sort of waves and rhythms in our own heart and mind. And, you know, most people's lives are busy, complex, lot of demands, and it's very hard to find one center and to stay balanced, stay grounded and to be connected with what's really important and what's really true. And so I think mindfulness has arisen and is speaking to so many people because it's a perfect counterpoint to the, to the times we're living in that a busy, complex, stressful, and, and a kind of disintegrating in a certain way of our psyches and our wellbeing.

So I'm just happy to be able to be part of sharing that in this platform with people and particularly the, the critic work I think is, is, is so useful. Just as I was a young man and was incredibly, burdened and by my judging mind and how that created a sense of worthlessness and self hatred and low self-esteem. And one of the reasons I wrote my book, Make Peace With Your Mind, and offering these teachings here is that I see with my students and that globally, I see this everywhere, people are the most harsh and most critical with themselves. High standards, perfectionism, feeling like an impostor, not feeling good enough. And a lot of that comes from this voice, these judgmental thoughts, these habits of mind that are critical and negative.

And when we bring mindfulness and compassion to those voices and understand them, we can actually find a way to find a lot of space and freedom from them. And that's really the gift and that's timeless. Beautiful. I think one of the things I really appreciate about how you've emphasized your work and even created your teachings with a big emphasis on nature. You know, as you were talking, you were saying, you know, this being able to attune to our internal rhythms and movements .And there's,I think there's something to be said for how often we override some natural rhythms within us, our built in rhythms of just how am I today rather than this cultural expectation to show up the same way each day.

And I think there's a really nice integration you have here with grounding yourself within, everything that's moving through you and also honoring the movement and the fluidity of all of that. Yeah, no, I mean, nature is in a, for me, it's my primary teacher at this point. And you know, one of the beautiful things about nature is it doesn't judge us. It doesn'thave some idea, it just doesn't care about our social media accounts or how we look or, you know, what size, age we are. It's just accepting and welcoming.

And actually that's one of the reasons why I was drawn to nature, because it was, provided that sort of healing, welcoming space that my mind at the time couldn't provide for itself. Yes, well said. You have three different formats that you're going to be offering here. The seven day course, the micro-practices and Q and A's. Could you just speak to why these different formats will be helpful for folks? Sure.

Yeah. So the, the seven-day course is really a nice way to kind of dive deeper into the material. It's a way to systematically sort of unpack, what is the critic? How does it come about? Why do we have one in the first place? How can we manage it? How can we understand it? How can we bring kindness and compassion and forgiveness and other, you know, beautiful qualities that help mind help us with mindfulness to really find a little space from and a little understanding of the freedom from the critic. And then the micro-practices, sort of a in a very immediate way of finding, you know, 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds in your day to apply very simple techniques that help unhook and illuminate the critic and again, to find that space from it. And then the Q and A's are really just time for you to engage with me as a teacher to, you know, to kind of just go into the material and, and get specific about what, what issues are arising for you and how we can address them.

So there, there, there's a three-fold way of, you know, managing and holding and working with the material that I think is very helpful. Yeah. Beautiful. Thanks Mark. I'm really excited to get that these teachings out there.

And, and thank you all for, for listening and joining us. Please go ahead and dive into Mark's course and content. You could click below and we look forward to hearing how it impacts your life. Thanks and take care. Thanks.