Welcome.
Lifesider is about finding new ways into our lives through poetry and meditation.
Lifesider exists to help us find new ways into our lives. Through poetry that leaves little unexplored and less unfelt. Through meditation that supports us to meet ourselves as honestly and plainly as we might.Â
The word Lifesider and those that came with it, appeared during meditation and felt like the arrival of a new way of being, to accompany a new way of seeing.
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We are offering poetry within the Lifesider Poetry Collection, in our online journal and upon everyday objects that you can wear or use. A way to see signs of life in others and an invitation to see them in yourself.
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We are offering meditation guidance through our Introduction To Meditation Course, during which you can begin to learn the skill of meditation. A way to focus your attention on what it means for you to be, to be alive and to be aware of your aliveness.
'I am on the side of life. I am a lifesider'.
Lifesider Poetry Collection.
Poems about life, love, loss and stillness. Full colour, 124 page book with 67 poems and 15 illustrations.
This book collects poems written in the middle of life. While an eventful year made its way around the earth. There was plenty of love, loss and some stillness. Way more than ought to have fit in the time. Which tells us something about time, and about life. Poems about meditation, family life, parenting children growing to adults and a cancer journey are shared in the order they arrived.
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Gavin Birchall has attempted to write the unwritable, to express the inexpressible and to embrace the everyday wonder of our lives just as they are. All while keeping it simple. Mostly.Â
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If you want excitement, danger and undirected outrage, that sort of thing, then this might not be what you are looking for. These are poems about an ordinary life where events, common to many of us, play out each day, with no less depth, feeling and meaning that any carefully crafted drama. Perhaps more in fact.
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Be on the side of life. Be a lifesider.
'Meditation is attention focussed on being'.
Introduction To Meditation Course.
Face to face, meditation course for those beginning to explore meditation. Based in Preston, Lancashire.
During guided meditations you will be introduced to a number of different techniques allowing exploration of which practice suits you most. Designed to begin gently and evolve as you find your way through the different approaches, this course is about the practice of meditation and not a particular religion or tradition. At the same time we are respectful of and recognise, with gratitude, the traditions from which the skill of meditation practice has emerged.Â
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Supported with information about the history and science behind meditation, this course will help you to begin developing the skill of focussed attention through breathing meditation, mantra meditation, contemplation meditation, mindfullness meditation and silent meditation.
Thousands of years of experience and decades of scientific research show how meditation can be helpful to reduce physical and mental stress, improve sleep, reduce illness and manage addiction. It can also help us to cultivate happiness, develop a greater appreciation of bodily awareness and heightened experience of our five senses resulting, for some, in a more vivid experience of life. Not straight away and not without persistence but these kinds of benefits have been measured by scientists and felt by generations of people. Beginning a practice is the start of finding out how meditation might help you.
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