Mindfulness for Health

This course will explore various approaches to pain and/or stress-management through mindfulness-meditation, with guided meditation-relaxation practices, and gentle movement (based on yoga, T’ai Chi and Qigong). We also look at pacing in daily life, and will cover how to keep an activity diary.

This course is suitable for (almost) anyone suffering from stress or poor health, and will teach methods of ‘coming home’ more fully to our present experience, and in so doing may also help to inhabit our bodies more fully. The mindfulness-meditations presented may also help to observe and perhaps quieten the often restless mental activity (anxiety and stress) that at times we can all suffer from, when we are not able to ‘switch off’ from our ongoing ‘internal dialogue’ (over-active thinking).

What will I learn?

• Learn to have some understanding of how to “inhabit” the body more fully – rather than living in the noisy ’internal dialogue’ of constant thinking.

• Learn to be more aware of breathing, how and where the breath comes from in the body.

• Learn to have some understanding of how poor breathing (not paying attention to how we breathe) can be associated with tension and stress.

• Learn how to use gentle exercise to work with pain and disability.

• Learn to regulate our daily activity, by keeping a pacing diary, and how this impacts on well-being.

• Learn to have some understanding of how we might develop more positive emotions including kindness to oneself and others.

• Learn methods to help us live in the ‘present moment’ rather than in the past or future (take time to ‘smell the flowers’).

• Learn to develop more appreciation of poetry, beauty and aesthetics – and how this can create more positive mental/emotional states, and help us to be more connected in our present experience.