Occasionally when I'm talking to people the topic of meditation will crop up. Meditation and mindfulness are large topics and so I thought I'd try to break them down into manageable bits. If you want to explore more there are lots of resources I can point you to. What is meditation? I've started off with … Continue reading What is meditation?
I don't know about anyone else but sometimes you just get to the point when it all gets a bit too much. I was at that point at 4am this morning! My mind was whirring around, I was mentally drafting blog posts, wondering what do to about planned classes and events, worrying about friends and … Continue reading Feel the fear and find a better way to be
Recently I shared two kindness meditations during a wellbeing day, and have uploaded one of them as an audio track for you to enjoy. It was a real pleasure to contribute towards the successful 'Sharing the Love' day which a fellow yoga teacher Jill organised in November here in Dumfries, and which was a fundraiser … Continue reading Sharing kindness meditations
I've uploaded my second mindfulness of breath track for you to listen to for free, to help bring feelings of calm, relaxation and quietness to the mind and body. There's now a 1 minute track and a 3 minute track. Listen to them whenever you want*, maybe before going to bed, or if you wake … Continue reading Free mindfulness of breath tracks
I'm delighted to be offering two wellbeing workshops this autumn in Dumfries. Following positive feedback from the workshop on understanding chronic (persistent) pain, I'm going to be delivering this workshop again, but it'll be slightly longer at 3 hours to allow more time for the practical things. In addition, I'm going to be delivering a … Continue reading Wellbeing workshops on pain, stress and anxiety
Last weekend, on a local well-being day, I heard a quote about meditation which I'd never heard before, but which made instant sense. 'You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.' Wow, I thought. How come I'd never heard that before? It's a quote from Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the most influential … Continue reading Surfing the waves of the mind
I recently participated in two workshops for therapists about understanding pain, particularly long-term (chronic) pain, and how to help people with such pain to improve their situation. The sessions were very intense with a huge amount of information and were led by a local therapist, Hedd Piper, who, although is a chiropractor by training, is … Continue reading Understanding persistent pain
If you're looking for free, good quality relaxation tracks to use at home, in English or Welsh, why not try these three tracks from Yoga i Bawb (trans: Yoga for All) a west Wales yoga group. The three available are: * Progressive relaxation - relaxing each part of the body in turn * Yoga Nidra … Continue reading Free relaxation tracks, including in Welsh
It seems that almost every week another study is published which shows that meditation and mindfulness are helpful to us for a number of reasons e.g. research showing that meditation can slow aging, or that mindfulness is being taken up by various groups e.g. some schools in Wales. As a result, many people know about … Continue reading Mindfulness and meditation audio tracks
It can take years, decades even, for ideas to become accepted widely in society, and it seems that meditation in the Western world has taken about 40 years to go from relative obscurity ('hippy') to mainstream, and even to McMindfulness and a backlash. The evidence for this acceptance is the recently published Mindful Nation UK report produced by … Continue reading The Mindful Nation UK report
