Does Mindfulness really help us to feel calmer?
I have a friend who lives near Newcastle airport. We teach Mindfulness together, and when we can we like to sit together in her back garden planning our teaching sessions. Frequently we are interrupted by the sound of aeroplanes overhead drowning out our conversation. Since, momentarily we cannot talk, we see this as an opportunity to pause, tune in to ourselves and enjoy a moment of just being with our own experience. Another friend who used to live nearby sold her house aft
Being Like a Mountain
It came as a surprise to me initially that the ongoing work we do in mindfulness training involved so much bodywork or embodiment (why is it called mindfulness? I found myself asking). This kind of training comes on the back of the settling the mind practices and this “somatic descent” is akin to touching the ground or being earthed -or touching earth-literally allowing our awareness to drop down into our body and explore what we find within the field of our experiencing. So,
Managing Pain: The Case for Compassion
For most of my career I have worked as a Clinical Psychologist in Pain Management, trying to help people with long term pain to respond in a way that allows them to live as well as they can. This is rewarding, challenging and at times very difficult work, because long-term pain would challenge every one of us. One of the problems is that long-term pain is different from the kind of short-term pain that most of us are familiar with. A lot of strategies that work for short-term
Mindfulness and the Trouble with Tribbles
Star Trek and mindfulness? Is that really logical? A few nights ago, I was flicking restlessly through the Freeview channels on my TV when I came cross the original series of Star Trek. I guess most of us over a certain age might have fond memories of this series; how Jim Kirk got to kiss beautiful women from alien civilisations every episode, how many times Spock said “illogical” or Bones implored “I’m only a doctor” and Scottie cried out “I canna hold it captain!” ahhhh, t.
Top 3 Tips to beat exam stress
As exam season approaches it's natural to feel anxious. Exams, or other forms of stress can have a real impact on health and wellbeing. Stress can enhance your performance if managed well, but could also get in the way of being able to do the best that you can. Try following these 3 tips to manage the stress as well as possible, stay healthy and make sure that you do the best you can do on the day. 1. Prioritise Self-Care. It can be easy to forget the basics, but the fact is
Feeling Dead or Becoming Alive?
Life might be busy and vibrant with its usual ups and downs but how does our world feel from the inside? Maybe a little grey and lifeless? Are there emotions that we have been avoiding? Can we simply be in touch with how we feel? Prince Harry set a fine example recently by speaking out on how he suppressed his emotions about the death of his mother. Years passed as he carried on with his partying, working and living a life full of advantages. Yet bubbling under the surface wa
A complete mess and nothing wrong
It wasn't what I had expected, and at this stage I wasn't overly impressed. In my case I was pretty sure that he was wrong. I had come on this course for professional reasons, as a Clinical Psychologist, hoping to improve my career prospects by adding mindfulness teaching to my repertoire. I had a calm and stable temperament with no history of psychological or emotional problems. Over the following months, as I practised and studied mindfulness, my awareness started to deepen
Rules about Pain
I recently read a blog post which made some interesting points about back pain. The argument presented was that back pain is not caused by heavy lifting. If it was it would likely be much more of a problem than it is for elite rowers who are pulling a large amount of weight through their curved backs on a regular basis. Rather, the post argued, back pain is far more likely to be due to inactivity and muscle weakness, leading to an intolerance of normal patterns of movement an
Kind Club
Last summer I attended a conference at Samye Ling Buddhist Monastary and retreat centre which was run by the Mindfulness Association in association with the University of Aberdeen. The conference included an array of inspirational speakers as well as a variety of workshops and presentations from students who had completed the MSc in Mindfulness Studies. While it was difficult to pick out a highlight, one workshop that I attended had a profound impact on me. In this session we
A Change in Direction
Last month, after 16 years in a job that I was comfortable in, good at and well paid for I moved on to a new and different challenge. To do this I moved from a senior to a relatively junior position, took a substantial pay cut and increased my working hours and travel time. A new colleague commented that I had taken a risk, which seemed like a reasonable thing to say. So it's taken some reflection to work out why I didn't see it that way. Interestingly, of the cohort of fello
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