Mindfulness at Christmas
What does mindfulness have to offer at Christmas? This week’s blog post is a short read on what mindfulness is and how it can help you regain your sense of equilibrium, with some simple easy to learn guided practices to help you get through to the New Year! Read more…
Mindfulness Series: Cultivating Kindness – why is it important?
Following on from the previous blog post in the Mindfulness Course series, today, I’m writing about an essential part of our mindfulness training, as experienced in this Mindfulness Based Living Course (MBLC): cultivating kindness for ourselves and others. That may come as a surprise to some – I mean, how is kindness relevant to being mindful? Read more…
What are we mindful about? Four aspects of Mindfulness
“Knowing what is happening, when it is happening and without preference.” (Rob Nairn).
Coming back to our definition of Mindfulness, we can see clearly that training in mindfulness will involve becoming more familiar with the workings of the mind. But what do we, in the West, mean by the mind? We usually understand the mind to mean our thoughts. However, as we come to see when we train in mindfulness, there are many other aspects to our experience of mind….read more…
So, my Mindful Walks made it into the Guardian travel section! I’m absolutely delighted – read more here.
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2023/aug/30/a-mindfulness-walking-weekend-in-north-wales
What is Mindfulness?
To appreciate what we mean by Mindfulness, we start with recognising “automatic pilot”. How many times have you walked into a different room in your home and found yourself there with little recall of the steps you took to get there, or the thoughts you were thinking on the way. To top it all, you find yourself standing there having forgotten what you came in for in the first place! Sound familiar? read more….
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As I walked out from Cyffylliog…
The Clwydian Range of hills, an iconic wave of hills rising from the Llandegla plateau, as they march along the northernmost stretch of King Offa’s Dyke, are a sight to see. I could regularly be heard extolling their virtues, saying that if it was possible to fall in love with hills and mountains, then the Clywdian Range stole my heart well and truly! Dotted with a liberal sprinkling of Bronze and Iron-age Hillforts, bedecked in heather, trussed up in ancient paths and trackways – they are an intriguing bunch and there’s much to love.
In the Counselling Room: A Place to Roost
In the Counselling Room: A Place to Roost
In the counselling room, I often work with individuals who have experienced trauma – specifically relational trauma, complex or attachment trauma. In the counselling room, individuals who come to work through this kind of experience, often talk of a feeling of “not belonging” – as if they must live on the outside of their family unit – outcast even, or perhaps feeling that they just don’t fit, fit-in. Such feelings become a part of their self-image, their ideas about themselves and there begins an ongoing experience of feeling like they don’t belong, don’t fit, or fit-in. And what of how this feels within the body? We have phrases in our own language that talk of “feeling comfortable in our own skin”, “So and So lived a few feet away from their body” and so on.
Walking: Winter’s Rest
Walking: Winter’s Rest
Oooh, I do love Winter – I know I gush lovingly about every Season, but, when we walk through Winter’s Solstice, I’m drinking, deep and grateful, from Winter’s Rest…
Walking: Strollers
Walking: Strollers
How do you find yourself when you are out walking? Is your walk a stroll, a trudge or a purposeful stride, or a mixture? Are you walking for your general health, your mental health, or perhaps to shed a few…! Again…a mix of the above? For me, it is an opportunity, as ever, to connect with my direct experience, present to what is going on outside by tuning into different bodily senses. I may hear the birdsong, see the sunshine through the trees, feel the wind on my face and smell the muckspreading – well, I do live in the country!
This poem gives, I hope, a sense of tuning in to direct experience…
In the Counselling Room: Deeply Heard, Safely Held
The Counselling Room: Deeply Heard, Safely Held
It can be helpful, when choosing a counsellor, to get some sort of feel for how they work. I work in an integrative way, a style that incorporates different approaches that enable me to adapt to the needs of each individual client. One such approach sees each individual as having many different “parts”, or “aspects” of the Self and works with you in meeting, hearing, celebrating and embracing or re-integrating each of those different parts. With this way of working, the saying goes that “there are no bad parts”.
This poem gives, I hope, a sense of how this might feel…
In the Counselling Room: Wounded Heart
The Counselling Room: Wounded Heart
What is it that prompts us to go for counselling? For some we may be aware of discomfort, confusion or difficulties in some way that is obvious. For others of us, there may be something more subtle, we may find behaviours emerging – a self-medication of sorts.
We may just be aware of difficulties when we sit down, or slow down – a sort of discomfort, or even emotional pain – and we do our best to avoid it! Both in the counselling room and “on the cushion”, that pain is, of course, the “door” to held injuries, misunderstandings, illusions and eventually, through supported exploration, our own liberation.
Practise mindful walking indoors, in a small room, or take it outdoors
Walking is part of daily life for most of us. Whether inside or out, we are usually walking in order to get somewhere: a goal-based journey. Quite often, while walking, be it to another room, a walk to the shops or a walk outdoors for pleasure, our minds usually take a walk too, into the world of thoughts. Before we know it, our awareness has shifted from ourselves, our bodies and our surroundings and we become lost in thought.
What’s it like to go for counselling?
When I hear from you for the first time, I always feel happy to that you have got in touch – and I think about how you’ve taken that first, perhaps nerve-wracking step towards feeling better – towards hope. My own experience tells me that you may not be feeling that conscious of there being hope, but you followed that impulse to move towards a better, lighter place. It may be that you’ve found it difficult to cope with your feelings or situation at the moment: perhaps you’ve battled on and on, or waited for months, perhaps years, hoping things will get better but they don’t and now you’re here, you’ve just contacted me.