Mindfulness at Christmas

Why you should practice mindfulness at Christmas

What is Mindfulness?  Let’s start with the definition of mindfulness that I work with: “Knowing what is happening, when it is happening and without preference.” 

Practicing mindfulness leads us into a state of being, as opposed to doing.  It involves a method – the “knowing what is happening, when it is happening” part – and an attitude – the “…without preference” part. 

Anyone who has sat in silence, for longer than five minutes, to pay attention on purpose to what is going on in the mind, might have an inkling that it can often be far less than straightforward!  Before we know it, we have disappeared down a rabbit-hole of To-Do lists; re-runs of events we wish had happened differently; things or people it is utterly imperative that we have/do in our life and well, perhaps you know just how the rest goes. 

Before long, we find ourselves feeling as though we have been tumbled in one of those old chemistry set stone-tumblers, are feeling well and truly “beaten up”, have disappeared down a spiral into “not-so-Wonderland” feeling as though we have shrunk to a size far smaller than our usual self.  So, this is “situation normal” for when we pay attention to what happens in our minds for longer than 5mins – it’s all totally ok, although it might not feel like it. 

If we are going to manage to willingly stay put beyond the five minute mark, it helps to work with the part of us that tends to end up “running amok” in there, while we are doing our best to maintain our “buddha-like” position on the cushion. 

Here is where the “…without preference” part comes in: we learn to understand and gradually work with, or “train”, the part of us that either likes or dislikes what is happening in our experience, at the moment it is happening. 

In this way, over time, we learn to approach what’s here with an attitude of accepting and allowing.  As you might now be thinking, this can take time – some would say a lifetime, but research has found that the learning of the method and attitude tends to take an optimal time of 8-10weeks.   This is about the time it takes for the laying down of new neural pathways, underpinning new habits – and here we are talking about the habit of practicing “knowing what is happening, when it is happening, without preference”!

Why is practicing mindfulness particularly important throughout the Christmas season? 
Christmas may be a time of many neatly or not-so-neatly wrapped packages: and the festive season, itself a combination of end-of-year To-Dos; celebrations with many cultural overlays; or more personal emotional overlays like loneliness and grief; and seasonal fluctuations affecting the daily rythmns of those of us in the Northern Hemisphere – the season of “Ho Ho Ho!” can often seem like one enormous, disastrously-wrapped package, ready to defeat the most organised, “got-it-together” and seasonally-adjusted of us – but hey, Dear Reader, you already know that!

If we add the mind’s stone-tumbler tendencies into this not-so-small-and-neat package, perhaps even the calmest of us can find the Christmas period tricky to get through.  There may not be time to complete an 8wk course before Christmas, but here are some mindfulness-based techniques you can use to help you get through Yuletide:

No.1: Just breathe!  I’m aware how cliché that may sound, but our breathing offers a direct route to the parts of our nervous system that either energise us or calm us, so we can reconnect with ourselves and others.  The trick is to become aware of our breath and to regulate it, or make the in-breaths the same in length as the out-breaths.  You may already be aware, there are many and diverse breathing techniques, serving just as many purposes: in mindfulness practice, we start with regulating the breath and just that alone, can help us regain a sense of balance and calm.  Here’s how to do it:

  • On your next in-breath, slowly inhale to a count of 3 or 4
  • On your next out-breath, slowly exhale to the same count
  • Breathe in this way for a about a minute, or more if you have longer
  • As you continue in this way, expand your awareness to include the body, nothing fancy, just noticing you’re inhabiting one! 
  • After a short while, allow your attention to come to rest gently on the outbreath, as if it’s a stepping stone…
  • Noticing after a few outbreaths, how the body lets go a little as it breathes out…
  • Just gently, letting the mind drop into the body as it breathes out, feeling into the points where the body makes contact with the surface it’s resting on.
  • Bring that re-embodied breathing into the next part of your day.

Link to guided practice

No.2 – Anchoring Touch:

This moment is a gift, that’s why they call it the present!  Direct experience through the 5 senses  brings us into the present and the quickest can be touch – something we can feel with hands/fingertips.  We can do this anytime or place, we can make it discreet as well, so you don’t end up having to explain what you’re doing.  Try it when you’re: washing up; decorating the tree; peeling potatoes; wrapping presents – use the sense of touch.  For Anchoring Touch, I find working through structure, texture and temperature a great way to take myself through the technique:

  • Structure: As you move your hand over it – does it feel big or small?  Does it feel hard or soft?
  • Texture: Is it rough or smooth?  If it’s rough – are there patterns you can feel? Are there raised lines, or bobbles etc?  If it’s smooth – does it feel matt, silk or glossy smooth?
  • Temperature: Does it feel cold, cool, warm or hot to the touch? Etc.
  • Now: notice whether you feel back in the present…
  • Bring this re-embodied awareness into the next part of your day.  Repeat as necessary!

Link to guided practice

No.3 – Mindful Walking – a trip upstairs will never be the same again!

  • Find a space, a room in your house will do – and choose a walking lane, where you can walk 4 paces in one direction or another.
  • Notice you are inhabiting a body, gently taking your attention through head, shoulders, torso, legs and feet.  Noticing the body breathing itself – you can just rest with the breathing for a moment if you like.
  • Now decide to take a few paces along your walking lane: with no goal in mind, just enjoy the sensations of moving.  What does the movement feel like?  Noticing the rolling of the body as you shift your weight from one foot to the other?  Notice how the shoulders are feeling – check in with the breathing – just give yourself this moment to re-source.
  • Bring this re-embodied awareness into the next part of your day.

Link to guided practice

No.4 – Go Outside!

Just take five or ten mins outside: breathe in the air, look around, notice what you can see and hear – we are more aware these days of the benefits of being in nature.  You can also do any of the above practices outside and double the benefits.

No.5: Don’t sweat it!

Give yourself a break, you don’t need to Be Perfect – Good Enough is plenty good enough, so don’t sweat it, just breathe through it!

So, why not experiment with these tools and tips and – as the song goes – have yourself a very mindful Christmas now! For more information on mindfulness courses and events click here.

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.  From my former background working in Shiatsu and traditional medicine, I have long been interested in how our thoughts and emotions reverberate throughout our musculo-skeletal and other bodily systems, lodging within them, as if a carbon copy of the original experience.

In this poem, A Place to Roost I talk of such “not belonging” and how it plays out in the body.  It talks of how our memories, thoughts, feelings and beliefs in general, but also particularly when we have experienced trauma, are stored within the body and how, over time, within a trauma-aware approach, we can safely reconnect with and come to terms with them.  It talks of how, at some point, from somewhere deep within the body, lost and buried feelings start their journey to the surface, where we might sense them, acknowledge and then hear them, reconnecting with the fuller part of our own story. 

A Place to Roost:
Life on the wing, blown here and there
Where’er the wind might take you
No place to roost, or rest, like you belong

Sunrise, sunset, each new day finds you feeling
Unsafe, hurt, angry and unloved
Alone and unprotected, your whole life long

No rest was there, for you here, in Mother,
No place to anchor, root or make your home
This not belonging, a Daughter of the unloved, 
the one outside the nest, was left to roam

This not belonging, takes shape within the body
Sinews taught, “Be taut at my behest!”
A tautness, was learned over and again over, to echo down the years
No place to rest, to roost or simply to call home

Lost and buried, this not belonging – daughter of the unloved, unsafe, not wanted feelings,
Sinews holding tight on taut alert
How, then, can it feel safe to root, to roost at home within the body!
To flee, and fly at sunset became preferred

I hear at dusk the distant rook-rook-cawing
Of flocking hoards, of roosting rooks in flight,
Day’s end of light, together, all enjoying
These feelings on safe branches now alight

This Unbelonging Daughter, now her parent,
To rest within these feelings now she lands
By laying on of deeply hearing hands, her own belonging
From hearing her own longing she understands
The echoes through the years now unfolding
Tautness gradually learning to release
The deepest of her fears, now her guides, are now bestowing
Her own safe space, a place to root beneath her tears,

So deep within does body’s wisdom echo
The rooks, her feelings, make their home, their nest
And in the light of heart’s warm hearth at sunset
And finally, to roost, to root, to anchor….yes, to rest.

By Belinda Gammon.

Visit my Home page for more information about counselling and how to contact me

In the Counselling Room: Deeply heard, safely held

In 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…

Deeply Heard, Safely Held
In the room, I listen deeply, 
Opening to what is said
Turning, with gentle curiosity
to what lies unsaid.
A breath, held, gasped - rasping
breath for freedom leaping.
Movements jolting freed,
mind's tension...tight clasp released.

Oh, so gentle, so safe and warm the embrace that holds 
this space for all those parts
of you, unsure at first, then surely
quietly assembling for the telling
of love's hurt, banishments too many to remember,
of loving moments, to few to light the cold and cavernous dark
Until now...

For, in the room, I listen, for
different voices, tones
Rythm, pitch and timbre, 
all, when they arrive, 
are heard, deeply and safely held.

Parts that, long unfelt or heard, sight unseen,
have rumbled in the dark.
Words, turns of phrase,
cards calling from different parts
Felt senses, lumps, colours, tones,
no words needed,
till words they come
deeply heard and safely held

Til when, the part that until now
entombed within the cells
it starts to speak its name, is
deeply heard, safely held.