All videos in this 4 part series are accessible, inclusive mindfulness experiences.
I use eye, hand, gentle body movement, breath, and other tools and hacks to settle the nervous system enough, so as to come into presence.
Often we can find mindfulness meditation difficult to access, it might feel triggering, overwhelming, confusing, or just impossible to settle into on any meaningful way. If our nervous system is over or under reactive to our external and internal environments, due to trauma, anxiety, high stress, neurodivergence we may find traditional mindfulness practices like breath or body scans impossible to access.
I noticed this both in myself and in clients. So I have worked to create mindful practices that use neuroscience informed activities to bring you into a calmer state before we even being the noticing and compassion building work of mindfulness meditation.
My experience as a psychotherapist, working with somatic movement and breathwork, as well as the Neurobiology of stress, distress and trauma informs my work.
Workshop 1: Accessible mindfulness – EYES
Eye movement is well known to effect and alter our brain, nervous system and therefore our emotional state. I offer options and information about eye movement that I hope will illuminate and positively elevate your mindfulness practice.
Workshop 2: Accessible mindfulness – HANDS
The brain will follow what the hands do via our eyes. This piece of neurobiological knowledge means we can begin to learn hand movements and explore hand sensation to enable mindful states with greater ease.
Workshop 3: Accessible mindfulness – BREATH
Our breathing depth and pattern is well know to be like a remote control to our brains, offering data to the nervous system, asking it to be calm, present and settled. State responsive breathwork, where how you feel leads what you do us a wonderful skill to learn.
Yogic, pranayama and other somatic approaches informs my work, neuroscience also guides how I teach breathwork. We will do timed Oojai, movement and somatic informed breathing as well as offering ideas for how to manage when distressed or anxious.
Workshop 4: Accessible mindfulness – BODY
Exploring many different gentle movements, we will still use eye and hand movement, adding in other somatic movement, informed by yoga, qi gong, feldenkrais and other therapeutic movement for wellbeing.
Using subtle whole body explorations we will come into calm, compassionate states, being mindful that the body can hold much that feels overwhelming or difficult to be with, introducing gentle compassion and kindness we can begin to be alongside our pains and struggles in small ways, hopefully over time developing greater skill and ease in our ability to be warmly, manageably and gently supportive to ourselves and our experiences.
I want to make the wonderful tool that is Mindfulness – Developing our capacity to practice responding over reacting, being less reactive to our inner and outer lives, developing greater capacity to stay in the here and now, manage the pains and stresses of life, with more compassion and equanimity, more inclusive. I want to make it more available and more accessible, both in its content and the way it’s taught, as well as by making much as possible free and low cost to access. I work in a trauma informed, trauma sensitive, neurodiverse aware, mental health aware way.
You can access the entire playlist also directly on Youtube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLk6XrlGn6CEslWRmRaLoYnegoYWvlrFwH