Mindfulness for Stress Taster

Mindfulness for Stress Taster

Friday 25th September 2015, 18:00-20:00

Free

The free Mindfulness for Stress Taster session will give you an insight into the full eight week course.

We can’t always choose what happens to us or how other people behave, but we can learn to have more choice in how we respond to life’s events.

Mindfulness means deliberately attending to and becoming more aware of our experience: of our thoughts, feelings and body sensations. This allows us to clearly perceive thoughts, physical sensations, emotions and events at the moment they occur without reacting in an automatic or habitual way.

By developing a new relationship with the conditions we find ourselves in we begin to respond creatively. Experiences don’t overwhelm us and we can remain steady through life’s ups and downs. Mindfulness isn’t a cool and detached awareness though – it’s warm, gentle, and kind. Towards the end of the course we’ll introduce a kindness meditation, which will help you to develop this aspect of mindfulness further. Like mindfulness, kindness has been proven to reduce levels of stress.

During the course we will be engaging in various activities to foster mindfulness and kindness. These include formal meditation practices, as well as small things we can do in the midst of our daily lives, such as doing a routine task mindfully, taking a break, slowing down a little. In particular we’ll be using the body sensations and the breath to help develop awareness. The aim of meditation is not to prevent the mind wandering off – which it will do, repeatedly – but to get into the habit of learning to check in with our experience so we have choices in how we respond.

The formal meditation aspect of the course is focused practice at learning to check in, and the informal mindful activities are ways to extend that learning into our daily lives. We need both. During the course you are encouraged to try out all the different practices fully, so that at the end of the course you can decide which practices work best for you.

Read more about the course content here,
http://www.breathworks-mindfulness.org.uk/mindfulness-for-stress/course-overview#1-1-read-more

Who can benefit?

The “Mindfulness for Stress” course is for anyone dealing with the sort of “everyday” stress that often comes with modern life. If you are suffering from depression or anxiety please see the FAQs page for further advice on whether this course might be helpful for you.

Home Practice

Home practice is a very important part of the course. The benefits of Mindfulness cannot be felt without regular daily practice and so during the course you will be asked to use the CDs or Mp3s of guided mindfulness meditation at home for 10 to 20 minutes twice a day every day.

By the end of the course you will have a wide range of practices, both formal meditations and informal everyday mindful activities, built into your daily life to help sustain your wellbeing and stress resilience. One of the key benefits of taking an 8-week course is to get the help, support and motivation necessary to make the daily commitment to both types of practice that can make such a difference in the long-term.

To find out more or to book a place, go to the norwichmindfulness page.