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Silent Retreat - Before

Tomorrow I will be attending my first ever silent retreat and quite frankly it is causing me a huge amount of anxiety. I have practiced mindful meditation almost every day for the past four years and still I can’t quiet my mind over my feelings of worry about tomorrow. I say this to show that even as a generally mindful person I still suffer from anxiety over some things. I believe the main reason for this is that my anxiety is very deep routed. Some of you may know my story but for those that don’t 6 years ago I had one of my vocal chords removed. Ignoring the trauma of the many surgeries that resulted from this and a year spent in and out of hospital my main issue is that I couldn’t speak for six weeks and as I learnt to talk again I could only manage a very quiet whisper. I talked with this whisper for 2 years. For those 2 years I barely used the telephone as many people couldn’t hear me and those that could either claimed there was a problem with the line or assumed that I must b...
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Sleep - How much and how to get it

The NHS website recommends that an adult of working age needs between 7 and 9 hours sleep a night and yet one in three of us don’t get enough sleep. Sleep is hugely important to help the body rebuild and reset itself and during this time when we are all suffering from the effects of the pandemic it could be argued that it is more important than ever to get enough sleep so that our minds can settle and reset themselves and to help our mental health. Mindfulness can help you to go to sleep, stay asleep and if you do wake in the middle of the night to get back to sleep, but before I go into how it can help, here are a few other tips that will set you up for a good nights sleep. Getting your mind and your body ready for bed Switch off electrical devises well before bed. Some research say two hours but it seems sensible to turn devices off at least 30 minutes before bed. The blue light that emits from screens fools the body into thinking it is the middle of the day and so it doesn’t ...
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Step small. Achieve big.

Once again it is that time of year where we are looking towards a new year and new beginnings. The time to make resolutions as to how we are going to be better next year. Fitter, stronger, slimmer, cleverer. All things we want to be but have never quite got round to doing. This year will be different but you’re probably getting bored of hearing that by now. Currently I am in tier 4 so there won’t be any gyms to join or any community college classes to look forward to and the vaccine is going to take a while to role out. As at the date of writing this the news was saying 22 million people will be vaccinated by April. As there are over 65 million people in this country that can only mean we won’t be returning to anything looking like normal until after Easter at the earliest. So yet again its time to think about what we can do in the short term and what we can do using those resources that are close at hand. As I am sure you will have read setting large goals often leads to people...
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Meditation - The beginning and some science

  Once you start to experience mindfulness you soon discover there are hundreds of books that will explain to you what it is and how to do it. One thing they will all agree on is the start point and so here it is. Mindfulness has its origins in Buddhism, but it is a secular practice and is taught without any religious connotations. Mindfulness is the 7 th step of the Noble Eightfold path taught by the Buddha. Jon Kabat-Zinn is considered the father of mindfulness in the west. When he attended a retreat led by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, he realised that there was a use for mindfulness in the treatment of chronic medical conditions. In 1979 Jon Kabat-Zinn adapted Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings into an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction course (MBSR) which he then developed over the next ten years at the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre. The MBSR course was set up because Jon Kabat-Zinn felt that the patients he was seeing who suffered fr...
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Location: Romney Marsh TN29, UK
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