Meditation and Mindfulness

My Meditation and Mindfulness sessions are $90. The consultation includes a remedy-mix and HST.

Discover my journey with Meditation and Mindfulness and how I can help you below.

My meditation story.

Over the course of my Reiki training, I participated in lots of meditation and it became an important part of the Reiki courses that I went on to develop for my own students, as a Reiki Master Teacher.

My Reiki self-healing always felt like meditation which meant that I found myself doing pretty much daily-meditation by the time I completed my Reiki training in 2009.

Through meditating regularly, I noticed huge personal benefits, especially my increased-awareness and my ability to notice myself having an emotional reaction. I developed the ability to respond to a situation rather than having a knee-jerk reaction to it and that’s a good feeling.

There have been periods, over the last decade, when I have dropped my daily meditation, usually at times when I needed it the most but was telling myself that I was too busy. It’s a common story within the spiritual community but I am happy to report that the length of time away from meditation gets shorter and shorter…until you get the message that ‘too busy’ equals ‘meditate more’

I meditate daily, before the rest of the house awakens as it helps to set my intention to have a great day

Teaching meditation

As with anything that helps me, I wanted to share the benefits of meditation with others and I began running a weekly meditation class through the Edinburgh adult-education program.

In planning the course, I felt that I wanted to give students something helpful to take away with them each week to practice, rather than them simply experiencing a relaxing-hour on a Sunday morning.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m in no way bashing the benefits of a relaxation-hour but from experience, that relaxation can disappear in the blink of an eye when you are cut-off by another driver on the way home and it may not reappear till the next relaxation-class.

Students seemed to like their mindfulness-homework and gave great feedback so I continued to focus the course on mindfulness through variations of it. The course was popular enough to warrant adding a second class and the students loved feeling the benefits as much as I loved teaching about them.

My classes were taken over by my friend Audrey and she has made them her own and expanded them across Edinburgh.

Indulging a little piece of trivia, Audrey and I trained in Reiki together and had many giggles when we did treatments for each other. She is also in the weekly meditation group that I used to be a part of where the nine of us took turns in leading meditation. I don’t get nostalgic but there is a little space inside me where the love and support of the “Tuesday meditation group” used to be.

For those of you who live in South East Scotland, check out Audreys website. She may be just who you are looking for.

I trained to become a Connected Kids tutor because I want the benefits of mindfulness and relaxation to be available for our young people and I was already working with youngsters using mindfulness.

From tiny humans to teenagers, I believe that meditation, in its various forms, can help all youngsters to better navigate the stresses in their lives.

I ran mindfulness/meditation classes for teenagers (and their teachers) in my kids’ high-school which received great feedback including that it helped with exam-stress, insomnia and concentration. How great is that? Not that I did it but that they got great results.

I was also happy to lead the meditations for senior students, in an eight-week pilot-project to introduce meditation into Scottish High Schools in 2015, through the Mindful Enterprise which is part of the wonderful Initiative that is Mindful Talent. I have no doubt that these guys will work tirelessly to secure funding to help Scottish schools embrace meditation as a part of their curriculum.

Meditation made simple.

Mindfulness is a form of Meditation but it is also one of the many benefits of doing regular meditation. Mindfulness means simply to be aware of or to notice what is going on in that one moment.

I like to think of it like this. Now is the Present = a Gift because the present is a gift.

Your breathing is the perfect focus for accepting the gift that is the present.

Confused?

Simply put, you cannot take a breath in the past and you cannot take a breath for the future so by bringing your awareness to your breathing you notice what is happening when you breath

That is mindfulness.

The great news about using the awareness of your breathing to practice mindfulness is that your breath is always there, it’s always in the present moment, it’s free and nobody needs to even know that you are meditating because you can focus on your breath with your eyes open, whilst standing up…or walking…or eating…or washing the dishes…

The science has caught up to what meditators have known for thousands of years so those of you who need proof in your life, there’s a whole mountain of research now that provides proof that we can change the shape and size of our brains to our benefit. If you use the phrase “I can’t change, I have always been a worrier” or a variation of that, it is simply untrue. You can choose to change the way that you think and mindfulness meditation is one way that you can do that.

I am not going to go into the science or put links in here…yet but if you go into the link for teaching children meditation, Lorraine Murray is a magnificent source of knowledge on the science behind the benefits.

Here’s what I know for sure

You can only think one thought at a time and when you first pause, to try meditation, you may complain that it makes your mind busier. What is happening though, is that you are paying attention to the thoughts that are coming into your mind, often back-to-back and at great speed so it feels like your mind just got busier. But it didn’t.

If I had to pick one thing for you to embrace when meditating, I’d pick acceptance.

Acceptance of whatever experience you have during your meditation.

Try to practice without expectation because every single time you meditate, it will be different.

My biggest giggle came when I found myself animatedly practicing a lecture whilst in meditation. And I mean that my eyes were wide-open and my arms were flapping around as they do when I teach…and then I noticed what I was doing, shook my head and returned my focus to my breath with a big grin on. How could I have been practicing a lecture in the middle of a meditation? Very simply put, the thought of the lecture must have entered my mind and I got pulled into it, letting it grow arms and legs until I had lost all awareness of the fact that I was supposed to be meditating. I wish that I could say that I was a beginner at the time…but that would be a lie.