Month: February 2024

Mindfulness for Menopause – how to manage the menopause mindfully

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Mindfulness for Menopause

How to manage the menopause mindfully

By – Helen Morris

 

 Unless you have been under a blanket media ban over the last couple of years, you will have started to hear the word menopause more often. It’s in advertising, it’s on our TVs (thank you Davina McCall), it’s got its own month and day (October and 18th October). There is plenty of information on this online, here are some useful websites if you want to know more about what it is, who it affects, what symptoms there may be and why it’s important:

https://www.menopausematters.co.uk/ – Menopause Matters

https://thebms.org.uk/  – The British Menopause Society

https://www.newsonhealth.co.uk/ – Newson Health Menopause & Wellbeing Centre (Blanace app)

But I want to talk about how mindfulness helped me come to terms with MY menopause experience. My menopause journey started abruptly at age 33 following surgery for endometriosis, removing my womb and ovaries. I experienced many of the symptoms listed on any of the above websites and was unable to take HRT (too many difficult and debilitating side effects) so was left with “non medical” interventions.

My major issues were with anxiety, aphasia (losing words), lacking confidence, focus and concentration, fatigue, headaches and migraines. With little help and medical support, I began to investigate ‘alternative therapies’ and found mindfulness signposted as a way of managing anxiety.

My menopause journey was well underway by this time, I had left a senior role in a corporate IT, become self employed as a way of relieving my workload and stress, and was frankly struggling to cope with anything approaching a ‘normal’ life. The attitudes of mindfulness as described by Jon Kabat-Zinn were a revelation to me, and working on those principles meant that I was able to start managing my menopause ‘madness’.

Non judgement – giving myself a break as I discovered that none of the symptoms were ‘my fault’. Giving my GP a break as I realised she simply had never had any training or education on how to manage menopause without HRT.

Acceptance – recognising that this was something that was going to be with me for the rest of my life, and that I could manage it successfully if I made some changes.

Patience – adapting to a slower pace of life, managing my stress by doing fewer things, but doing them better. Allowing the lifestyle changes I was making to take effect, over time.

Trust – in my own perceptions of what my body required. Listening to my own needs and trusting in my own research.

Beginner’s mind – this was crucial for my health and mental wellbeing. I had to remain curious and open minded about my experiences, and treat each new symptom as opportunity to learn more about my body and its needs.

Non-striving and letting go – stopping myself trying to be someone I could no longer be, and abandoning of all of my preconceptions about menopause.

I could not have coped with the changes I had to make in my life without mindfulness to help me accept them and embed them through regular practice.

 

About the author

Helen Morris is a Mindfulness Teacher and Menopause Coach based in France. She is available online but will travel 

W: https://theawaremind.org

E: helen@theawaremind.org

M: +44 (0) 7962 068 056

Written for The Breathing Space Journal Winter edition 2024

Find out more at www.mindfulnessnow.org.uk

 

Celebrating Mindfulness Teachers across the UK – Mindfulness Now Celebration Day 2024 – Annual Conference in Birmingham

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A celebration of mindfulness teachers across the UK

Celebrating our Mindfulness Now Family

” This special day will be a chance to catch up with fellow graduates and tutors and to network with other members of our growing community. Promising to be a day of supportive mindful practice, the sharing of experiences, networking and learning something new.”

Time to celebrate the many achievements of our amazing Mindfulness Now graduates. This year is also a particularly special one as it marks the 10 year anniversary of our training school!

We are immensely proud of our community and would like to invite you to come and celebrate with us on Sunday 28th April 2024 at the home of Mindfulness Now, the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham.

We have 8 great workshops planned for the day…

Nick Cooke Compassion Focused Coaching
Clare Harris Embodied Confidence: Navigating the Spotlight Mindfully
Aston Colley Mindfulness Yoga
Kate Angell Tai Chi Chih – Joy through Movement
Léo Taylor Authoring meditations from our own stories and experiences
Nikki Street Experiential Virtual Reality
Amanda Carter-Blackford Mindful Journalling
Dr. Nikki Chatfield Mindfulness for Diabetes and Cardiovascular Health

This special day will be a chance to catch up with fellow graduates and tutors and to network with other members of our growing community. Promising to be a day of supportive mindful practice, the sharing of experiences, networking and learning something new.
In further celebration of our 10 year anniversary, we are also pleased to announce the launch of the Mindfulness Now Teachers Bursary Fund. Any profit made from this special day will be added to this fund. Initially, we will be supporting the training of mindfulness teachers within small community based projects/ organisations.

As usual there are a limited number of tickets available for this day. Please book your tickets now to avoid any disappointment!

Book Now

£49 pp (Each ticket price includes a vegan packed lunch and refreshments.

Need to stay over?…
For those of you who may be travelling and need to stay over in Birmingham, Edgbaston Park Hotel has offered us a 15% discount for any of our graduates staying the nights of 27th or 28th April 2024 using the promo code MAC24. The code will be valid until 16th March 2024 on the flexible rate.

For further information, please explore booking.com or airbnb.co.uk for other good and more affordable accommodation options.

A personal Journey – Training to become a mindfulness teacher

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My personal mindfulness teacher training journey and becoming a mindfulness teacher.

My Story

 Kirsty shares her own personal journey into holistic healing

“It took time for me to come to terms with my need to leave the NHS, but once the decision was made, I knew the shackles were off in terms of limiting my scope to only cover nourishment of the body. I could learn to teach others how to also nourish their minds.”

 By – Kirsty Dobson

As a dietitian for 23 years, I was NHS ward-trained in the traditional hierarchical medical model of managing ill health. I’ve helped people with a myriad of health challenges, teaching them to self-manage their chronic illnesses, through a range of evidence-based dietary and lifestyle approaches. I enjoy supporting patients with complex digestive complaints so the irrefutable link between brain and gut meant that I fought for longer duration appointments to gain the full picture of overall health and wellbeing, previous medical or drug history, their work and family life, and degree of social support. The stark revelation that so many sufferers of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) also had diagnoses of Anxiety or Depression and were frequently on anti-depressants, and yet were often still symptomatic, led me to research evidence of alternative ways to support wellbeing. On hearing that mindfulness could be valuable in IBS, I experimented myself by using Headspace and discovered after just 2-3 weeks of ten minutes daily my sleep quality improved, I felt more in control at work with greater clarity of thought and in spoken word. Likewise, my clients who embraced mindfulness achieved greater gut symptom control and weathered the storm of life without triggering relapse. Mindfulness improved confidence in managing their own chronic condition. The diagnosis was no longer impacting their quality of life.

Then covid hit. The demands placed upon me in my role leading an acute team of, frankly terrified, acute dietitians through a pandemic when the explosion in intensive care bed numbers required me to return to a frontline clinical role alongside leadership responsibilities, meant I totally abandoned self-care practices and just got on with the job at hand. Unsurprisingly 18 months in I had my own mental health breakdown. I had a period of sick leave and a 6-month spell on anti-depressants during which time I re-discovered the healing power of mindfulness. Daily meditation, positive intelligence practices and cultivating compassion enabled me to properly challenge self-harming automatic thoughts and negative behaviours. It has led to a deep emotional healing, somewhat akin to a ‘spring clean’ of the considerable detritus which had accumulated during the first four decades of my life.

It took time for me to come to terms with my need to leave the NHS, but once the decision was made, I knew the shackles were off in terms of limiting my scope to only cover nourishment of the body. I could learn to teach others how to also nourish their minds. The therapy-based, secular nature of the Mindfulness Now course and the thought of a week immersed mindfully in beautiful Devon without the role of boss, wife or mother was decision made. I felt so grateful to experience the magic of Tawstock Court as the summer turned into autumn this year with Nick and Maddy expertly guiding us through the program. Through daily practices we grew and bonded together in our teaching cohort. Integrating mindfulness as a tool alongside dietary / lifestyle measures and targeted supplementation seems to me to be a much more powerful and holistic approach to long-lasting healing than I was able to previously offer patients in my old role so I cannot wait to share it with the world!

 

About the author –

Kirsty Dobson is a holistic brain health & wellbeing educator/coach based in Brighton www.clarity-and.com / kirsty@clarity-and.com / https://www.instagram.com/clarity_and/

Article written for The Breathing Space Journal Winter 2024

 

 

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Training – ACT for Anxiety – FULLY BOOKED

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By Nick Cooke

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) certified professional training with a key focus on assisting those with anxiety

"… irrespective of the number of symptoms we have, or how serious those are, provided that we respond to them in a mindful way we will feel happier and better able to function. Unwanted symptoms do ‘miraculously’ tend to reduce, even though this is not the primary aim!"

It was Sigmund Freud who famously described anxiety as ‘fear spread thinly. What a lot of sense this continues to make in our present day and age. However, Freud’s belief about the causes of anxiety and his method of treatment varies widely from present day understanding and treatment. Freud’s work was predicated on theories of how sufferers would have ‘repressed’ (hidden from conscious awareness) the causes of symptoms, including anxiety, and that repressed memories connected to the originating causes would be released and brought to conscious awareness, understanding and release through his famous ‘talking cure’, psychoanalysis. We discuss this approach in our Mindfulness Based Clinical Hypnosis (MBCH) training. www.mbch.org.uk

Scientific evidence since the 1980s has shown that many talking therapies including clinical hypnosis, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and mindfulness-based therapies, can be effective in dealing with the symptoms of anxiety. One of the most successful approaches is ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), which is pronounced as the word ‘act’ for good reason. It’s about taking action. It was developed in the USA by psychologist Steve Hayes, along with his colleagues Kelly Wilson and Kirk Strosahl. The original body of work has been further developed and expanded by others, including Dr Russ Harris who has authored a number of well-respected books including the self-help guide ‘The Happiness Trap’.

Steve Hayes, describes ACT as an ‘oddly counterintuitive model of work’. It can be engaging and playful and teaches us skills to handle unwanted and painful thoughts and feelings in a way in which they have far less significance or negative affect. This is where mindfulness skills are brought into play. It also takes the view that, irrespective of the number of symptoms we have, or how serious those are, provided that we respond to them in a mindful way we will feel happier and better able to function. Unwanted symptoms do ‘miraculously’ tend to reduce, even though this is not the primary aim!

ACT has been scientifically researched and proven to be effective in helping people with a wide range of issues including: anxiety, depression and chronic pain. Even those with severe psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia have gained remarkable benefit. It has also produced similarly high levels of success with some of the less serious conditions which we may encounter in our day-to-day work, such as smoking cessation, weight reduction and reducing stress. The high level of supporting scientific evidence has ensured that ACT has grown in popularity as a form of psychological treatment around the world.

30 years in the making

It’s taken a while to get there. The original development of ACT was around 30 years ago and yet it was not until nearer to 10 years ago when it began to find its current high level of popularity. There are a number of reasons for this delayed enthusiasm:

• 30 years ago ACT seemed to fly in the face of conventional psychological theory in the sense that most approaches aimed to reduce unwanted symptoms. ACT takes a very different approach and one that is much more focussed on the idea that quality of life is primarily dependent upon mindful, values-guided action
• ACT is a mindfulness based intervention and 30 years ago these were in their infancy and seen as a little way out!
• The original writings on ACT were peer reviewed as being ‘overly complex’. Heavy on rather complicated theory but light on practicalities

The ACT acronym

ACT is sometimes seen as a rather large model but the real beauty of it is the way that it can be simplified and easily explainable to clients. I favour this very simple acronym which sums it up neatly.

A = Accept your thoughts and feelings and be present.

C = Choose a valued direction

D = Take action!

Key themes of ACT include developing psychological flexibility, encouraging self-awareness and examining beliefs and values. Here we encourage our clients, rather like we would in a coaching exercise, to explore their innermost beliefs and values. What would they live and die for? What would they say is their life purpose? Translating this into a behavioural context, what qualities of ongoing action matter? How do clients want to behave on an ongoing basis?

Clients are taught how to ‘defuse’, or separate from their unwanted thoughts, emotions and mental pictures. They learn how to observe them more passively or step back and view them from a distance, rather like clouds passing by in the sky. ACT employs a number of different styles of metaphor, which are often a great way of teaching clients in an indirect and more acceptable manner.

Nick Cooke is presenting a one-day CPD training on ACT for Anxiety on Saturday 24th May 2024. Being presented in a live, interactive format on Zoom, timings are 10.00 AM to 5.00 PM. The fee is £130 to NCH members and £160 to non-members. Places are strictly limited so please book early by contacting Rachel at Mindfulness Now (CEC) on 0121 444 1110 or emailing info@mindfulnessnow.org.uk