A New Year, A New More Mindful You?

As we look to begin a new year, it is common for us to take stock, to reflect on our achievements during the year just past and to start to plan for the new year. You may have decided that you need to take more exercise, to lose a little weight, or to train for a better job, but how many of us consider the possibility of actively improving our emotional fitness. If you have been becoming more stressed, or if your relationships are not as harmonious as you would like, or if you are burdened with low self-esteem or doubts that are holding you back.

These are often symptoms that you have an internalised self-critic at work and signs that you need to take care of your emotional wellbeing and develop a more compassionate self. Self compassion is the very opposite of self pity in that it encourages you to develop a caring but wiser approach to managing difficult emotions so that rather than using self-sabotaging behaviours such as overeating to cope you take an active but kind interest in your own emotional wellbeing. You can improve your fitness through exercise and diet, you can improve your intellect through education and skills training but to improve your emotional wellbeing you need something quite different. That something may well be mindfulness training.

In February, we are holding our next Stress Management And Relaxation Techniques (SMART) programme at the Norwich Wellbeing Centre, a 6 week course that teaches you to create a more positive relationship with yourself. Using mindfulness, meditation and visualisation it connects your emotional wellbeing with your real-world existence where family and work responsibilities and pressures are ever present. You will learn how anxiety is just as much a physical as an emotional condition and how to create a more harmonious mind-body connection. You will explore your own relationship with anxiety and how anxiety can represent a low-level nagging fear, or sometimes terror, which can sometimes give rise to outbursts of anger.

You will learn how to treat yourself with compassion and to extend your feelings of compassion to those you love. In this way you will learn to treat yourself more kindly but without destructive self-pity.

The wide adoption of mindfulness for emotional wellbeing stems from the power that mindfulness has in teaching us to live in the present; to learn to adopt “being mode” rather than “doing mode”. In western culture we tend to default to living in doing mode in which we are consumed by the need to plan, to achieve and to acquire. Often this leads a disconnect in what we become in order to live and what we would like to be which in turn leads to emotional distress and the symptoms of stress.

Mindfulness teaches us to enter being mode in which we live in the present. This does not suggest shrinking away from responsibilities or ambition but teaches us to enjoy this moment, which makes us more effective and can help us achieve while at the same time enjoying this moment and this task. We learn to be mindful by using breathing, meditation and visualisation, but this is only the start. Can we be mindful in a meeting or when with the family? Can we present in this moment time and in this place with these people? Can we look on ourselves and others with compassion?

For more information about the Stress Management And Relaxation course, please visits www.innercalm.co.uk. The course is limited to a maximum of 12 people. The normal cost of the course is £180 but there is a £30 discount for places booked by the 8^th January and a further £30 discount for liking the the Inner Calm Facebook page. At £120, perhaps a place on the course would make a fantastic Christmas gift.