Meditation

The warmer weather prompts me to repost this article by my good friend Masha Bennett

Having been a horticulturist in my “past life”, I would like to include some leafy and flowery thoughts to contribute to your happiness and well-being. It is well known that gardening can be therapeutic – but no tips on digging or pruning in this article, you may be pleased to know! Instead, I will try to share my ideas on how to get the most enjoyment and pleasure from your own (or someone else’s, for that matter) garden.

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Last week one of my clients had expressed an interest in mindfulness meditation for pain relief. She was looking for some general information. I offered to lend her my copy of Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat Zinn which is one of the earliest and most comprehensive books on the subject

Since I have quite an interest in this topic I did some searching on the internet for her and came up with this simple introduction to the subject from National Public Radio: Meditation a Hit for Pain Management

For a more in depth look at the field of mindfulness the excellent All In The Mind from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation had a 30 minute program devoted to ‘Dr Mindfulness’

If you are particularly interested in mindfulness in pain relief work you might like to listen to this podcast from the West of Scotland Pain Group (no, it’s not a masochism organisation) but a group of doctors based in the West of Scotland that sponsor talks of interest, record them and post them onto the internet for the benefit of their far flung colleagues. This particular talk takes a while to get going and includes a lot of uhms and errs but the content is interesting.

OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. What I’ve found is a Google Video talk by Jon Kabat-Zinn who’s work in using mindfulness meditation, and excellent book ‘Wherever you go, there you are’, I’ve mentioned before.

If you know something about mindfulness and his work then Jon Kabat-Zinn: Coming to Our Senses will not tell you anything you didn’t know. However it’s a very clear review of what mindfulness is and how it can help us in our stress filled lives.

You’ll need broadband and about an hour to watch it.

I’ve been experimenting this week with a little addition to the Quickie Covert EFT first suggested by Charlie Curtis. In his technique you massage the ‘gamut spot’ (the groove just behind the knuckles of the little and ring finger) while keeping your attention on a problem state or feeling. This works really nicely to reduce all sorts of negative emotions, as one of my clients reported:

But when I felt the palpitations coming on and the adrenaline kicking in I sat and [in plain sight] rubbed the point between the little and ring finger as suggested on your blog and it really helped. It didn’t clear all the nerves but helped to quash the panic reaction, I could actually feel the panic flowing away. Plus I was doing it in front of everyone without even a funny look.! That is so valuable.

Last week I was teaching an Introductory Meditation class, the meditation we’d been using is called a bodyscan meditation. In which you imagine that you are breathing in and out through different parts of your body in a sequence from your toes to your head. This style of meditation can be profoundly calming and is widely used in mindfulness based stress reduction courses. You can find a download of this bodyscan meditation here.

It occurred to me to blend a micro-EFT routine with a micro-meditation, by adding the idea of imagining breathing through the gamut spot whilst massaging it.

If you’d like to give it a go, here’s how:

• When anxiety, or some other negative emotion, arises gently massage the spot in the groove between the tendons behind the ring and middle finger. Keep your attention on the emotion as best you can.
• While massaging the gamut spot, imagine your breath entering and leaving the gamut spot and travelling up and down your arm to your chest. Don’t try to modify the way you breathe, just be aware of the inflow and outflow of the breath as if it was passing through the gamut spot you are massaging.

This process may take a little practice; holding the emotion, rubbing the gamut spot and imagining the breath entering and leaving through that spot.

Unfortunately (?) I’ve not had any stressful moments since I came up with this. However when I’ve tried just massaging the gamut spot and imaging my breathing passing through it, I’ve found that I’ve quickly entered a very peaceful and fully present state.

This is a very new technique, less than a week old, so I’m curious to know how well it works. Would you be willing to try this ‘hot off the press’ technique and let me know what happened in the comments to this post? I’ll be trying it out on myself and anyone else who’s interested, but I’d be delighted to hear about your experiences.

Meditation is an age old method of calming mind and body, it can help you develop calmness and tranquillity, reduce stress, and have a richer, deeper, experience of life.

If you’d like to learn to meditate, I am running a six week meditation and relaxation course at The Bodywork Centre in Hexham on Wednesday afternoons.

The course starts on Wednesday November 1^st, each session, lasting one hour, starts at 1pm and costs £5.00.

The course is secular and suitable for people of all faiths and none, you won’t need to sit in the lotus position, wear a robe or shave your head. You just need to be ready to relax and settle your mind.

To book a place on the course contact: The Bodywork Centre, Hexham on 01434 601 577

This message appeared on (EFT’s founder) Gary Craig’s email newsletter and I thought I’d post it in full. It’s a message of praise from a Buddhist monk, of western origin, living in Sri Lanka.

By Nyanasanti Bhikkhu

Dear Friends…

I have been given a real gift recently, and I want to share it with all of you. It is simply one of the most powerful healing and transformational tools I have ever encountered (after meditation).

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A good way to find out how tense you are, is to feel your belly! No, not with your hands, with your awareness! Do your stomach muscles feel tense? Tensing the abdominal muscles is a common physiological response to fear and anxiety.

If you find yourself in a difficult situation, being told off by your boss, or getting into an argument with your teenage son. You might find, if you are aware of it, that you were tightening your abdominal muscles, tensing them to resist whatever difficulties are coming your way.

If you do enough tightening, you may find that has become an habitual part of your physiology. You might like to try this little experiment to find out how tense your abdominal muscles are.

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