I have always felt it important that any training or professional study I commit my valuable time, energy and financial resources to has integrity, so that when I teach I know that I may pass that teaching on to my own students.

It is important to me that you too have that peace of mind and so in terms of transparency, I’d like to offer you an insight as to how I am qualified to facilitate or guide you on your journey, at this most difficult and challenging time for us all.

Like many people, I suffered my own personal crisis after a marriage breakup and job loss 14 years ago. I was forced to see life in a totally different way, as it became clear that the way in which I was living, thinking and feeling were not working for me. I found mindfulness as a way to help me through the grief, anxiety and stress of those times.

The mindfulness attitudes and practices I learnt and incorporated into my daily life helped me to turn my life around so, wishing to help others too, I decided to train to become a mindfulness teacher. I grounded myself in a degree in psychology as a pre-requisite for taking the MSc in Mindfulness Based Applications at Exeter university, a 2 year applied course in mindfulness teacher training.

Since then I have continued to train extensively with some of the most experienced mindfulness teachers worldwide (Bangor, Oxford, Bodhi College) so that I may deepen my practice, which I am committed to on a daily basis.

I teach Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), as well as the Mindful Self Compassion (MSC) course. I am also trained to teach the .b teen and PAWS younger children’s curriculum, taught in schools, as well teach the Foundations mindfulness curriculum to school teachers.

I also ensure I receive the necessary supervision as well as many extra continuing development courses and retreats, attending mindfulness conferences to keep my skills experience and practice relevant to today’s rapidly changing world, including recently an online course with David Treleaven in Trauma Based Mindfulness. It is crucially important to me to understand how to protect my prospective students. Mindfulness training is not for all people and is not a panacea for all ills, neither is it therapy. Mindfulness is more a set of attitudes and strategies to live by. These will be explored in full throughout the courses as well as within the website resource sections.

The current global crisis seems to me to be the culmination of 100 years accelerating and unprecedented change in the way in which our World, our societies and cultures interact with each other. We simple human beings just can’t keep up with the impact of escalating technology, since our brains are little changed from those of our stone age ancestors. In those days the flight/fright/freeze limbic brain caused us to run from the ubiquitous sabre tooth tiger or fight the woolly mammoth to feed & clothe our families, while after such fights we rested in caves around the campfire allowing our cortisol stress levels to return to normal, much like animals in the wild do now. (obviously not round a campfire, but they don’t tend to chew over the anxiety of what could have been or what could be tomorrow!)

Our brains are predicated for our physical survival and as that quick release stress was/is crucial for survival. Today though, stress comes in the form of missed deadlines, personal slights, worries about the future and worries about what we’ve done in the past, various addictions, social media, some of which we exacerbated ourselves, some of which was real. Now in real terms the sabre toothed tiger has morphed into reality in the form of a pandemic which places us at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs struggling for survival. Clearly these are not imagined fears at all. To make matters worse, our minds, our imaginations have the ability to throw fuel on the fire, leading to catastrophising, rumination and a snowball of panic. This kind of thinking is what leads us to behave in ways that are not only counter productive to our health but also counter productive to getting our (and others’) needs met.

The resulting build up of  stress stays in our physical systems, leaving us depleted and exhausted, while massively depleting our immune capability. So while it is true that what we face in the world now are real and pressing fears, we must also accept that a huge amount of the extra stress we suffer comes from our own minds and subsequent behaviours, which are enacted through no fault of our own, due to habitual conditioning. It is my aim to help you uncover unhelpful ways of thinking and behaving to lead if not happier, then more peaceful lives in equanimity.

The culture we live in acts as fuel to the fire of fear – through social media, the news channels, the breaking down of political certainty. The more we engage with these limiting behaviours & habits the more we exacerbate the stress, the more we literally bathe in our own stress juices, further compromising our mental and physical health. It is a vicious cycle of suffering that we do indeed have the capacity to slow down/stop with the help of mindfulness strategies and attitudes. Indeed it really is possible to reverse the downward spiral to move toward health and happiness. This is not a quick fix, but a new learning how to be. How to Be Human.