Download transcript PDF

00:00:04
I'm a mindfulness meditation teacher and I'm back yet again just to talk to you talk to you through a few practical things that you can bring into the classroom preliminarily for yourself but possibly you might even want to adapt these for your students whatever age group they are okay um so I'm not going to talk a lot today about the theory of meditation and mindfulness per se but I'm going to just allow you to EXP experience these practices and see for yourselves how you feel okay so please

00:00:35
get on board and join us um we can talk about meditation and mindfulness forever but it will not change anything the only thing that will change ways of being and habits is by actually doing the practices so if you're ready let's begin with one right now so I invite you to sit up straight put your feet flat on the floor so and cross your legs sit up straight you might consider sitting almost like a king or a queen on their Throne okay so your nice and upright just allows you to breathe breathe

00:01:06
deeply into the diaphragm you can just put your hands you just rest them on your lap and you might want to just tuck in your chin a little bit we often have a tendency to be up like that just allows the breath to move easily down the tubes okay and if it's okay for you right now to close your eyes please do so otherwise you might like to just lower your gaze and we're going to do something called called a stop practice s o p okay so the first per part of it is s which is for stop so closing your eyes

00:01:44
sitting up straight this is the beginning of starting to do something new perhaps you've had a busy morning or evening or wherever you are in the day just stop and notice what it feels like to just close your eyes and to turn off that set so then no we spend a lot of time looking so what a relief it is to just close one's eyes then let's turn to T which is take some conscious breaths through the nose it's so much better to breathe through the nose than the mouth so what I mean by that is can you

00:02:22
as you breathe in be aware of the breath in your nostrils as it goes through the body you might notice the chest move a little bit and if it feels okay for you place your hand on your belly button or just above your belly button and feel your breath moving in your body so this helps us connect to the breath so as you breathe in can you feel your hand moving up and out and as you breathe out the hand slowly drops back and in so let's just see if we can follow the breath for let's say three breaths so breathing

00:02:57
in feeling that mov of the breath and and then letting the breath out you can let the breath out through your mouth or your nose okay it's very simple you don't have to do anything extravagant with the breath just following the breath all the way in allowing the breath to be deep and all the way back out again okay I'll talk more later on about why the breath is so powerful for helping us with our stress but just for now just enjoy being connected to your breathing and if you find your mind wandering it's

00:03:29
completely normal just smile to yourself you're learning something new it's okay and just come back to the next INB breath and the next out breath great now we're going to turn to the O of stop which is observe your emotions in the body so another word for emotions is feelings right because we feel our emotional state so let's first of all connect with how you're feeling so literally just ask yourself this question how am I and just see what bubbles up you might just notice you're a little

00:04:07
bit stressed or anxious maybe you're a bit jittery and excited maybe you're tired maybe you're worried maybe you're a bit sad maybe you're happy maybe you're quite neutral so just noticing how you are this really important this is what being mindful is about is becoming aware of yourself in the present moment without judgment and as I say you can feel emotions so can you connect your emotional state with perhaps a sense of that in the body so perhaps you feel I don't know maybe

00:04:41
you're a bit anxious and you discover that your stomach is a bit knotted or perhaps you're a little bit um frustrated maybe your jaw is tight or your shoulders are tight or maybe you notice something else maybe you know your your lower back is tight your hips are tight maybe there something going on in your arms your legs people can manifest these feelings in different places but the usual ones are jaw throat chest back belly so again you don't need to do anything about this with simply becoming

00:05:22
aware and as you become aware of that tension in the body just see if you can imagine breathing into those spaces ah maybe even breathing out with a sigh as you start to invite the body to soften and let go a little bit so there's nothing wrong with discovering that you're a bit anxious or a bit tight in the body what we're doing now is just listening to the body and inviting that breath to just soften anything that really doesn't need to be working right now okay so allowing the body to relax a little

00:05:56
don't worry if you find it hard to concentrate once once you notice oh I've wandered off that is your golden opportunity to come back to the next in breath okay and then finally the P of the stop practice is proceed so proceeding into your day you stopped you were on maybe high alert you've stopped you've looked after yourself you've come to your breath you've noticed your emotional state you how your body's reacting and now what do you need can you just go back into your day do you need to take a

00:06:31
sip of water go to the toilet eat something stretch or if you are having a difficult conversation and something this is what provoked you in the first place can you imagine now with this new hopefully calmer state of mind you can go back in and actually say what you need to say you know maybe sometimes it's difficult to speak out or maybe sometimes you get overwhelmed by emotions and you end up arguing or being pushy or whatever what would it be like to now go back into a ation with this sense of more presence more calm a

00:07:04
little bit more wisdom okay so gently bring some movement to the body maybe just have a little stretch roll your shoulders okay and tell me I'm very interested to hear how are you feeling do you notice any difference from before we began that okay now don't worry if you didn't feel relaxed I hope you did but you know this is a practice we're starting to do possibly something really new that you've never done before so it sometimes takes a little bit of time because sometimes we've been running at

00:07:40
100 miles an hour for a very long time to suddenly stop put the brakes on you know it can be something that we need to practice so I'm seeing woo it's all speeding up here calm down feeling relaxed some people finding no change that's okay maybe you weren't very tense to begin with and sometimes it's just literally nice to take a break lighter peaceful yeah so there's a stop practice that is something that you could potentially bring into your classroom why not I'm sure your pupils would love

00:08:11
it so we're really exploring today um how we can learn to deal with stress and anxiety so I invite you right now to just tell me what are the sort of things in your work day that get you going is it uh surprise workload is it um um exam pressure you know what what gets you going no names please about people but just literally what is your sort of top three things that really gets you stressed out because clearly um stress is part of our daily lives and it isn't it there's nothing wrong with stress per

00:08:47
se it's the thing that gets us going in the morning right we it pushes us on to do things it's when we get out of balance and our stress levels get so high and we're on them on a continual basis that's incredibly toxic for the body because we're pushing our body on when it really doesn't want to be pushed on in that way and much of it is driven by our mental state which we'll be exploring today a little bit yeah so I'm seeing uh expectations workload tension with colleagues yeah meeting goals

00:09:20
parents I mean what isn't on the list really okay good thank you for that so I'm just going to move along here because I really want to have you time for some more practices but Stress and Anxiety is actually something called our fight and flight mechanism I'm sure many of you will know what this is but every animal on the planet has it we you know we're walking along and everything is okay and then suddenly we look down and I don't know we suddenly think maybe oh my God I know if you're in the

00:09:50
countryside there's a snake in the grass for example and in that moment we get a message from the amigdala to say we need to go on high alert because we might have to go into survival mode right now we might have to run we might have to fight hence fight and flight and freeze as well there's a few different names uh for it but let's just keep it simple for today and as you can see there's a whole rake of things that happen to your body it can happen like that in milliseconds and so some of those things that you

00:10:18
associate with your Stress and Anxiety are actually of course your body's natural response to a perceived threat so you know if you imagine when you're angry what do you feel like you feel hot you feel tense you're getting ready you might be clenching your jaw your heart might be beating fast your stomach might be tightening up um and a whole rake of other things that can be affected you know your um your sleep patterns might get um changed etc etc this is fight and flight now clearly if you had to run

00:10:50
away from a snake or fight a snake how many times do that happen I know but you know what I mean it's a it's a useful mechanism that all animals have but the problem is that it's overworked because now what sends us into fight and flight all those things that you've just mentioned right over overworking yourself um deadlines parents dealing with trick tricky children etc etc very quickly like that we can be sent into the fight andf flight mechanism but it's actually unnecessary in those scenarios

00:11:21
in actual fact those are the moments when we want to keep calm and keep under control and we want to be in the other side of what you can see on the slide there which is rest and digest where everything is just okay so life we can't control many things in the exterior world if you can change it go ahead as long as it doesn't hurt anybody but many things we can't control so the only thing that we can control is how we perceive it right how we look at it and therefore how we also process it through

00:11:55
our body and the beauty of meditation is that this is the tool to get yourself back across into fight and flight and when I say meditation I don't necessarily mean like as you've seen a 30 minute meditation you've got to download on an app it can literally be let me just take a little moment out of my busy schedule to just notice how I am regulate myself with my breath slow down the nervous system and put myself into rest and digest okay this is very simple terms here but I just like say I haven't got so much

00:12:30
time to explain all the theory today and that's okay not only do we have um like real so-called threats like you know work that we weren't expecting but the other problem is that our minds wander um there have been various studies that show that our mind wanders maybe even 47% of the time okay now where does our mind wander into the past oh if only I'd done this now would be better if only this shouldn't have happened something else should have happened that person shouldn't have done this or I shouldn't

00:12:59
have done that but that past is unchangeable and in actual fact there's many studies that studies that prove that actually even our memory is quite false every time we bring a memory up we change it slightly and adapt it so our memories can't be completely trusted it's a mechanism it's for Learning and processing information so that we can do better next time but when that gets out of um out of control and we're constantly stuck in the past going round and round in circles it's

00:13:26
not very good for us because it actually makes our our body think that we are actually in a threat situation and guess what we go back into fight and flight unnecessarily just thinking about the past and the same with the future now as teachers you spend a lot of time planning organizing worrying about you know thinking how this thing is going to go etc etc again there's nothing wrong with planning but it's when we get into that outof balance point where we can't control the mind anymore and it's just

00:13:56
flying about all over the place and bringing back worry some thoughts after worrisome thoughts about how this thing isn't going to go well again brings us into fight andlight mechanism okay so what we're looking at in meditation is how we can bring this mind that wants to float about all over the place which is unfocused into focus and that connects with what I was talking about before about the classroom experience don't you want your students to be focused so that they are present so that they can learn

00:14:25
and don't you want to be focused as well so that you can deal with whatever's going on in front of you in calm way this is what we're going to be looking at Okay so we've got these states of mind we can do something about it all okay so here's a lovely little practice we can do right now how do we bring ourselves back into the present moment well thoughts are conceptual okay they don't actually exist we can think and think and think about a chocolate cake but it won't

00:14:54
appear until one actually physically appears in the room but thoughts can feel really real aren't they but they're not actually they are they are happening but they're not actually necessarily true this terrible thing that we predict is not actually happening until it happens which it may or may not happen Okay so it's very very open to interpretation but often we get caught up in believing our thoughts so what we can do is we can bring ourselves to the senses because the senses can only have

00:15:24
experienced in the present moment okay you can't hear something from yesterday or tomorrow you can only hear what's happening now and this brings us very clearly and very succinctly into the present moment so the senses are our Escape Route from mental uh chat so I invite you now to become really curious okay it's another part of mindfulness be curious with your environment for a moment and just choose a color so it might be let's say blue doesn't have to be but just have a look around your

00:15:59
space for a moment and see if you can find five different Blues maybe five different tones of blue as well so dark to light okay and notice if the mind is wandering off into an email or something you've got to do later on today and just choose to bring it back just become really interested and as you start to look around you may start to realize gosh there's actually lots of things in my space that I haven't noticed before and there's a certain Joy Jo sometimes in just discovering that much of our

00:16:32
lifetime can of Our Lives can be like wallpaper we just don't notice it anymore and this is an invitation to start waking up to the things that are around us okay so now close your eyes and just become aware of the sensations in your body so I'm just going to talk you through a couple so can you become aware of I don't know let's start with your feet can you become aware of the weight of your body pressing down onto the soles of your feet notice perhaps the pressure of the shoes or the

00:17:14
socks what you're training here is your focus so again if you're wandering off just come back to those Sensations can you really hone your focus into your big toe just notice that okay take a deep breath let go of that become aware of the bottom on the on the seat feel the weight of gravity pushing you down into your seat also you can become aware of how the seat is supporting you right now and isn't it interesting you can put your focus where you want to put it and that's another one of your really

00:17:58
superpowers is that yeah I might have a busy mind but right now I'm just going to become aware of my body that takes me out of all that negative thinking into the present moment now can you become aware of your hands and perhaps you notice the weight of your hands in your lap can you feel I don't know the temperature in the room for example Can You Feel the sensations inside your hands so maybe there's a slight feeling of aliveness there like a throbbing pulsing all these things that are going

00:18:44
on all day long that you've maybe never noticed before and maybe one other thing you can notice just noticing your breath again so feeling that breath moving in and out great and now let's turn towards three sounds so this is a great one to do with your students if you don't do anything else just sometimes asking them to close their eyes and become aware of sounds that can bring a sense of calm to the room and then becoming aware of two smells if you can might be tricky this one see how you get

00:19:35
on and finally One Taste in the mouth great and then just taking a long slow deep breath in breathing out and when you're ready just opening your eyes again so what did you notice from that experience literally what could you hear what could you smell what could you feel but also how do you feel from doing that practice was it Pleasant to just take a moment out to connect with your senses as I say this is something it's so simple you know you literally set the class uh practice to do and just for for

00:20:20
30 seconds you know you 15 seconds you can just choose to tune into sounds around you and that will take you away from all the busyness and bring you back into the present moment yeah so people are saying relaxed more Focus um feel relieved yeah I mean that like I say practices in the pocket very tiny little things that you can just bring in super thank you okay so this next one um I've put there as the title the body keeps the score it is the name of a of a wonderful book that I highly recommend but um what

00:20:55
I'm talking about here is sort of twofold really firstly that when we all day long we've discovered through neuroplasticity and Neuroscience that all day long when we are having experiences whatever they are they are all impacting on our brains okay the gray matter and they've discovered that we can change our habits by doing new things of course if you've ever tried to learn to play the piano at the beginning you're not very good at it little by little the brain starts to recognize oh

00:21:26
you need hand to eye coordination and it starts to grow new neural Pathways to allow you to get better at practicing this new thing called playing a piano and so it is with us with all our habits as well so if you have a habit to get frustrated when n n happens that person turns up that situation happens you've created very quick neural Pathways that information shoots across your brain and in a millisecond the the the um the event has happened or the person has appeared and you are already acting in a certain way

00:22:00
almost unconsciously so what we're inviting ourselves to do here is start to become aware of our patterning and start to change it and as we start to change it we start to create new neural Pathways and as we create those new neural Pathways our habitual ways of thinking start to change and we start to create an upward spiral because new ways of being start to become available to us the more we practice them the more available they are the more available the more we practice them and Round and

00:22:27
Round Up it goes okay does that make sense to everyone so let's practice doing something else which is becoming aware of how our body is also holding all the tension of the day and not just today but you know though all those days all those years and even they now discover it's not just us but it also comes through through our genes through our parents our grandparents certain ways of being certain tensions that we can hold in the body okay the body is not not wrong it's the most incredible

00:23:01
alarm clock so Stress and Anxiety isn't incorrect we just treat it incorrectly it's actually a huge wakeup call because your body is saying hello I'm out of balance please put me back into balance and these practices are the way to do that to self-regulate so please close your eyes or lower your gaze sit up and just again connect connect to your breath okay feel that breath moving in the nostrils maybe again a hand on the belly just to allow you to connect for a moment so just inviting you to

00:23:48
notice your body so let's go to the feet again and notice the feet now feet are usually pretty neutral so it's a good place to go if you're feeling stressed literally let me come to my feet you're in the supermarket you're in the classroom I'm feeling overwhelmed let me just concentrate on my feet for a moment literally it grounds you back into the present moment okay now feeling the bottom on the seat and now let's check in with those zones which can hold tension so just

00:24:26
noticing how your hips are and you might want to just imagine breathing into those spaces giving some oxygen some some air into any places of tension maybe in your stomach there's some tightness there it's often the place people feel their anxiety so just noticing what's here right now no judgment simply becoming interested and curious breathing in breathing out moving up maybe just checking in with the heart space the chest breathing in and noticing how that is how the throat is today noticing the shoulders maybe

00:25:22
allowing the shoulders to drop back and down melting back maybe they're ice at the moment and they can start to become waterlike just as you're breathing and into the jaw perhaps you want to just open your mouth a little and let your jaw soften especially as teachers talking all day long what's it like and you may notice that effect going through the back and the neck as you open your mouth a little and coming to your eyes even if you've got your eyes closed just becoming aware of the muscles around the

00:26:00
eyes the forehead the scalp as you breathe in and out can anything just let go a little bit okay and then just taking one last big breath all the way in deeply into the belly and breathing out so I'm going to roll over into another little practice which is just to become aware become aware of the body and now how we can actually allow the body to relax a little bit so you might want to if you've got glasses on you might want to take them off a moment keep your eyes closed and just allow I

00:26:39
want you to do this very slowly so micro movements okay allow your head if it's okay for you to drop forward a little bit the minute you start to feel any tension or tightness just pause and breathe okay many of us hold tension in the neck and the shoulders so we're not not forcing the body in any way we are literally listening to it it's been holding all this tension and as we breathe deeply imagining sending the breath into any tightness and tension you may notice that the body naturally

00:27:11
starts to relax and let go a little bit once it's softened you may like to explore moving the head further down the minute you feel tension again just pause it should be delicious this okay it's nothing nothing we're not forcing any it should be a relief to just breathe into those places of tension and let go so some of you may be halfway some of you may be all the way down to the ground now I mean looking down to the ground rather um so now in your own time you may just explore moving your head very slowly around okay

00:27:48
this is not an exercise class this is not about anything other than becoming really deeply interested in the body noticing the muscles that have to move breathing deeply and just inviting the shoulders to soften and in your own time obviously everybody's got a different body so just moving the head really slowly from side to side taking those deep breaths and then if it's okay for you coming up again with the head and then just in these last few moments still with your eyes closed you might want to

00:28:26
roll your shoulders you might want to have a stretch maybe bring your arms up into the air or twist and look behind you but don't just notice if the mind takes over and you start to flip off into ideas and thoughts again and come back into the body become really curious with all the things the body has to do all the muscles just to move ever so slightly all the parts of the body that magically just work for you to create movement okay so that helps you with that Curiosity and maybe just to finish you might like

00:29:01
to just bring your hands to your face and just give yourself a little bit of a massage bring your hands to around your ears and massage that jaw maybe even do a little yarn maybe you want to take that into the scalp give yourself a little head massage how many of you dream of having a mass on hand without realizing you can be your own Mass so just giving your shoulders a little rub still staying with all those Sensations brilliant okay and just sitting there for a moment and noticing what it feels

00:29:41
like to have just done that little practice again what would it be like if you started your day you know five minutes just doing that now as I mentioned before you might like to just keep still with your eyes closed there's nothing really to see on the screen at the moment I'm going to talk you through the next little practice which is to just explore your thinking now I'm sure all the way through those practices there'll be a moment when you've wandered off into thoughts so let's just address that for

00:30:06
a moment okay so just sitting here breathing and I invite you to count your breath so as you breathe in breathe one as you breathe out breathe two count two as you breathe in three as you breathe out four okay so just connecting with that breath and as soon as your mind wanders off into a thought which I'm sure it will do very quickly we're training something new here simply just say to your thought with a smile on your face hello thought okay so we're very accepting we're not judgmental and we just come back to the

00:30:42
next number we remember and as we breathe in we count the next number and we breathe out again so keep going and just going to keep talking whilst you're breathing and Counting the point of this is that we endlessly think okay we have between 85,000 and 125,000 thoughts a day many of them repetitive many of them negative about ourselves or other people but actually we don't need to buy into those thoughts and the less we buy into those negative thoughts the less we put ourselves into the fight andlight

00:31:14
mechanism so this can be done at any time in the day where you suddenly just notice where's my head what am I thinking about oh hello thought smile just let it go come back to the present moment okay back to the next breath and they also say that we can't be stressed anxious uh Angry if we're in a in a place of gratitude so right now just to finish off this practice for today I'd like to invite you to just think of one good thing right now in your life okay might be a good friend might be a

00:31:51
partner might be a pet might be a lovely person that you work with May maybe you're grateful for having done this practice and learned something new about breathing and really helping to self-regulate yourself but as you really think about it do you notice it also does something to your body maybe it brings a smile to your face maybe it relaxes you a little maybe you feel a little bit of warmth and opening in your heart space gratitude is the antidote to all the stress so in any moment you can

00:32:26
choose to think of one good thing feel grateful and also to smile