Sit

 ...& relax!


It's not as easy as it first might sound just sitting there & thinking of nothing...in fact the truth is it's impossible! Your brain like a monkey swings from random thought to random thought & does it's best to keep your mind occupied on anything & everything, leaving some of you fraught with overload rather than calm & centred...so what is the answer?



Here are some ways you can work to calm your mind and stop racing thoughts:

Use cognitive distancing. Our mind usually worries about things it is convinced are true but, most of the time, are actually not true!
Use a mantra! You can make up your own.
Focus on the present & how your are feeling in the moment.
Write things down.
Breathe & concentrate on your breathing.

    Monkey mind or mind monkey, from Chinese xinyuan and Sino-Japanese shin'en 心猿 [lit. "heart-/mind-monkey"], is a Buddhist term meaning "unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable".

    Learning to Meditate...

    The effects of mediation are so many and always well document...& really I believe it's like most things finding a way that suits you, your personality & your lifestyle. There have been many studies on different forms of meditation & the 2 main forms are  Focused Attention (FA) and Open Monitoring (OM). In the FA kind, you try to focus on a thing like the breath, but this can also be an object or like in TRAKATA a candle flame. This is to help to train your attention so that when your mind wanders you can try to bring it back to the breath etc again and again. So  you see the practice isn’t  sitting there with a blank mind like often people think. It is more about bringing the focus back to its object repeatedly.
    In the another way which is more advanced the OM form (also called mindfulness meditation), you aim to watch your thoughts in a  non-judgmental way and then acknowledge them, and then try to just let them go. This is about not reacting just simply observing. In various studies it showed that the OM was more effective at helping reduce the number of negative thoughts people had in general. Lots of mindfulness work has showed
    meditation can actually deactivate the brain regions that are thought to contribute to this constant mind chatter or it's the default mode network DMN. This is the bit that is active when our brains are just 'resting' but actually jumping from thought to thought. Other studies have shown that it can actually change the whole structure of the brain in ways that can help to turn off the DMN. So meditation does seems to offer a lots of benefits not just only psychologically, but neurologically too!

    Join us for Yoga Bedtime Stories online on Wednesday evenings from 9pm to learn some meditation

    techniques & take some time out.


    by Suzanne Richardson - Coward

    research from https://www.psychologytoday.com/


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