Meditation and Mindfulness
Do you want to change your life, bring your confused thoughts away, reduce your anxiety, feel calm, content and fulfilled?
Try Healing Meditation.
Yoga Healing offers specialised Meditation and Mindfulness studied to provide relief from back & feet pain and stress & anxiety.
Meditation and Mindfulness sessions are held On Line via Zoom in the comfort of your own home, Face-to-Face in Pollokshields, Glasgow or in an agreed location.
I offer Group Classes, Private Classes one-to-one or Small Private Groups with your friends, family or Team.
Private Classes are tailored to meet your Personal Goals. I will assess your potential and design the class around your needs and abilities.
Meditation and Mindfulness sessions are from 20 to 60 minutes long but I offer longer sessions for an additional fee, or shorter to match your schedule.
What is Meditation?
Our lives are full of stimulation and sometimes it’s like being on a train running around at 200 miles speed per hour. Stress is the word probably most used or most heard.
When I meet a person often, I hear “I am very stressed”. There is a way to stop that train, doing nothing and stay still: this is meditation. Meditation is a way to remove yourself for a few minutes or longer from the surrounding world, pausing and training the mind to be more present and aware in the moment.
It is not about controlling or changing your mind and cancelling your thoughts. Meditation is the skill that allows you to watch your thoughts passing through your mind, like watching the TV but avoiding attaching yourself to your thoughts and creating restless feelings. It is training the mind and change our relationship with our feelings and thoughts, avoiding judgment, uncontrollable and overwhelming thinking.
Meditation is the re-training of attention. Attention is normally conditioned to fluctuate or it’s hard for it to focus, and it’s also a reactive
attention.
Meditation keeps your attention still and non-reactive.
Meditation is looking our thoughts in a different way, being more objective and feeling more still. Furthermore, meditation provides us with a sense of calmness, and it eases our body and life. It can help to be more aware and to live in the present, without thinking too much to past and future. Also, it brings positivity and improves our relationships with others. You can meditate alone or with other people.
There is a wide range of techniques that can be used for different and specific situations in life. If you are thinking about how many types of meditation exist, you need to think very big.
If you research and try to write a list you will not see the end of it. One of the most used techniques to practice meditation is focussing on something else. This can be through visualisation, a question, a word, breath, a phrase or something external, but literally there are hundreds of meditation techniques from different traditions, cultures, spiritual disciplines, and religions.
There’s not the “best” or “most effective” type. Every person is different and has a preference that helps us choose the one that works best. Meditation involves about 8 areas of the brain, which control attention (the anterior cingulate cortex and the striatum), emotion (multiple prefrontal regions, limbic regions and the striatum) and self-awareness (the insula, medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex and praecuneus).
The classes are held On Line via Zoom in the comfort of your own home, Face-to-Face in Pollokshields, Glasgow or in an agreed location.
I researched different medical databases and read various articles which report that meditation can cause neuroplastic changes in the structure and function of brain regions involved in the regulation of attention, emotion and self-awareness.
Meditation can be used to facilitate the cultivation of a healthy mind, positive behavioural outcome and increased well-being (Tang et al, 2015) (Hasenkampet al, 2012) (Cahn et al, 2009) reducing stress, pain and depression.
It has also been observed that meditation changes the brain and the immune function in positive ways (Davidson et al, 2003) and it provides beneficial effects on short-term memory (Pragya et al, 2021).
What is a neuroplastic change? What is Neuroplasticity?
The brain contains eighty billion nerve cells, called neurons, which make a very large number of connections forming networks and pathways.
Neurons talk to each other using special chemicals called neurotransmitters which are like chemical words, sending “messages” from one neuron to another.
Neuroplasticity is the ability of neural networks in the brain to change through growth and reorganization.
This involves neuron pathways and a new connection between neurons which changes the structure of the brain.
In the same way we train muscles at the gym improving strengths, power and making them thicker, we can train the brain with meditation focussing the mind on positive thoughts, happiness, well-being and being a healthy mind. And in the same way of the muscles that part of the brain becomes thicker, bigger, stronger and more powerful and allow us to spend more time in that part of the mind.
Meditation can change your mind after only 8 weeks.
One of the best ways to start meditation is to try guided meditation. Most people meditate sitting but my personal preference is lying on bed, yoga mat, on the floor or sofa.
Years ago I was a different person and at the word “meditation” I would have reacted with “really meditation, I cannot do any meditation, I
will never meditate in my life”. Now, I cannot live without meditation.
I must confess some days is more difficult while other days is like diving in the Caribbean Sea.
Meditation changed my life, I feel that I am a different person, I am content and meditation today is my bread and butter, I never have enough.
Healing Meditation will change your life, you can start your journey now.
I offer Private Classes one-to-one or Small Private Groups with your friends, family or Team.
Private Classes are tailored to meet your Personal Goals. They can be On Line in Zoom or Face-to-Face in an agreed location.
Meditation class can variate from 20 minutes to 1 hour long but I offer longer lessons for an additional fee, or shorter sessions to match your schedule.
Reference:
Cahn, B.R. and Polich, J., 2009. Meditation (Vipassana) and the P3a event-related brain potential. International journal of psychophysiology, 72(1), pp.51-60.
Davidson, R.J., Kabat-Zinn, J., Schumacher, J., Rosenkranz, M., Muller, D., Santorelli, S.F., Urbanowski, F., Harrington, A., Bonus, K. and Sheridan, J.F., 2003. Alterations in brain and immune function produced by mindfulness meditation. Psychosomatic medicine, 65(4), pp.564-570.
Hasenkamp, W. and Barsalou, L.W., 2012. Effects of meditation experience on functional connectivity of distributed brain networks. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 6, p.38.Pragya, S.U., Mehta, N.D., Abomoelak, B., Uddin, P., Veeramachaneni, P., Mehta, N., Moore, S., Jean-Francois, M., Garcia, S., Pragya, S.C. and Mehta, D.I., 2021.
Effects of Combining Meditation Techniques on Short-Term Memory, Attention, and Affect in Healthy College Students. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, p.557.Tang, Y.Y., Hölzel, B.K. and Posner, M.I., 2015. The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(4), pp.213-225.
