Mindfulness For Your Mental Health

Mental health is complex: much of our stress and distress can come from circumstances beyond our control.

We offer pro-active help to prevent and respond to mental health challenges.

Harnessing your strengths

We offer evidence-based group mindfulness programs that harness your innate strengths. These programs have a different approach to the way we generally think about illness and health. Mindfulness is not a quick fix and takes time. It does involve getting to know your own mind, heart and body and how they affect each other. It can be interesting, heart-opening, transforming and empowering. It is also demanding and requires some dedication and grit. A proper mindfulness training is a very different from using a mindfulness app or just doing an intro course. Rather than simply learning how to relax, you will learn how to get curious and less reactive to your thoughts and emotions. And to understand and interrupt patterns that are not serving you.

A foundational capacity

Mindfulness is sometimes described as a ‘foundational capacity’, because it changes the way we interact with the world. It affects what we pay attention to in our lives, the quality of that attention, and the decisions we make as a result. It can therefore impact many aspects of our lives – mentally, emotionally and behaviourally. The training helps develop an observant, accepting and compassionate stance towards your thoughts, emotional states, body sensations and impulses, and how to apply this in a practical way to immediate life challenges.

The Science Behind Mindfulness Meditation

A holistic multi-faceted approach

Unlike most interventions in the current health system, our programs attend to you as a whole person in the following ways:

Physiological regulation~ learning how to calm down and balance your nervous system
Emotional awareness ~ getting to know your own emotions and how to accept, explore and transform them
Cognitive flexibility ~ developing more awareness and clarity, and less rigidity in your beliefs and attitudes
Engagement with values ~ bringing what you care about into how you live
Behavioural change ~ experimenting with small changes leading to bigger shifts in life

How Mindfulness Empowers Us: An Animation Narrated by Sharon Salzberg

Our programs

Offer skills and knowledge to draw out your own innate wisdom
Are collaborative: we trust you as the expert on your own experience
Complement conventional healthcare and can support the effectiveness of other therapy or medication you are using.
Are trans-diagnostic, i.e., they can effectively help with different things (like stress, burnout, trauma, depression, emotion disregulation, negative thoughts, experiential avoidance and interpersonal problems)
Dissolve aloneness: we provide an environment of safety and trust where connection can happen.
Acknowledge and work with the societal causes of mental and physical suffering.
Enhance positive functioning such as self-compassion, well-being, and self-worth.

Not for everyone

However a mindfulness program is not a treatment of choice for everyone or for all problems. It may not be workable or helpful if you:

Feel actively suicidal
Have severe addiction and substance abuse
Are unable to be in a group situation
Have psychosis or severe impulse disorders,
Have untreated major depression or bipolar disorder,
Have moderate to severe autism spectrum diagnosis,
Are in a current crisis situation requiring immediate crisis intervention (e.g., intimate partner violence).

For these things, psychiatry, social work, clinical psychology and psychotherapy will be more helpful.

We want you to thrive