The practice of mindfulness meditation creates awareness and cultivates inner calm, peace and a quiet resilience. Awareness is the greatest catalyst for positive change. Mindfulness is a practice, an approach which enables us to become aware of and explore our internal reality - the nature of our subjective experiences.

Cultivating awareness through mindfulness practice helps us build healthy relationships with ourselves and enhances our ability to manage stress and navigate challenges in their external reality at home and at work.

Helping clients cultivate mindfulness, the ability to be present and engaged in the moment, is central to all our coaching programs.

According to neuroscientist, Mike Merzenich "Experience, coupled with attention leads to physical changes in the structure and future functioning of the nervous system. This leaves us with aclear physiological fact...Moment by moment we choose and sculpt how our ever-changing minds will work, we choose who we will be the next moment in a very real sense and these choices are left embossed in physical form on our material."

"It is fascinating to see the brain's plasticity and that, by practicing meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can increase our well-being and quality of life." says Britta Hölzel, PhD, a research fellow at MGH and Giessen University in Germany. Learn more in this Science News January 21, 2011 article

More recently, in an article published October 25, 2012 in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, David R. Vago* and David A. Silbersweig "provide an integrative theoretical framework and systems-based neurobiological model that explains the mechanisms by which mindfulness reduces biases related to self-processing and creates a sustainable healthy mind."

Learning how to be mindful takes training of the mind and requires

• A spirit of openness and non-judgment
• Commitment and sustained attention to being present in the moment

Recognized as a means to harmonize the mind-body connection, mindfulness can enhance health and create states of inner peace and self-acceptance. Compassion for self and others is a result of mindfulness in action and is at the centre of personal wisdom, health and happiness.

Benefits

Cultivating mindfulness helps you gain insight into:

• Unconscious, automatic reactions – triggers and hot buttons
• Habitual patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour and
• Allows you to transcend contradictions and fears, integrate our experiences and
• Helps you embrace complexity and
• Take empowered action.

According to neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Siegel, the practice of inward reflection, particularly in meditation, energizes and trains the areas of the brain associated with:

• Balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems
• Attuned communication
• Emotional balance
• The capacity for flexible, non-reactive response
• Empathy
• Self-knowing awareness
• Healthy regulation of fear
• Intuition
• Morality

Mindfulness training is good for business.

Mindfulness Is Good for Your Health

Scientific research studies show that mindfulness meditation can:

• Overcome stress and improve relaxation (University of Massachusetts Medical School, 2003)
• Alleviate pain and improve cognitive processing (Wake Forest University School of Medicine, 2010)
• Help overcome anxiety, depression, anger and confusion (Psychosomatic Medicine, 2009)
• Improve digestion and lower blood pressure (Harvard Medical School)
• Decrease your risk of heart attack (The Stroke Journal, 2009)
• Boost creativity and positive mental outlook.(ScienceDaily, 2010)
• Increase your libido and improve your sex life (The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 2009)
• Cultivate healthy habits that lead to weight loss (Journal Emotion, 2007)
• Enhance mental focus and attention (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007)
• Increase the size of your brain! (Harvard University Gazette, 2006)

Mindfulness training and practice harmonizes head and heart facilitating transformation and personal growth.

Learn more about:

• Meditation and its reduced risk on cardiovascular disease
• Meditation on the effects and prevention of depression

Experience mindfulness and kick-start your mindfulness practice. Learn how.

Inspiration

Meditation is not for the faint-hearted, nor for those who routinely avoid the whispered longings of their own hearts. It is for individuals interested in the adventure and challenges of self-exploration and transformation, for those who wish to taste and explore new ways of knowing and new ways of being - not someone else's, but one's own moment-to-moment experience. Jon Kabat-Zinn and Saki Santorelli

You must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose. Indira Gandhi

He who knows others is wise, he who knows himself is enlightened. Lao Tzu

© Julia von Flotow, 2011

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