Take the Steps Mindfulness and Wellbeing
Take the Steps Mindfulness and Wellbeing is a structured five week program based on up-to-the-minute research in neuroscience, psychology and meditation. The program combines training in Mindfulness with techniques derived from yoga, CBT, and positive psychology to rewire your brain for increased happiness, relaxation, peace of mind, resilience and a positive mind set. Designed and delivered by chartered psychologist, registered yoga teacher and accredited holistic psychotherapist, Margaret Forde.Currently, this course is available via Zoom.
Our Classes
UPCOMING FIVE-WEEK COURSES Fee €150.
Research shows that combining mindfulness with insights and techniques from positive psychology and CBT increases the effectiveness of mindfulness training, and the ease with which it can be applied in your daily life. Each class in the course contains a presentation on a specific topic, experiential exercises, feedback and discussion, as well as mindfulness and guided relaxation practice. Classes are 90 mins each evening.
What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness is paying attention, deliberately and non-judgementally to each moment of your life. It is the latest “buzz-word’ yet at the centre of many ancient philosophies and spiritual traditions such as yoga and zen, which recognize that our minds run on “autopilot”, rarely coming into “manual control” to experience the moment we are in right now.
Stopping the Monkey Chatter
In a very large scale international study, overthinking and self-critical thoughts were identified as a major cause of depression and high anxiety levels.
Mindfulness is essentially about coming out of our busy heads to step into the present moment. Inspired by some of the popular books, many people start to practice with great enthusiasm, only to abandon it in the first couple of weeks, put off by the extent of the “monkey chatter” they discover in their own mind! This is unfortunate, as many of the benefits of mindfulness only kick in after a few weeks of practice.
This is why, learning to meditate in a supervised setting, where you are getting weekly feedback, is essential. In my view, it is impossible to learn meditation from simply reading about it: you have to actually train the mind to do it. I designed “Take the Steps” course as a step by step program to train the mind to develop mental focus and learn to meditate.
CBT and Positive Psychology Techniques
As the Buddha put it: “you and your world are created by your thoughts. The wise person controls their thoughts”
Our past experiences and built up repetitive thought patterns, which interfere with our capacity to be truly present, and to fully enjoy the people and situations in our lives. We are like passengers on a bus, travelling through an area of beautiful scenery, but with all the blinds pulled down, and instead listening to a running commentary telling us what its like “out there”. Worse still, the guide we are listening to is partially blind, and keeps telling us the same stories over and over! Yet we take what this guide says to be true, and run the risk of losing our entire lives to a group of deluded thoughts!
CBT cognitive behaviour therapy is about replacing some of these negative and often self critical thought patterns with more helpful ones. The Positive Psychology techniques help to combat our natural negative bias, so that we can live a happier and more self-fulfilled life.
The course is aimed at putting you back in the driving seat. All the assignments and techniques used in the course are evidence-based, i.e. they are proven to be effective in research and to have long term effects on your happiness and wellbeing.
In each class, you will be using both right brain and left brain techniques, and the combination is powerful to bring about change.
In Summary
Change does not come from reading or talking about. For many people, a lot of the material they read, just acts as another layer of things that they “should” do. In contrast, real change results from being, doing, thinking and interacting differently.