About my experience & practice
My qualifications and professional experience
I qualified and worked as a music therapist in hospitals, therapeutic communities, care homes for the elderly and hostels for young people with behavioural challenges. As a tutor at The Lantern Trust London I trained health professionals in HIV/AIDS awareness and taught on the Life, Death and Loss course for the Open University Course. I also worked as a member of the care team at St Patrick’s Hospice for HIV/AIDS Dementia.
To support my group- work, I completed training at the Institute of Group Analysis London and hold a certificate in counselling from Birkbeck University London.
In 2007, I founded award-winning charity SLOW – Surviving the loss of your World building on my experience of profound personal loss. SLOW is London-based charity for bereaved parents and siblings where I currently work as the bereavement support manager and supervise training of the facilitator team.
I teach Mindfulness Courses, workshops, taster and classes in London, and have worked with hospices, palliative care staff, Council teams, doctors, parenting groups, school teachers and charity volunteers at Cruse and Octopus.
I adhere to the UK Good Practice Guidelines for Mindfulness Teachers and am committed to regular CPD. I attend regular supervision for my Mindfulness teaching.
My personal experience and practice
Mindfulness tapped me gently on the back before I had become aware of its benefits, potential for growth, and growing popularity. Living with uncertainty, bereavement and grief led me to seek ways of managing the challenges of my life by living more fully in the present.
Dwelling in regrets of the past, and worries about what life held in store was taking its toll on my health, and I discovered that living in the present more fully, though often painful, could also offer different ways to respond to my anxiety and distress and to appreciate the joyful moments as they arrived.
Paradoxically, I sensed that by turning towards that which I feared most, there was to be found a place of calm and more acceptance. I eventually attended an 8–week course in Mindfulness – Based Cognitive Therapy that offered a new way of meeting life with a different perspective.
Developing a daily practice
I have a regular mindfulness meditation practice which resources my life and work.
The translation of ‘meditation’ as ‘cultivation’ is key to the understanding that by providing the right conditions, we learn how to cultivate steadiness and moment – to – moment awareness within the ground of self–compassion. From this stable base, we notice the activities of our minds and are able to make wiser choices in how we respond to life.
What is mindfulness
Mindfulness, at its simplest, is paying attention to the present moment – with intention, kindness, and curiosity. There is a saying that ‘Mindfulness is caught, rather than taught’ and this alludes to the fact that we need to experience mindfulness directly to really feel its benefits– just as, if we were learning to swim, we would need to get into the water!
Mindfulness is caught, rather than taught
We may believe that we live in the present moment – and yet, with a little gentle investigation, through mindfulness practice, we realise that in fact we are more often than not living ‘an unlived life’ – our attention is scattered, pulled in different directions, driven by automatic pilot or habitual thinking patterns that means we are often lost in thought, and far away from attending to the present.
With mindfulness training, we find ourselves waking up to the ways in which we create and recreate problems for ourselves by being unaware of the automatic choices that we make, moment to moment. We learn with more awareness how we move through the world, how the world touches us and how we touch the world.
By practising moment to moment awareness, through meditation, we begin to notice our patterns and with regular practise, can begin to loosen the roots of unhelpful patterns of thought and their hold on us.
Life is the curriculum
Life is the curriculum, and will present many opportunities to practice Mindfulness daily. We also learn to practice compassion and kindness towards ourselves and others– gradually holding our experience more lightly and with less effort, and noticing our harsh inner critic.
Mindfulness does not change the fact that life will always present us with ups and downs, challenges and joys, loves, losses and uncertainly – but with mindfulness we can cultivate our capacity to respond rather than react, to allow the flow of life through us more readily, turn toward our difficulties, befriend our vulnerabilities, to embrace the inner critic and to flourish and appreciate those parts of our experience that feel good and resourceful.
There are benefits to those around us too –being aware and present in the ‘here and now’ is a refreshing and restorative experience that can enable us to take better care of ourselves and be more present to others – family, friends and work colleagues. Whilst mindfulness can be applied to the serious aspects of life (health, wellbeing and everyday ups and downs) it can also be held with lightness, humour and the capacity to enrich day to day ordinary experience.
Mindfulness for Everyday Living 