Have you ever wondered what Mindful Living and Meditation is all about and how it can help you in your day to day life and in your relationships with other people and yourself?
Freada McGoldrick has been running her popular Mindfulness and Meditation Courses at The Ananta Yoga Studio for the past two years. The courses are held in the warm, relaxing and peaceful setting of our studios with small class numbers.
Freada is an extremely experienced and wonderful facilitator of Mindful Living and Meditation with many years of training and practice behind her. She also teaches Somatic Movement classes at The Ananta Yoga Studio. Anyone who has been fortunate enough to come in contact with her through her work will say that they immediately felt at ease in her company and confident in her ability to guide them through their experiences in her courses. She exudes an air of warmth, calm and serenity and her courses are highly recommended by all who have attended. I personally feel extremely fortunate to have met her and to be working along side her at The Ananta Yoga Studio. Her work hugely compliments the yoga and pilates classes we offer, with many students attending Freadas courses and classes as well as their weekly yoga classes.
The application of Mindful Living and Meditation techniques is becoming hugely popular as a more holistic approach to managing symptoms stress, anxiety and depression enhancing spiritual, emotional and mental well being. To read more about Freada please <<<<< click here>>>>>
Freada has kindly written the following article for our website….
Mindful Living and Meditation
So what is mindfulness?
Have you ever been caught in a moment where you have witnessed a little child utterly captivated by the sight of a butterfly, or a bird in the sky and their whole world stands still. This is a mindful moment for both child and adult.
Imagine now a young child on the beach building a sandcastle. Their full attention on the sight and the sound of the spade digging its way into the sand, perhaps stopping for a moment to take in the sparkly grains of sand… intently watching the way each spade full slowly spills into the bucket, over and over, until they have filled the bucket. Then very carefully turning the bucket over and following with a rhyme such as” “Pat a cake, pat a cake baker’s man, bake me a cake as fast as you can.” …as if the rhyme might weave a magic spell on the sand…and then, hey presto, the sheer anticipation and then delight when the perfect castle stands proudly on the beach. Or – perhaps a look of disappointment if the castle falls down.. Either way, it’s on to the next castle.
This is the rapture of being alive and this is our natural state.
As adults we seldom experience this level of attention.
Sadly, for most of us, we lose this ability to be in the moment. Instead of our mind being creatively awake, it becomes filled with trash, trash that rarely gets emptied. Processing about 70,000 thoughts a day we are operating on automatic pilot. Mostly these thoughts are about the past or the future, anywhere but the present moment. Internal dialogue is paramount and consists of lists, planning, woes, worries, relationships, annoyances and grievances at others…we fill our memory banks with more and more trash and then we get stuck. Life becomes exhausting, while we increasingly become angry, fed, up and depressed. Forgetting about all the important things our health starts to suffer in all sorts of ways.
So, what do we do from here? NOTHING
Mindful Living encourages the practice of doing nothing. WHAT????
Yes., nothing!
As Tibetan lama Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche put it, we learn to “Rest in natural great peace, this exhausted mind.”
Mindful Living and meditation allows us to manage our internal dialogue , rest our exhausted mind and come back to our natural state.
This is important for our health and well being and for our children.
Did you ever have the experience of a young child wanting to tell you something about their day. You might be cooking the dinner and thinking about the homework to be done or the day you’ve just had or the bill you have to pay tomorrow and only paying lip service to their story. Now more than ever we need to teach our children and grandchildren to keep their minds open and fresh, to remain thinking outside the box, to continue to live in their natural state, open, aware, alive, curious. To do this we need to empty the trash and live from our own natural state. Or as Gandhi says: “Be the change you want to see in the world”
Mindful Living and Meditation Classes with Freada McGoldrick. Next 6 week block commencing at The Ananta Yoga Studio, The Tap, Kilbride, Co. Wicklow – Tuesday evenings from 24th September 7.30pm to 9.15pm and Wednesday mornings from 25th September 9.45am to 11.30am
Please contact Freada if the above dates have passed or you would like to enrol for the next block as courses are on going.
Contact Freada McGoldrick. 087 2186209