The Nomad Yogi

We have been exploring how to use meditation to deal with anxiety. This is our 4th meditation on this subject. Each meditation builds on the last and introduces a new skill, so if you are interested but haven’t done any of the previous meditations they will make more sense if you return to the beginning and work your way through. Each meditation is about 10 minutes long, so pretty easy to fit into a busy schedule. You can access them all through these blogs or by clicking on the link “meditations” on the top bar of my website homepage.  These meditations are an aid. They don’t replace professional help. If you are following along with these meditations - having a go at each daily for a week before moving on - and noticing no improvement or finding sitting in stillness with your thoughts to be particularly distressing you may need to seek professional support to explore what narrative is feeding that anxiety. We tend to identify different feelings as part of who we are rath...

Welcome to Meditations for Anxiety - this is our third session. We have developed a bit of a system to the flow of the meditation. So today there will be less cuing and more silence. If you find you can’t remember what to do it might be best to go back to the first meditation and have a go at the basic form before moving on to this one. These meditations build on each other and one aim of this course is for you to be able meditate independently without guidance if you so choose by the end of this course, so if you have missed the first 2 it will be more effective if you go back and do the first two. Remember as you notice the thoughts, feelings and body sensations that come and go in the mind you don’t have to concentrate hard or catch every one. We are getting a general idea of what’s going on in our inner world by applying a soft kind of attention. The first week we noted whether we became distracted from the breath focus by a thought, feeling or body sensation. Last week we a...

Last week I introduced a simple 10 minute meditation practice to deal with anxiety. In it we were instructed to notice any thoughts, feelings or body sensations that emerge as we sit or lie in quiet stillness. Research demonstrates an almost 50% reduction in the intensity of difficult emotions like anxiety by using this one easy technique. I think its useful to point out that you don’t have to concentrate hard or catch everything that goes through your head. Apply a soft, feather-light, kind of attention. We are moving on today adding a little bit more depth to the practice. If you are just tuning in you might like to try Meditation 1 first before moving into this one. Personally, I think of it as tidying up my mental desk. Each thought, feeling or sensation is like a paper littering the desktop. I note if it is a thought, feeling or sensation and file it away in my mental filing cabinet. I also take notice of whether the thoughts are set in the past or the future. It’s a though...

Waterfront Yoga starts back this week! Tuesday 0700 and Friday 0600. See:  https://www.thenomadyogi.com/classes

It seems like everyone is coping with a lot of stress these days. For some people, anxiety is an occasional experience, others worry constantly everyday. Sometimes worry is only a background chatter in our mind but it can be overwhelming leading to panic attacks with sweaty palms, racing heart and shortness of breath.  Take a moment to think about what anxiety feels like for you. You might like to write this down in a journal. What thoughts, feelings, and sensations represent anxiety in your mind and body? This short series of 10 minute meditations on dealing with anxiety cannot replace professional help but it is a helpful aid. Neuroscience is showing us that the brains of people who have a regular guided meditation practice show less emotional reactivity to stress. And when regular meditators get stressed, they recover their peace of mind faster. And the thing is meditation is actually a cheap, easy, relatively fast thing to do.  Anxiety is a kind of fear and fe...