We at the British Mindfulness Institute are a team of professionals who are committed to offering the highest quality courses and training in the field of Mindfulness and Neuroscience. Our entire team has vast experience of these areas at both a professional and personal level having trained in Bangor University and the Institute for Mindfulness Based Approaches (IMBA), Germany.  We adhere to the Good Practice Guidelines for Teaching Mindfulness developed by the UK Mindfulness Teachers Network.  The guidance includes formal mindfulness training, personal regular mindfulness meditation practice, engagement in regular supervision, commitment to on-going personal practice, training, supervision, attendance on retreats and a high standard of ethics in relation to our teaching and practice of mindfulness.

One of the amazing privileges of being human is that we can make thought become real. That is, if we become focused, the thought that we are thinking literally becomes the experience. The end product of this experience is a feeling or emotion. Once we begin to embrace the event (that we are thinking emotionally) we activate certain chemicals that begin to teach the body emotionally what the mind understands is going on. One experiment that was carried out involved hooking up a skier to a number of electrodes. The Skier was asked to imagine sking down a mountain. The activity of the electrodes connecting to the muscle tissue corresponded identically to the situation where the skier was actually skiing down the mountain.

Your body is your unconscious mind. It does not know the difference between actual experience in your life that produces an emotion and an emotion that you fabricate yourself by thought alone. To the body both things are the same.

We think about 60,000 thoughts a day. 90% of those thoughts are the same thoughts as the day before. This means that the same thoughts lead to the same choices, the same choices lead to the same behaviours, the same behaviours produce the same experiences, the same experiences create the same emotions and those emotions create the same thoughts. Our biology becomes a reflection of this.

The moment you begin, to think about what you’re thinking, begin to notice how you’re behaving and begin to pay attention to your feelings. This allows you to change your state.

Using a techniques such as Mindfulness practice, when we begin to decouple ourselves from our emotions, see them as mere clouds passing over us, extract information from them and begin to see the information inside them, we are given the opportunity to change this automatic program of thinking, feeling and thinking feeling.

Our bodies are very sensitive to even the smallest of our emotions. Often our bodies will register something long before it becomes registered in our minds, whether that emotion arose from something that is happening now or a memory from the past or even some fantasising about the future. Either way, our bodies act as early warning detection systems to different emotions and their corresponding thoughts. We can all remember our chests tightening or our palms becoming sweaty just before that important meeting or interview. Within Mindfulness, it is important to learn to listen to and read these messages from our bodies.

To learn to read and understand what is happening in your body, it is important to pay attention to the places in the body that are sources of signals. These signals can come from anywhere in the body. In order to become skilled at recognising these signals we use the ‘Body Scan’ Meditation. This is a mediation that includes every region and body.