As part of the East London Consortium’s CPD network, on behalf on Hackney Educational Psychology Service, I will be running a workshop on Mindfulness-based Approaches in EP Practice, on 20th September 2013.  It will be an introduction to mindfulness and the evidence base for using mindfulness-based approaches when working with children and young people.  It intends to cover the research background to mindfulness and its use in school settings.  There will be opportunities to explore the experience of mindfulness, through various mindfulness practices.  If you are an Educational Psychologist and are interested in this workshop, please let me know.  Best wishes, Bernadette.

The Mindfulness in Schools Project is growing from strength to strength.  Its conference in London on 27 March 2013 was inspirational and I was delighted to be able to have attended it.  To see some videos – including one of Jon Kabat-Zinn as key note speaker – and photos from the day, see the Mindfulness in Schools website.

I enjoyed the conference, and it was exciting to have a day’s workshop by John Kabat Zinn – and an opportunity to deepen into practice.  It was a delight to talk about the research on children’s experiences of mindfulness, during the poster presentation session.  Each day brought new gifts, inspiring talks, including one by Shauna Shapiro, and interesting conversations with other delegates.  There was a sense of connection, community and celebration.  An awareness of the depth of commitment and momentum in bringing mindfulness deeper into our own lives and in the work that we do in teaching mindfulness.

It was exciting to meet Jon Kabat-Zinn at the Mindfulness in Society Conference, in Chester.

I am delighted to be presenting a research poster at the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice (CMRP) Mindfulness in Society Conference 2013.  This will be on children’s experiences of learning mindfulness to help develop their attention skills.

Today I taught a shiatsu class.  One theme was on developing awareness of the quality of the awareness with which the receiver’s energy field is sensed – and to cultivate positive qualities such as kindliness, friendliness, caring.  This mindfulness-based approach supported the students in developing that “connection” between the one receiving and the one giving the treatment. Furthermore, by encouraging both the giver and receiver to focus on present moment sensations (arising and passing away, moment by moment) there was an even clearer sense of congruence or resonance between their energy fields.  Overall the mindfulness approach supported a deepening of “connection” and potentially enhanced the positive effects of the treatment.  The between shiatsu with mindfulness is more fully described in an article by Sonia Moriceau.

Yesterday I delivered a day’s workshop, introducing mindfulness practices to a group of professionals, including educational psychologists and inclusion managers.  It was well received and I hope forward to delivering it again.

This week, on 12 December 2012, I submitted my doctoral thesis.  The research explored children’s experiences of learning mindfulness to help develop their attentional skills.  It was conducted in a mainstream primary school in London and involved designing and implementing the Mindfulness-Based Attention Training (MBAT) intervention.  During the intervention, the children drew pictures of their experiences of practicing mindfulness.  When the children were later interviewed, these pictures were used as prompts and their accounts were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenlogical Analysis (IPA).   For more information on the research click here.