Description
This mindfulness course is a special invitation to parents and their young adult family members (minimum 16) to come and learn together. In today’s life stress and pressure is a daily challenge for most of us, no matter our age, and this is an opportunity to come together as a family and a community to learn ways to start relating to life in a new way. With a mindful practice, challenges become workable rather than overwhelming and we learn ways to be with life and its different flavours with more ease. It is not a quick fix and as with all new skills it requires practice and dedication. By joining as a family, we can support each other in the learning process, creating new habits of living, behaving, thinking and communicating. It is not a pre-requisite that you come with a family member – you are also free to join alone. While the structure and content is standardised, the themes and exercises will be adapted to the participants that enrol.
This mindfulness course is following the 8-week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course, which is a vastly researched and evidence based intervention that teaches skills to manage stress and other adversities in life. It has also been proven to improve general well-being and resilience. The teaching happens is a group setting once a week over 8 week period. During the sessions participants learn about the principles of Mindfulness and the core practises which they are invited to practise at home daily between the sessions.
Learning mindfulness takes time and effort
All studies indicate that the best way to learn mindfulness is to do it over a longer period of time ensuring practice time on a regular basis. You learn to be mindful just like you learn any other new skill; through practice. The practice will physically change the neurological pathways in your brain and will in due time give you an improved ability to choose your focus, sustain attention and gain awareness which will let you to see new ways to behave and interact with the world.
Home practice
Home practice plays an important role in this course and you are expected to commit 20-40 minutes per day during the course for practising mindfulness. Mindfulness is an experiential practice, intellectually reading or learning about it will not offer many benefits. To support your home practice, you will be given meditations as mp3 files as well as a Participant Handbook. Home practice mostly consist of meditations where you listen to recorded guidance, but it can also include reflecting and making notes about your experience and doing some informal mindfulness practices during your day.
The teacher
Berit Lewis will be your teacher. Berit is an accredited MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) Teacher, trained in ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) and also trained at Mindfulness in Schools Foundations (MiSP) to teach .B Foundations for teachers. She is a category 1 member of VMBN (Vereniging Mindfulness Based Trainers Nederland en Vlaanderen) and holds a BA (Honours) in Psychology, a MA of Communication and a MSc of Vitality and Ageing. She has previously developed a successful mindfulness course for teenagers. Before founding Thriving Life she worked as a communication- and PR specialist in Denmark and Australia – including 10 years as a communications specialist at the Danish Defence. Berit is Danish, married to a Welshman and has two teenage children in Highschool at the American School of The Hague.
Berit is a category 1 member of the VMBN (the dutch Mindfulness Association), which means that most insurance companies in the Netherland will reimburse parts of or sometimes even all of the cost of the course. Please enquire with your insurance company.
