Creating a Healing Space

Listening, really listening, to your patients is a great way to create the healing space. Hopefully by now you are spending some time each day paying attention to your breathing and/ or your whole body breathing, sounds, thoughts or to nothing or everything. Next time you are with a patient, and it isn't some great emergency, pay attention to the patient and what they are saying. Pay attention to them and what they are saying the same way as you would pay attention to your breathing. The patient becomes the focus of your meditation. If a thought comes into your head, just let it go, and just stay with the patient and their story. Sit down if you can. Don't try to analyse them, don't try to use your intuition or to feel their vibe or anything hippy-ish. Just be there with the patient. Really hear what they are saying. If you can do this for 2 minutes without thinking about what you need to do to fix them, what your next job is, without thinking "this person is a drongo", it will make a huge difference. It seems like a waste of time, but actually your communication, and your own thinking, becomes much clearer and efficient. You will find you can actually get more achieved in a shorter time. The time invested in true listening always pays off. The same applies to your work colleagues. Stop and actually listen to them when they are talking to you. You will find communication is much clearer and efficient. You take everything in first time and pick up the subtle messages. You will soon have your patients and colleagues saying "Thanks for listening." They notice the difference because true listening is rare in our society. Make this your daily practice. It is easy to get sucked back into the old ways of rushing around and not really listening. Each day rededicate yourself to listening to your patients and your colleagues. Download audio

It is helpful to make the physical space you work in as conducive to healing as possible. Your ability to do this will vary depending on on the type of workspace you have: are you sharing a hospital ward with many other staff and patients or do you have your own natural therapy clinic room. If you have your own clinic room you can make the space very healing-friendly - but you still need to take into account your patients' perspectives. Will they find the environment conducive, or will they find it a bit too way out or spooky. In a hospital ward you may need to make small changes at time eg put some pot plants and music in the nursing station. Pick music that will uplift everybody. In a shared workspace this maybe pop with a sprinkling of healing music from different lands. The plants and music will lift the spirits of the staff who will then lift the spirits of the patients. A piece of lively art can make a huge difference too. You will soon notice you and your workmates happier in your work. This will induce more happiness in your patients - a great step towards healing. Download audio

The final of these short meditations focuses on nothing ... or everything. Try is out. Download audio

This meditation turns your attention to the sounds around you, then to your thoughts. Download audio

This is another type of meditation focusing your attention on the whole of your body as you breathe. Download audio

This is Professor Kabat-Zinn's Breathing meditation as a separate audio file so you can listen to it with out having to listen to me! Download audio.

Most of us have a lot of negative thoughts cluttering our minds and colouring our view of the world. We have lots of mind chatter reviewing the events of the day and thinking and worrying about upcoming events. Some of us don’t even notice these thoughts, others are painfully aware of them. Most of us use, whether we are aware of it or not, a lot of sedatives to quieten the mind chatter for example alcohol and other drugs, magazines, TV and even meaningless chatter with other people. A lot of these sedatives fill our brains with negativity – people being cruel to each other on the TV programs, the bad news on the news, the sad or angry stories of our friends. It keeps us believing this is how the world is and should be. It can be quite refreshing to have this mental noise shut up for a while. First step: stop using the sedatives. Turn off the TV, use no drugs, don’t read any magazines or newspapers, don’t engage in general chit chat for a day or even a week and see what happens. Simultaneously do some exercises to turn your attention away from the mental pollution in your mind. One easy way to do this is to turn your attention to your breathing. Here is a short guided meditation by Jon Kabat-Zinn who is a professor of medicine in the States. Trying doing this once a day and see if day by day you can become more aware of the mind chatter , be aware it’s there, rather than having it run your life with out you noticing it. There are a serious of these short meditations by Prof Kabat-Zinn with different focuses. They are just tools to turn your attention away from your thoughts and onto something else. With practice you will find that the chatter becomes quieter, and day by day the negativity around you becomes less apparent and it is easier to see the beauty in people and the world around you. Download audio

Most of us want to help other people. Those of us in the healing professions and crafts usually started out really wanting to help our fellow humans. Often along the way we end up feeling frustrated and ineffectual, annoyed at our patients for not helping themselves and can often end up burned out. Something just seems to be missing. Through this program we are going to guide you back on course and help you find your enthusiasm for, and enjoyment of, your work and help you to make a difference for your patients. It sounds like a tall order, it will take some work - but it is definitely worth it. You might even find yourself having fun again at work again. This course is not THE way to be a healer, just a collection of suggestions that will help you to find your own way. One of the principles we are going to use is induction. A moving electrical current in one wire can induce a moving current in another wire nearby. Similarly, we are going to teach you to induce wellness in your patients. To do this you have to be healthy yourself. And so most of the work you will be doing through this program is on yourself. You are going to heal yourself. As you do so you will learn techniques that you can share with your patients. And as you heal yourself you will find that people start to become healthy around you. This sounds strange but we all know how a miserable person can bring us down and a happy person can brighten our days. Similarly a truly health person can inspire, induce and invoke healthiness in others. Just remember how you feel around vivacious, happy people. That's going to be you - and then some. So let's start looking at you. There's a 99% chance you have doubts about yourself, you often have sad times, you sometimes think there is no hope for your patients and the world, life is pretty stressful and you sometimes have trouble sleeping at night because you are worrying about things. Welcome to the human race and what has been considered normal and sane in our global society. We grow up in our society / our world and learn to think and feel like everyone else. Everyone else induces these thoughts and feelings in us. It's normal. It's the way humans are. But we don't have to stay like this. We can change the way we think and feel and this can have a dramatic effect on our quality of life and on the lives of those around us, including our patients. If you are interested stay tunes for Step One Download Audio