Mindfulness is a mental process of being deeply aware of our experience in the present moment, without judgment.
This involves deliberately focusing our attention to become more aware of both body sensations and the wide range of thoughts and feelings that arise each moment in our mind. With mindfulness practice, we also learn to accept what we notice in our experience without reacting to it or becoming overwhelmed by it.

Many academic and clinical studies have shown that being mindful in our daily life provides us with a wide range of benefits. These include reducing stress and anxiety, managing chronic pain, better sleep, improving focus and concentration, increasing empathy and compassion, developing closer relationships and promoting our overall well-being.

It is important to note that after a lifetime of living without such awareness, mindfulness is a skill that can take a little time to learn. Mindfulness is learned 'experimentally', rather than intellectually. On an 8-week course,  a qualified tutor will guide you in the use of specially designed mindfulness meditations. Practicing mindfulness meditations involves sitting quietly and focusing on the present moment, typically by deliberately paying attention to the breath or other bodily sensations, letting thoughts come and go. Mindful walking and mindful movement practices are learned too.

Learning mindfulness requires regular practice of attention and awareness with the mindfulness meditations. Studying the principles and concepts of mindfulness can provide an intellectual understanding of the ways in which mindfulness can be beneficial, but it is through the wisdom gained by experience of consistent, regular practice, that we will more fully develop our mindfulness skills.

We could think of it like learning to swim. We could read a book about 'how to swim' and understand how it works, but until we get into the water and practice swimming, we’re not going to learn to swim. And just as a stronger swimmer is more likely to be able to cope with choppier waters, a person with well-practiced mindfulness skills can develop greater emotional resilience and a wider range of ways to respond to the inevitable stresses of life.

So, while intellectual learning can serve as a starting point, it is only by taking the time to practice and apply mindfulness in our lives that leads to its wide range of valuable benefits. Many people from our courses talk about how learning mindfulness has transformed their lives. 

This could be you also!

Find out who joins our mindfulness courses HERE

The Peer 2 Peer Mindfulness teachers often get asked two questions:

1. Who joins your mindfulness courses?

Based on who joined one of our courses in the past year, some answers are:
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Administrators, Athletes, Bakers, Beauty Therapists, Bus Drivers, Business Owners, Carers, Counsellors, Dentists, Doctors, Electricians, Factory workers, Financial Accountants, Fitness Instructors, Grandparents, Graphic Designers, Hairdressers, Home Makers, HR Managers, HGV Drivers, IT Engineers, Joiners, Knitting Machinists, Landscapers, Marketing Executives, Musicians, Nurses, Osteopaths, Painters, Parents, Physiotherapists, Purchasing Managers, Road Workers, Receptionists, Retired People, Roofers, Sales People, Secretaries, Shop Assistants, Solicitors, Students, Teachers, Unemployed People, Van Drivers, Vets, Yoga Teachers and many more.

2. Why do these people join your mindfulness courses?

Some answers which course participants gave us for joining the mindfulness course were:

• Be more creative
• Manage chronic pain
• Increase confidence
• Increase concentration
• Manage emotions better
• Manage relationships better
• Improve quality of sleep
• Gain freedom from stressful, worrying thoughts
• To be happier and enjoy life more
• and more

It's clear that anyone and everyone can benefit in some way from mindfulness!

Over 1000 people have already benefited from participating on our courses over the last few years. Will you join them?

OUR FREE MINDFULNESS COURSES are starting soon in Kelso, Hawick & Gala.

Do you know someone who may benefit from our course? If you do, please forward this blog to them now. Thank you.

Visit the website today to find out more information or request a course place - https://www.peer2peer-mindfulness.co.uk/mindfulness-living-8-week-course.html 

​We all know that Coronavirus has brought to everyone around the world an all too real risk of serious illness and loss of life, never mind the loss to our way of living.

According to the United Nations the uncertainty which COVID-19 generates and the constant news about the physical, economic and social danger the pandemic poses is taking its toll on people's mental health.

This is all being worsened by the lack of connection to others which most people are experiencing while social distancing in lockdown.

As human beings, we thrive on connection. Whether these are with friends in the pub or colleagues in the workplace, the power of connection has huge implications for the way we develop.

Indeed, it has been shown that individuals who feel more connected have lower rates of anxiety and depression and a strengthened immune system. A book by Matthew D Lieberman, describes the neuroscience evidence for the importance of social connection in showing how when we experience social isolation our brains “hurt” in the same way we do when we feel physical pain.

It’s for this reason that Peer 2 Peer Mindfulness set up the Online Mindfulness Practitioner Community. It is a place where you can come and connect with others who are also experiencing the impact of Coronavirus and find support from one another, and from mindfulness.

Come and join your mindfulness friends in the Online Peer2Peer Mindfulness Community on Thursday night (6.45 pm for 7 pm Start) via 'ZOOM' and practice 'Thriving on Connection'.

While there is no question that relaxation is a component of mindfulness, what we’re more concerned with are a couple of things:

1. Awareness, increasing awareness; intentionally working with attention to learn how to direct attention, to explore experience, and to be able to shift attention when necessary.
2. Working to regulate emotions; and we’re also trying to learn to regulate our behavior. All in the service of increased health, and increased compassion for self and others.

Crucial to that is the inquiry process after practicing. Inquiry is a dialogue — an interactive process, a reflective process, on an experience that has just occurred. What we’re trying to do in a mindfulness course is enhance a persons ability to be with their direct experience.

So, within the context of the Mindfulness Based Living Course, per se, the first few weeks of the programme are about awareness building and training attention, to work with the body as well as thoughts and emotions. So really getting to know the full nature of our experience. And then the latter weeks of the programme are about learning to turn toward difficulty to be able to build the stress tolerance for difficulty versus engaging in the kind of avoidance strategies that we tend to use when we’re faced with things we don’t like, or maladaptive coping responses. So we’re trying to increase choice about how we might skillfully respond to difficulty rather than reacting automatically or engaging in habitual automatic patterns that may be harmful or at least not helpful to us.

So mindfulness inquiry, then, is part of that process. The guidance of the meditative practices and the cognitive exercises entail guiding us to work with our attention in a variety of ways and also to begin to separate or pause our experience into its components of thoughts, emotions, body sensations, behaviors, or impulses to act. And by doing so, we begin to make difficult situations that are often overwhelming more manageable because we can learn to intervene with mindfulness into various aspects of our experience.

So, for example let’s say we’re driving in our car and somebody cuts us off in traffic. And we might normally get really angry, get all of our sympathetic nervous system fired up, start banging on the car horn. And we don’t even realise that we’ve done this and then we’re in a bad mood for the rest of the day. So, mindfulness is really working to try to help us to recognise when this whole kind of cycle might start up and how we might begin to interrupt that, and then what we might do next. So it’s not really, to get rid of reactivity, or a bad mood or low mood or anxiety, but rather what we do when these things start to show up? And to learn to recognise early warning signs or symptoms or signs before they take hold so we have more options about what to do next.

So, inquiry is a dialogue— An interactive process, a reflective process, on an experience that has just occurred. If we understand that what we’re trying to do in a mindfulness course is enhance our ability to be with our direct experience versus what we normally do, which is to immediately have interpretations, ideas, conclusions, judgments about our experience — we move very fast away from the direct experience.

If mindfulness is trying to help us get close to our experience, then inquiry is partly designed to help us to be able to enhance our capacity to reflect on the unfolding nature of experience and learn to track that experience without running off into storytelling or narrative or other ideas and conclusions. So we’re trying to enhance our ability to develop a language of experience, a vocabulary of experience — whether that’s describing our sensations, being able to describe our thoughts versus analysing them, being able to name emotions in an attempt to manage them better and make them less overwhelming, and to begin to see how the body is a source of information and a place that holds the sensory correlates of emotion.

So, we’re not so locked up in our thinking but rather we are getting access to our moment-to-moment experience.

So when we say the sensory correlates of emotion, we mean something like, we begin to notice our chest tightening, rather than that just saying, “Oh, I’m pissed off.”

Maybe that’s the first thing we notice; the chest is tightening, or maybe the first thing we notice are our thoughts, or maybe the first thing we notice is the naming of the emotion. But if we begin to identify the physical components of the experience then we can then begin to learn to bring our attention here and begin to explore this. So, inquiry is designed to help people begin to understand the how, what, where, and when of experience, but not the 'why'.

This is because the 'why' pitches up into cognition and into thinking about and narrating our experience. And this is not to say that these are bad things, because without our prefrontal cortex an ability to judge and to plan and to have a sense of self we would just be really chaotic. But if we’re too focused in this way of being in the world, what we may call 'doing mode', then we can become really rigid. So by learning to recognise and attend to our moment-by-moment experience, we have another place from which to witness experience and also act upon it.

A new group has been formed on World Suicide Prevention Day (Tuesday, 10th September) to open up a safe space for men in the Scottish Borders to talk with peers about anything that is worrying them including suicidal thoughts.

According to the Mental Health Foundation, suicide is the most common cause of death in the UK for men under the age of 50. The number of deaths by suicide rose by 11.8% in the UK in 2018 with 75% of all suicides occurring in men (Office for National Statistics 2019).

While all the underlying reasons for this aren’t yet fully understood, it has been suggested that some of the risk factors may include*:

• Societal pressure on men to be seen as strong and not talk about emotions because to express emotion is seen to be weak.
• Men may be less likely to admit when they feel vulnerable including to a doctor.
• Stigmatising threats to identity such as job loss or societal standing in a community. One study for example, has shown that for every 1% increase in unemployment there is a 0.79% increase in the suicide rate (Guido Van Hal, 2015).

The new group has been formed by men who after struggling found support in talking and in mindfulness. Everyone in the group felt it was very important to get a message out that “it’s okay to talk”, because that’s what they had found most beneficial. Group members said:

“I felt a certain stigma that was attached to me being a man that I couldn't do what was needed by myself. The more issues I had to deal with the more I became detached from humanity. The more I became detached from humanity the closer I got to loneliness, despair  and  overwhelmed with negative, damaging emotions. Knowing it was okay to talk was half the battle. Noticing the moments of anguish are key to recovery.”

“I was lucky. I had someone who knew me, who encouraged me to talk and seek help. He helped me get over the irrational stigma of feeling that low, that I couldn't show a weakness of character a chink in my armour. I would encourage all men who find themselves feeling this way to talk. It's hugely important to offer that helping hand to guide someone back to health.  To be able to once again see life and love, outside the blinkers of isolation suicidal thoughts give us. And I've found a way, through Mindfulness, of managing the random and intrusive thoughts that still haunted me before then.”

Group members identified that speaking together removed the sense that each was alone in the world with their dark thoughts and emotions. The new group is open to all men who may find themselves in this position, where they will find others who have experienced something similar.

The group is not a therapy group and participants would always be encouraged to seek professional support. While all of the participants in the group to date met through Peer 2 Peer Mindfulness, the group is not a mindfulness provider. Anyone wanting more information about the men’s peer discussion group can contact Brian Turnbull on 07462 891 549.

Anyone in immediate distress can contact the Samaritans 24 hours a day on 116 123 for free.

Many of us can struggle to make mindfulness part of our daily routine. There always seems to be someone or something else to take care of, which results in taking care of ourselves slipping down our list of priorities for the day.

Contrastingly though, when we regularly make the time for mindfulness practice, we can begin to feel better, we can become more energised and more effective and we can get more done than on the days when our practice hasn’t happened.

What is mindfulness practice?

What we mean here, is the regular daily practice of mindfulness meditation. That is, the intentional and systematic practice of bringing ourselves into the present moment – over and over again. Typically, this might involve sitting down and focusing our attention on the sensation of our breath: flowing in and out of the body. This can help us to stay present, and feel grounded in our own body. Every time the mind wanders in distracting thoughts (as it will), we simply notice the thought or the emotional feeling that has arisen with the thought, and bring our attention back to the breath. It’s that simple. But not easy, unless we practice!

In practicing like this every day, we develop an inner calmness, a deeper understanding of our thoughts and feelings, and a greater capacity for accepting ourselves and others. We can learn to respond rather than react to the things that happen to us. This makes us happier and less dependent on external circumstances for our well-being.

How much time do I need?

There is often debate on how much time should be devoted to meditation each day. What is clear is that mindfulness works, if we work at it and develop a routine that works for us.

​One study looked at business leaders undertaking mindfulness practice each day. The participants who practiced regularly for at least 10 minutes per day got the best results.
Just ten minutes. This is approximately just 1% of the time that we're awake! The question we need to ask ourselves is: Is it possible to transfer 10 minutes of the time I spend watching the news or TV soaps, etc, to practicing mindfulness as a means of developing my well-being?

If you can make the time for mindfulness practice, the results can be transformative. Neuroscientists have found evidence that after participating in an 8-week mindfulness course, the structures of the brain change. MRI scans show that the areas of the brain responsible for learning, memory, emotion and sense of self increased in grey matter concentration. Mindfulness practice supports our mental well-being.

If you can make the time for mindfulness practice, the results can be transformative. Neuroscientists have found evidence that after participating in an 8-week mindfulness course, the structures of the brain change. MRI scans show that the areas of the brain responsible for learning, memory, emotion and sense of self increased in grey matter concentration. Mindfulness practice supports our mental well-being.

How can I make time when I have none?

A good mindfulness routine starts with establishing a time and a place. Set an intention to devote whatever time you realistically can to it. This might be anything from 10 minutes to 30 minutes. Stay with the time you’ve decided on.

Importantly, find a place where you can settle and where you won’t be disturbed. This could even be in your parked car before you go in to work each day.

Tell yourself you will meditate for the chosen time in the place you’ve decided on every day. Making this commitment, even on days when things may not be going so well, will help you to form a habit.

If you feel you can, ask people close to you for some support by not disturbing you during this period of time you have chosen to devote to yourself.

Remember also that mindfulness is not just about sitting down to meditate. Mindfulness can be incorporated into our daily life activities. Just bringing ourselves back into our body when doing any activity and noticing the sensations you’re feeling, brings you into the present moment. So whatever you’re doing, take the opportunity to notice the things around you: the colours, the objects, smells and people.

It’s not always easy to make mindfulness practice part of your daily routine, but with a little planning and commitment it will soon start to transform your life.
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To find out more about how mindfulness can help you, email Peer 2 Peer Mindfulness today with your question - Click Here to send your email

Dear Peer 2 Peer Mindfulness Community,

Thank You, And A Very Merry Christmas To You! 

Recently Peer 2 Peer Mindfulness applied to the Aviva Community Fund to support our free of charge courses, which we run so that anyone can attend without barrier of cost. Unfortunately, amid intense competition, our application wasn't successful this time. Fortunately, however, we have received kind donations towards costs from many of you who have attended the courses, and we are grateful for every penny. 

At the moment, it is only your donations, and the time freely donated by our tutors, that enables us to keep running the courses free of charge.

We applied to the Aviva Community Fund to help give more sustainable funding support to our courses. With the help of the video testimonies several of you kindly provided, we got through to the Public Voting Round and the voting began. So many of you supported us with votes and, by sharing with family and friends, together we gained well over 2500 votes! Your support was fantastic, and we are so deeply grateful.

Not even that number of votes was enough to get us through to the final round. We were up against nearly 500 other projects and just 10% of applications with the highest number of votes went through.

We are continuing to make further grant applications and to generate fund-raising ideas. It is very important that we continue our mission to provide courses free of charge, so that anyone who wishes to do so can benefit from mindfulness, without barrier of cost. 

Thank you, our wonderful supporters: our Peer 2 Peer Mindfulness community. We are very grateful for your kindness, for your presence, and for your enthusiasm for the mission of Peer 2 Peer Mindfulness to help share the benefits of mindfulness with everyone.

What a wonderful encouragement you give to all of us: a beautiful message of the season: your support, votes and donations showing a wish to offer kindness and the gift of mindfulness to all.

Thank you, Peer 2 Peer Mindfulness Community, for being who you are. We are deeply grateful.

A Very Merry Christmas To You,

With warmest wishes,

Brian, 
On behalf of the Peer 2 Peer Mindfulness Directors, Tutors and Volunteers.

Stress Awareness Day was set aside as time to be aware of the stress in our lives and how it affects us.

Stress can be a real killer, both in the workplace and in our day to day lives. Stress does serve a solid purpose in human biology, but our modern lives have brought about a surplus of causes that haunt us from day to day. When we are faced with a challenge, or a threat to our well-being, the body experiences stress. Whether you’re dealing with a job that puts you under tremendous pressure, or face struggles in your life or relationship that leave you in a state of constant worry, stress can be a real killer.

The best way to take part in Stress Awareness Day is to take the opportunity to remove the stress from your life for the day.
Here are some One-Minute-Mindfulness-Moments you can try out anywhere and at any time that suits you as you go through your day. Mindfulness can be used in your everyday life and doesn’t have to take a lot of effort or time. You can practise mindfulness in just one minute!

Below, we describe various one-minute mindfulness practices so that you can try it yourself anywhere and at any time that suits you.

Mindful Breathing 
This is a chance for you to step out of the daily grind and to allow time to be present with yourself; that is, being present with yourself, and with whatever arises in your mind and body. Taking a minute to observe your breathing. Breathing in and out as you normally would: noticing the time between each inhalation and exhalation; noticing your lungs expanding. Noticing when your mind wanders, and gently bringing your attention back to your breath.

Body scan
It can often feel like we’re an observer of our own body caught up in our heads. Try spending one mindful minute bringing awareness to your body and your body’s sensations. Close the eyes gently and begin scanning your body with your mind. Starting with the feet, and then slowly bring your awareness upwards in your body until you reach your hands. What sensations do you feel? Heaviness in the legs? Strain in the back? Perhaps no sensations at all. Now move your focus out from the hands and become aware of your environment and the space all around you. 

Mindful walking
Mindful walking is something you can practise at any time as you go about your day. It’s good to try it slowly at first, but once you’re used to it, you can practise it at any pace – even when you’re rushing.
Start by walking slowly: become aware of the sensations in the soles of your feet as they make contact with the floor, and any sensations in the muscles of the legs. There’s no need to look down at the feet. When your mind wanders, use the contact of the feet on the floor as an anchor to bring your awareness back into the present moment. Without judgement, just take a minute to focus on the sensations generated in the body by walking.

Mindful eating
Eating mindfully can take us out of autopilot, helping us appreciate and enjoy the experience more.
The next time you eat, stop to observe your food. Give it your full attention. Notice the texture: really see it, feel it, smell it, take a bite into it – noticing the taste and texture in the mouth – continue to chew slowly, bringing your full attention to the taste of it.

Mindful listening
By taking this time out to tune in to your environment and listen to what it tells you, it will help you to bring mindfulness into the rest of your life – bringing your awareness as you move through the day. Take a minute to listen to the sounds in your environment. You don’t need to try and determine the origin or type of sounds you hear, just listen and absorb the experience of their quality and how they resonates with you. If you recognise a sound then label it and move on, allowing your ears to catch new sounds.

Thank you for reading this Blog. Perhaps you might now like to share it with someone you care about.

Feel free to take another moment to contact Peer 2 Peer Mindfulness to find out more about how to bring peace and calm to your life and the life of those you care about. You can do that HERE.

May you be calm happy and at ease as you go through your Stress Awareness Day.

The mission of Peer 2 Peer Mindfulness CIC Ltd is to provide free of charge, high quality Mindfulness courses to adults in the Scottish Borders region who may not have the financial means to be able to obtain the benefits a mindfulness course can provide.

With your vote we will have an opportunity to receive a financial grant from the Aviva Community Fund which will ensure the provision of our free mindfulness courses in the community during 2019.

The aim of the Mindfulness Living Courses delivered by Peer 2 Peer Mindfulness CIC is to enable and nurture a growing community of secular mindfulness practitioners from all walks of life by inspiring people to live and work according to mindfulness principles, for the sustained well-being of the Scottish Borders and society as a whole.

The impact of the project will be to empower under-served individuals through learning mindfulness skills. This will bring them increased self-awareness, confidence, stress reduction and emotional resilience, leading to an increased likelihood of sustained well-being. Because mindfulness encourages healthy lifestyles, it helps build community and family cohesion. Mindfulness can support the ability to cope and respond in a more beneficial way in communication, relationships, and stressful situations.

Testimonial from 'N' in Hawick - "The 8-week Peer 2 Peer Mindfulness course provided me with a safe place to learn to be with stressful thoughts and emotions by living in the present moment instead of anxiously worrying about things in my life. I have now successfully returned to full time employment and am enjoying life as a mum for the first time"

Please vote HERE now and help us continue bringing mindfulness to your community.

Thank you. We are very grateful for your support.

​I make an intention to meditate (in silence) each morning among nature and most days I am joined at my side by my horse or the local wildlife (pigeon, yellowhammer, butterfly, mole).
Today it was a Bee who joined me and who felt so safe in the energy of my meditation place that it decided it could take the time to have a 'mindful' pollen meal.
Bees are incredibly intelligent and complex creatures, and we, as humans, can learn much from spending time with them.
Interacting with bees is a humbling experience - as you watch them you begin to really understand what a 'sense of community' is in a whole new way. 
They are an excellent model for our communal relationships; where individuals work together to serve a single unit of communal consciousness for the benefit of all beings.
Bees also respond greatly to the energies that we put out. As any seasoned beekeeper will tell you, if you have positive thoughts and intentions, the bees will find a harmony with you - and you with them.
This is the purpose of practicing mindfulness in your life - to find a natural balance and harmony with all of nature, and the human world around you.
Can you make an intention to 'Bee' Mindful in your life this weekend?

As Dalai Lama XIV once said, “Since we desire the true happiness that is brought about by a calm mind, and such peace of mind arises only from having a compassionate attitude, we need to make a concerted effort to develop compassion.”

The sages of mindfulness all talk of three core elements of mindfulness; teaching gleaned from the wisdom of their heart, and shared in hope of us obtaining freedom from suffering for all living beings:
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​Be Patient
Being patient is the calm acceptance that things can happen in a different order than the one we have in mind.

Part of having a healthy relationship with ourselves means being patient through our inevitable and unavoidable phases of growth and personal evolution. Getting what we think we need right away doesn’t always help us grow as much as learning to trust and wait for good things to happen in their natural time.

Everything comes to us in the right moment. Remember that sometimes not getting what we want is a wonderful stroke of luck.

Be Kind
Kindness does not have to mean life-changing actions of charity or selflessness – instead, we can adopt a humble spirit of helpfulness in each small action that we do. Simply considering the needs of others as we move through the world can make a huge difference in our lives.

Be Compassionate
When we realise how deeply our lives are connected to those around us, we also realise that our happiness is not dependent on ourselves alone, but rather on a shared, positive, and healthy bond with everyone we interact with each day.

So, if we want to be happy, we can practice compassion and, if we want others to be happy, we can practice compassion.
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Question for today - Can we allow further growth in our lives to emerge through learning to be more patient, compassionate and kind to ourselves, and to others?

One way of practicing mindfulness is to pay attention to the activity of walking, and to turn this into a mindfulness practice or meditation. 
Mindfulness walking is a practice of presence that you can bring alive in all kinds of settings and activities.
Mindfulness walking meditation can be particularly valuable for helping you to cultivate an awareness of the embodied experience in each moment, allowing you to bring the body, heart, and mind together as you move through life.

When we practice mindfulness walking meditation, we do not need to be going anywhere, and it can be helpful to let go of any sense of a destination or a purpose to the walking. 
The intention of walking meditation is just to walk!

When practicing mindfulness walking meditation we practice bringing awareness to the whole experience of walking: the lifting and placing of the feet, the sensations of the soles of the feet touching the ground, with shifting sensations of pressure and touch; the shift in balance of the body from one side to the next; the movements throughout the whole body as we move; the flowing of the breath.

Mindfulness walking meditation is a key mindfulness practice which helps us to engage fully with our lives. 
It is a practice which connects us to ourselves, to nature, to each other and to all of life.
People usually consider walking on water, or on thin air a miracle. But the real miracle is not to walk either on water, or in thin air, but to walk on earth.
Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All this is a miracle.

Peer 2 Peer Mindfulness regularly organises mindfulness walks in the beautiful Scottish Borders. You can find out the dates of our mindfulness walks and book a place on one by visiting our events calendar.