Education

Somatic Rehabilitation offers mindfulness classes (Pathway to the Present Moment) and workshops to individuals and groups.

Next class: Mindfulness classes - Thursday 7 February at 5.30pm

What Sheree and Somatic Rehabilitation offer

In addition to therapeutic services to individuals and couples, Sheree and Somatic Rehabilitation offer various group classes, including mindfulness, during the year. Classes are structured in 8-10 week sets and are of one hour each week.  Classes have been offered in Queenstown for several years and more recently, in Northern Southland.

Mindfulness classes with Sheree offer an opportunity to work with an experienced practitioner with over 1200 hours of mindfulness-based training and many years of experience working with the mind-body connection in mindful awareness. Sheree can help you learn the skill of mindfulness and uses Hakomi Mindful Somatic Psychotherapy tools and techniques to assist you to harness the full benefit mindfulness has to offer.

If you are interested in the process and would like to find out more, please contact Sheree.

Why the emphasis on mindfulness?

While mindfulness is currently popular, mindfulness and its variations have been around for centuries. There are many ways to be mindful, prayer is one of them, and credit must be given to the Buddhist religion for developing effective mindfulness practises designed to stabilise the mind.

However, whilst mindfulness and its variants may be practised in many religions, it is not a religious technique or doctrine. Sheree's experience as a Hakomi graduate trained to use Hakomi tools and techniques in mindfulness, has shown her the capacity to be mindful is a necessary prerequisite to receive the full benefit mindful therapy has to offer via the connection between body and mind.

In Hakomi Mindful Somatic Psychotherapy, Mindfulness is used as a tool to facilitate and use information that becomes available to us via a process of self study, that harnesses this connection.

How does this work?

Ordinary daily awareness is habitual and automatic and when problematic behaviours arise in our lives, it tends to involve certain patterns and states of mind: knowing and understanding what these are can help us identify where we might choose to do something differently. Being able to observe this for ourselves in mindful awareness is key to making the changes that work for us.

What exactly is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is a particular state of awareness. It can be defined as the ability to be present in the moment, fully aware of our internal experience, at the same time as we are also aware of what’s happening outside of ourselves. With practice, we are able to witness ourselves via an ‘internal observer’ - a neural network in the frontal cortex of the brain.

Because this capacity allows us to observe ourselves, we gain the potential to interrupt our habitual, automatic responses to others and to life events. With mindful awareness, its possible to teach ourselves to stop reacting and instead gain the capacity to choose how we respond.

Further, developing mindfulness techniques can give us the ability to apply the knowledge gained from self-perception to improve our connection to ourselves and others. This becomes the groundwork for empathy and compassion in our relationships.

During the process of working with applied mindfulness we may discover new aspects of ourselves, learn to work with and manage our own experience more effectively and gain the capacity for self-mastery.