Frome Valley Osteopaths

I fell in love with this book and inhaled it yesterday, so much of the beautiful and funny teachings from this memoir are relatable, osteopathic, and refreshingly human.

Björn Natthiko Lindeblad, from Sweden, shares the story of his life from highflying economics graduate to Forest Monk and beyond. He shares his awareness that success wasn’t all it was cracked up to be and the search for something more meaningful, which he found, after a few false starts in a monastery.

Natthiko explains that meditation is far from emptying your mind. Whenever we talk with patients about the benefits of meditation in clinic, the common misconception is that the aim is to empty your mind. This meditation teacher explains that’s ‘pretty much physically impossible’. The aim is to ‘deliberately and consciously direct our attention towards something less complicated, such as a physical experience like breathing, this can constitute a healing, soothing break from our inner chaos’.

This break from our inner chaos can also give us a chance to find regulation, to bring our nervous systems out of a perpetual state of Sympathetic, fight, flight, freeze etc. To allow the nervous system to drop its tone, into a parasympathetic dorsal vagal state, where rest and recovery can take place as well as our mind slowing down (with practise).

A state of awareness, deep presence, is also something that comes from meditation, the ability to be in presence, with ourselves and with others is a powerful thing and not easily forgotten when experienced.

There is lots of information in the book to get you started in meditation and I have some recommendations coming for other options. But, If you want to give it go right now, I started with this guidance from Thich Naht Hanh, a Vietnamese peace activist, author and poet. This is just the start of one of his short verses to help us be mindful, it goes:

Breathing in, I know I am breathing in.
Breathing out, I know I am breathing out.

and repeat, and when you get lost in your thoughts again, gently bring it back to the breath and the phrasing above. Thich Naht Hanh has many beautiful books full of these short verses or Gathas, The blooming of a lotus is one I have on our bookcase. Good luck!

Some lovely, not so fluffy, places to start … Finding peace in a frantic world by Mark Williams and Danny Penman. Mindfulness for health by Vidyamala Burch and Danny Penman. There are many other books around, have a google and see what takes your fancy! Apps can be a great place to start too, insight timer is free and there is a huge library to explore and see if anything works for you, some of these help me off to sleep most nights!

We are lucky enough in Winterbourne Down, to have a wonderful meditation teacher called Sarah Presley who runs 5 week courses for beginners and beyond, you can find her at http://www.sarahpresley.co.uk. She’s Fab!

I may be wrong, is beautiful and funny and full of excellent advice on how to not take yourself or your thoughts too seriously, how we can learn to let them go. If you read it, let me know what you thing 🙂

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