Managing Your Emotions – ReTrain Your Brain Course

Download course flyer for Term 4 2011 here

 

About emotions

Do you feel that your emotions are sometimes (or maybe even often) running your life instead of you? Are you anxious a lot, or do you easily lose your temper? Or are you maybe struggling with being sad and down in the dumps a lot? And the more you try not to ‘have’ those emotions, the more they seem to want to stay?

We all have intense and unpleasant emotions sometimes, but if this is happening more often than you would like, or affecting your life in a negative way, then maybe this course is something for you.

 

Why ‘Re-Train Your Brain’?

Intense overwhelming and unpleasant emotions are partly caused and maintained by automatic and unconscious reaction patterns of our brain. Changing those automatic reactions is possible, but it definitely does not just happen by itself!

 

The course “Managing Your Emotions – Re-Train Your Brain” offers a structured and effective method (body focussed mindfulness practice) to re-train your own brain and start extinguishing unhelpful automatic thinking patterns.

 

You will also learn to become more at ease with unpleasant emotions, which leads to those emotions becoming less and less intense.

 

The second half of the course focuses on applying mindfulness skills in situations in your daily life that may be difficult for you to cope with, such as busy traffic, interactions with other people, etc. 

 

What is this ‘mindfulness’?

Mindfulness is the ability to pay attention to an experience in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment (without drifting into thoughts of the past or concerns about the future) and without having any judgements about the experience.

 

The use of mindfulness practice and mindfulness in daily life has proven to be very helpful for many people in their recovery from a wide range of mental-emotional difficulties such as depression, anxiety, anger, PTSD, interpersonal difficulties and also as effective relapse prevention. Mindfulness practice has also been used successfully in the management of chronic pain and has been demonstrated to have a positive effect on stress levels and the immune system.

 

Mindfulness meditation is not about relaxation or about ‘zoning out’ to Nirvana, but about training yourself to become fully aware and emotionally balanced in the here and now. You do not need to sit cross-legged on the floor (although you can if you want to), chant ‘ohm’ or be a ‘spiritual person’.