 Thank you, Helen, and thank you all very much for having me here today. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. I've heard great reviews of how friendly and open-minded everyone is, so what could go wrong? So I've personally been practicing mindfulness and compassion for about 20 years and as Helen said, set up a charity with some other educators in 2010 because we were witnessing an explosion in mental health issues in schools, which is continuing unabated and the mindfulness and compassion tools we use are drawn from ancient wisdom traditions, but are backed up by a large body of modern scientific evidence. So this is what computers look like when I studied in college, which is quite some time ago. This was a Vax no such thing as laptops. It was a lot less fun, I think, than what you guys have to to work with today. And I worked in various places all over the world and then when I had children, I took a break and started exploring meditation for myself initially and then had the urge to share it a bit more widely because I was benefiting so much from it myself. I found it a wonderful way to stay sane and less reactive within the very challenging world of young children. So I'll put this out there as a bit of a bold claim at the start of the presentation that well-being and happiness are actually trainable skills. And this is a quote from Richard Davidson, who's a leader in the neuroscience in this field and I'd also add to that that empathy and emotional intelligence and focus and all of these skills are all trainable. But the best way to understand mindfulness is actually to have a go at it. So we're just going to do a very short one minute little mindfulness practice just to get a feel for what what it is I'm talking about. Hands up if you've ever done it before. Okay, so there's quite a few people who've had a go. So you'll be familiar with this. We just sit as you are in your chair. No need to do anything different and just allow your attention to drop down into your feet. You could wiggle your toes for a few moments just to see you can come into contact with sensations in your feet. You could maybe notice where your feet come in contact with your shoes. Or whether your feet feel warm or cold, heavy or light. Or if there's any sensations of tingling or numbness and then you could just shift attention to where your body meets the chair. Noticing sensations there too. Okay, and then we can just come back together. So that's all it is really. It's no big mystery. It's just coming into contact with sensations in our body or thoughts and emotions in our mind. Or even with where we are right now with what's happening in the environment around us. So it's about being present and we can train in that. So this is a half our presentation today with 10 minutes for questions and answers at the end. By the end of the presentation, I'd really hope you have a good feeling for what mindfulness is and that you might even be eager to take it up. So who is it for? That look familiar to anyone? Anyone have a mind that's a bit like spaghetti junction? So it's for anyone who feels this sort of endless looping thoughts and maybe emotions running riot, maybe anxiety, maybe depression. I'm not bagging out thinking. Thinking is incredibly useful, but it's when it's constant and a bit out of control that we might need some help to soothe that the thinking mind. And we can feel this agitation in our body as well and we can notice it in our behavior. Perhaps when someone's talking to us, we're only half listening, we're thinking about what we're gonna say or thinking about something else entirely. Or maybe we don't notice tension in our body until it turns into chronic pain. There's lots of different symptoms of stress that really affect our quality of life that we tend to ignore. It might come as a surprise that this kind of mind has been around for a very long time. The texts from a couple of thousand years ago also talk about this speedy, distracted mind and often call it monkey mind. So this mind that bounces around from task to task and can't settle or focus. So the techniques we use or the tools we use have been around for that long and have been transforming minds and hearts since, you know, for a couple of thousand years. So they're well tested. So mindfulness helps us to shift out of this very busy thinking and doing and very driven mode that we're all all too familiar with and to settle more into a being mode or a sensing mode. This wandering mind, this distracted mind is very common in a study from 2010 with over 15,000 people. They were called track your happiness. They pinged them at different times of the day and asked them what they were doing, what they were thinking of, if they were thinking of something different than what they were doing and how they were feeling and they discovered that we're mind wandering almost half of the time. So we're not present in our lives for half of the time. If you add to that the amount of time we're asleep, we're missing rather a large chunk. And mindfulness, you can see how this impacts at work that half of the time we're not, we're off task half of the time at work and it doesn't just affect productivity, it affects happiness levels too. It's a really good predictor of how happy we are, how often our mind wanders. It's not our fault. We have something called a negativity bias. When our minds wander, they tend to wander to negative things. So we're not sitting there dreaming of the beach or the holidays generally. We're dwelling over some past hurt or regret or we're worrying about something in the future or if you're anything like most people today, you're running multiple to-do lists in your head all the time. And there's very little space and very little peace. But we can train ourselves to be present. So on top of this ancient brain that we're burdened with, there's now this modern twist of a huge quantity of information we're bombarded with every day. They say that it's more now in a single day than in the Middle Ages they would have had in their entire lifetime. And it's almost 24-7. Many of us check our phones first thing in the morning. Anyone nodding to that or last thing at night or even during the night? I've heard so and then we were surprised when we can't sleep. And we can we think we can multitask, but actually all we're doing is shifting very inefficiently between tasks and we lose time and we lose quality of work when we do that. And these two things, this internal distracted speediness and the external overload of information not surprisingly lead a lot of us to a quite an anxious place in our daily lives. So that's where mindfulness can help. As well as reducing stress and anxiety and depression, it can also enhance a number of very positive qualities such as enjoyment and delight and clarity and even creativity and enhance relationships and emotional intelligence. So what exactly is it? It's a little bit more, a few more definitions. John Kabat-Zinn is widely regarded as the founder of the modern mindfulness movement. He started in the 70s in a hospital in Massachusetts working with patients with chronic pain. And he says mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what we're doing. It's moment to moment awareness. And that's something we can all do. Did you notice a little bit more presence when we brought attention to our feet? Do you ever feel in flow, in work and completely absorbed in what you're doing? Or maybe intensely absorbed in some strenuous physical activity where you're not distracted by other thoughts? Well, we're all capable of it, but most of us can't sustain it. It sort of hits us at random points. So John Kabat-Zinn also says and that we bring to it an attitude of openness, curiosity and kindness. Suspending judgment and self-criticism is key to the practice. And it can feel really nourishing to drop out of the thinking mind and into the sensing or being of the body. But it can also sometimes be uncomfortable. Sometimes when we sit, we realize that, oh, I'm tired or I'm irritable or I'm anxious or sad. But this is really valuable to know too. Often we ignore or push down those feelings. But maybe we need to do something to take care of ourselves. It also helps us to respond a little more wisely whenever we feel provoked or triggered rather than reacting on autopilot or reacting habitually. And over time, we can learn to observe our thoughts as temporary events in our minds. They may or may not be true. They may or may not be real. They may or may not be important. They're just thoughts. Thoughts are not facts. There's an old story, a traditional story that talks about the second arrow when we encounter a painful event that the first arrow represents the event itself. And the second arrow is the suffering that we add to that. So maybe we rage and we look for someone to blame or maybe we shame ourselves for whatever has happened. But with mindfulness, we get a bit of a pause and we get to take some time to maybe respond a little bit more wisely or compassionately. So John Kabat-Sin says in another analogy that we can't stop the waves or we can't stop that first arrow, but we can learn how to surf. So let's have another go, slightly longer than the last one, just a few minutes. It's completely optional. If you don't want to do it, just sit and relax. If you do want to do it, you can also sit and relax. So there'll be no way to tell. So for this one, maybe if you want to practice, you could maybe sit a little bit more upright in the seat you're in, so the spine is self-supporting, coming away a bit with a little bit more strength and dignity in the posture. So with our back straight and as best we can, our bodies relaxed and at ease. And our eyes can be closed or open, looking downwards perhaps, with a soft focus. We'll start by resting in the present moment. Simply aware of any sounds, or sights or physical sensations, and we can take a moment here to tune into our mood. There's no right or wrong way to feel. However we are is completely fine, and dropping awareness down into the body again, and noticing sensations there, perhaps feeling sensations of tension or tightness, or of relaxation, or maybe just feeling the contact with the chair and the floor, or where one part of the body rests against another part, not trying to change or judge or fix anything, and not trying to make anything happen, just observing what's already there, and now connecting in with the rhythm of the breath. It might help to place one hand on the abdomen for a few breaths, just to feel the rise and fall as we breathe in and out, just a light and gentle attention to the sensations of breathing. And whenever the mind wanders, as it inevitably will, we just gently bring it back to the sensations of breathing, and then returning the hand to the lap or the knees, and letting go of the focus, and simply being present and relaxed, and aware of sights and sounds again and physical sensations, and thoughts and emotions, letting them all come and go, without blocking or getting involved with them, simply aware, simply being, and coming back together as a group. So it's a practice called body, breath and being, or mind with heart practices. Mindfulness is quite simple to describe, but can be difficult to do sometimes, and our minds are very busy and distracted. So we focus on something, and sooner or later we get distracted, generally sooner, and then sooner or later we notice that we're distracted, and that's generally later. And then we come back with kindness. So there's a few key points in there. We know what we're focusing on, so we're very clear, whether it's the body or the breath or sounds in the environment, and it's a key moment when we notice we're distracted. That's a metacognitive skill of the mind, so being aware of where the mind is, and that's incredibly useful in life and in work, of course. And then coming back with kindness, we're building up this ability to be more tolerant and kind with our, this ancient brain that we have. It's a training, not a quick fix. They say it takes 21 days to build a new habit, so welcome to start today, if you want, and reap, start to reap the benefits. They start to come fairly quickly. I started with about three or five minutes, I think, when my kids were little and noticed a big difference even from that. They can measure brain changes in as little as eight minutes a day for eight weeks. They can see changes to the structures of the brain. So the next few slides are just to give you a bit of a feeling for mindfulness, so this sense of complete relaxation. We're cultivating three key qualities when we practice. This first one is relaxation or spaciousness. That's a softening and an easing, and we're in being mode, not this doing, thinking, and driven mode, so that's inherently calming. And the second quality we're cultivating is presence or attention. This is a light and gentle attention, but very precise, like a butterfly landing on a flower. So in mindfulness, we choose where to place our attention, and we train in remaining there. And this strengthens our attention clearly, and also our stability and ability to remain non-distracted. And the third quality we're cultivating is awareness or seeing clearly. As I've said, this is a meta-capacity of the mind, as well as being mindful of the breath. For example, we're aware that we're being mindful of the breath, and we're aware when we become distracted. A nice visual for these three qualities is of the sky and clouds, where we're identifying more with this relaxed, open presence of the sky. And the thoughts and emotions are like clouds that are coming and going, and they may be thunderous or light and fluffy, but we've got a little bit of space between us, and the thoughts and emotions were not stuck. And kindness is missing, somehow. So an attitude of kindness. We're perhaps all familiar with having an inner critic, a little voice that maybe puts us down, tells us we're not good enough, maybe criticizes our appearance or our performance at work. And then in mindfulness practice, every time we bring our mind back kindly to the present moment, we're strengthening that ability to accept ourselves and to be kind to ourselves. This is similar to the attitude we might have towards a puppy who's peeing and pooing all over the place and maybe chewing furniture and biting, but we know it's just a puppy, we still love it, and we keep working with it. So that's the attitude we bring to our mindfulness practice. So this self-awareness that we cultivate and this kind attitude we bring towards ourselves has also huge benefits for others, because it's the basis for awareness of other and for our kindness and good attitude towards other people. And just as mindfulness is a quality we all already possess, we also have a biological predisposition towards altruistic behavior. We've got structures like the vagus nerve and we've got neuropeptides like oxytocin, which give us a really warm and fuzzy feeling when we do something kind for someone else. And they think this may have evolved because caring for others was so crucial to the survival of our species. We're very dependent when we're young, so we needed to be rewarded for looking after each other. And it's key to our own well-being and happiness too. In a Harvard study of 700 men over 75 years, their main conclusion was that good relationships keep us happier and healthier. So just looking at how the warm and fuzzy might play out at work, employers are increasingly saying that the 21st century skills they're looking for are things like empathy, emotional intelligence, the ability to work on a team and collaborate. And Google spent a lot of money in a couple of years researching what made a successful team within their organization. It's a project called Aristotle, and it mystified them at the start. They had no idea why some teams were more successful than others. And after sifting through a lot of data and interviewing the people on the teams, they concluded that the key to team success is something they call psychological safety. And psychological safety, they broke down into two key components. One they called ostentatious listening, which is just demonstrating that you're listening. So the person that's talking to you is aware that you're listening. And equality in conversational turn-taking. So this means that the introverts get to speak, the women get to speak. It's all good. So this psychological safety in a team allows for speaking our mind and allows us to take moderate risks and to be creative. It's all behaviors that lead to market breakthroughs. And just as with mindfulness, there are particular trainings you can do to enhance your empathy and compassion skills. There are two big challenges to empathy. The first one is not noticing when someone's in distress, not noticing their pain. And mindfulness helps with that because we're more present and aware. And the second big challenge is perhaps we do notice the distress, perhaps we do feel for them, but we tune out in order to soothe our own discomfort. So these practices just like me and loving-kindness practices can strengthen our ability to be with discomfort and enable us to be in very difficult situations but to really be with somebody who's suffering. So I've mentioned some of the benefits as we went through the presentation. And I'll just sum them up now in a few different domains. So physically, has a big impact on immune response, on general health and well-being, on heart health. There's less hospital admissions for infectious diseases, for cardiovascular problems, for cancer, blood pressure improvements, and higher energy levels in general and productivity. And it's a great way to turn on the relaxation response when we've had a stress trigger, which helps us to soothe all our nervous system. Emotionally, there's a lot of benefits too. This ability to bounce back more quickly from a stressful event is called resilience, and that improves on our emotional regulation and also our self-awareness and self-acceptance. So studies have shown that people who have self-awareness are well able to cultivate a lot of the other emotional intelligence skills, but people who don't have it can't. It's helpful for reducing stress and anxiety and depression too. Socially, it helps us to cultivate healthy relationships and to develop our empathy and kindness and our listening skills and just our mere presence, being with whoever we're with. It helps to overcome shyness and social anxiety and self-consciousness, all of which I had in spades as a young adult. So I can testify to it helping there. Cognitively, there's some kind of obvious benefits like focus and attention and mental clarity, but there's some perhaps more unexpected ones like memory and there's one for the gamers, reaction speed improves. And awareness and metacognition. And the third point there, creativity, is also probably a key one for many of you. So mindfulness helps in a number of ways with this. First of all, helps us to de-stress and be less anxious, which are big blocks to creativity. Also helps us to be aware of our flashes of insight, so we don't miss them. And then after the flash of insight, through to product launch, there's a whole range of emotional intelligence skills that are needed in order for that to be successful, such as being able to build a team, being able to explain your idea, understanding how other people think, and all those relationships, those soft skills, collaborating. So very helpful with the creative cycle. And organizationally, there's a number of benefits. Clearly, if your employees are all practicing mindfulness, there'll be a leap in focus and productivity and in job satisfaction too. And it also enhances leadership skills, as I said, it brings this self-awareness, which is key to leadership. Less time off for stress and burnout. At the moment, it's estimated that days off due to mental ill health cost about £1,000 per employee per year. And 45% of all sickness absences are due to mental health issues. So if we can take care of that, we're in a good place both personally and work-wise. I'm not saying that it replaces doing something to fix dysfunction in an organization. We need to address that as well. But if we're all more mindful, we might have a bit more clue about how to go about that. There's a number of changes that they can measure that happen in the brains of people who practice regularly, such as the shrinking of the amygdala, which is our threat response. And for a lot of us, we're in kind of hyper threat mode a lot of the time, so that's beneficial. Hippocampus is associated with memory and learning, and that grows. And the prefrontal cortex, the higher-order thinking things and creativity, that thickens and has more connectivity. And this is all due to something called neuroplasticity. I don't know if you're familiar with that term, but we're building our brains all of the time. And the habits we have are like kind of super highways running through the brain, where we can traverse them really quickly. So if we've got an anxiety habit or an anger habit, we're speeding down that road whenever it gets triggered. But we can consciously and deliberately cultivate other neural pathways. We can create new habits. And repetition and practice will strengthen those and make them into the new super highways. We just need to decide how we want our brains to wire, really. So just, again, to sort of sum up, mindfulness does help to reduce stress and anxiety and depression, but it would be selling it a bit short if we just say it helps to sort of reduce or manage the negative emotions. There's so much more that comes to us from it. This almost like an inner beauty or an inner peace that you connect with, a sort of sense of being okay that you get when you sit with yourself every day, however you are. So I highly recommend it. It's kind of like a spring cleaning for the mind, where the clutter that normally occupies our mind just settles and we get to see more clearly and feel more clearly. So if you do want to continue, you'd have to decide first that that's where you want to go. And as John Kabat-Sin says, we don't start weaving our parachute when we're just about to jump out of the plane. So having a stressful event looming, it's not probably the best time to take up mindfulness, but if you can start weaving your parachute now, you're in a better place to deal with life, what life throws at us. It's a training, not a quick fix, so you're going to need to put some effort in, like going to the gym or learning any new skill. We've got to put a bit of effort in and persist. So I'll leave you with a challenge if you are interested in what this is and maybe every time you stand up or sit down when you're at this conference, you could just notice sensations in the body. And if you want to go to the next level of challenge, you could practice being present when somebody's talking to you, just giving them your full attention without preempting or interrupting, just being there with them. It's good to have a formal practice as well, or it won't even occur to you to do those kinds of things. So with making a new habit, a regular time and place can be supportive. Even five minutes, ten minutes a day is a good way to start. And 21 days to make a new habit, maybe 92, entrench it. A couple of key points to remember, it's not about emptying or clearing the mind, it's about being present with whatever is going on. And it may not feel relaxing every time you do it, but over time, it strengthens all those things we've spoken about. So we just keep practicing, just do it. These are some of the resources you might want to check out if you're keen to take it up. Headspace is a great app. I don't have anything to do with them, I'm not promoting them. And on Insight Timer and SoundCloud, there's a number of guided practices from many different people. Also, you could go physically to a course such as a mindfulness-based stress reduction course. John Kabatzin was the founder of that. And we run three courses in schools, but some of them are aspects are for teachers. So we've worked in software companies in Australia, we're very happy to come in, if anyone's keen, to learn a little bit more, and they're quite fun because they're designed for a school environment and very exploratory and not dogmatic. Some books that I suggest, Mindfulness, Finding Peace in a Frantic World, is a great place to start. You can't go wrong with any of John Kabatzin's books. And there's some others up there that focus more on the empathy and compassion and the workplace. And one more challenge. If any of you are connected with schools or with education authorities and can put in a word for us, we'd love to be working in more schools in England. And while our hope is that schools can become real visions, real beacons of wisdom and compassion, and that students and teachers have all the tools they need to take good care of themselves, so they suffer less and can enjoy their lives more and be there just for themselves, but also for others, and ultimately have a big impact on the world we live in. That's it. Thank you. Thank you very much, Fiona. Excellent information there. We're going to open it up to questions from the floor. Does anyone have a question for Fiona? Oh, Marietta is our mic runner. Just curious, how long have you been practicing mindfulness for? For 20 years. When do you think you reached a tipping point where you were there sort of stages or plateaus that you reached? Has it just been continuous improvement? Do you feel? I think like anything, there's probably little leaps at different points, but it's a kind of upward trend, thankfully. And I mean, there's still things that stress me. Getting up here stressed me, but less than it would have years ago. And it's not that everything goes away, but that we're a little bit more informed about what's going on and able to deal with it a bit better. But I'd also emphasise for that that also there's incredible beauty and joy and delight in life and ability to be present and really notice what's happening in your life. Thank you very much. I don't know if I'm answering your question. You have answered my question. Thank you. Any more questions for Fiona? Over here. Thank you. I'm working within a FE college environment and I'm wondering what your experience has been working with 16 to 19 year old students and how they respond and take to this. I can see positives from this. I think the initial engagement with 16 to 19 year olds could be problematic. And I'm wondering what your experience with that is? Thank you. It very much depends on the group and the support within the school. So we prefer to take a whole school approach where we train the teachers first and then the teachers work with the young people. We were going in initially and doing sort of those eight week interventions and working with students but then we leave and then they're sort of left. But when teachers are able to practice even three minutes at the start of class every day it's very supportive for them and for students. So we've got stories from schools where very badly behaved students have come back kind of and been able to learn again and been able to feel understood and to connect back in with themselves and the reasons for the behavior. It doesn't work for everyone but sometimes we're ready for this kind of thing and other times in our lives we're not. So within a class there'll be a number of students who are keen especially coming up to those exam years. They're desperate for something that can help them but it'll depend on the individual and the timing and it's kind of key to make it optional so that people don't have to do it. It's not something we're forcing on them. They tend to be enthusiastic and keen. Any more questions for Fiona? Keeping you running. Just wondering sometimes you've got a stressful end at work. You've got a sense of email that gets sent to you and you feel really stressed. Is there any way to step away or calm down really quickly and then you can get back on with your work and deal with it if someone sends you an email or a phone call or things like that? I think you've kind of said it yourself. It's just about stepping back. The problem is it doesn't even occur to us to do this when we're not practicing mindfulness regularly but if we're practicing it regularly and we notice our heart rate's just increased and maybe our urge to respond in a not-so-helpful way then we can just, as we did here, just drop attention down into our feet, take a few breaths. The deeper the out-breath is, the more it soothes our system that helps to release oxytocin and down-regulate the parasympathetic nervous system. So just a few breaths and a little bit of attention down into the body and out of the thinking mind or even getting up and moving, walking around and going for a drink of water. Over here? Just to continue on from that previous question, someone I was talking to yesterday talking about some horrific crash that his sister was involved in. At one point he said, talk about it, I don't want to describe what's happening because it's just having a kind of negative effect and I was thinking, that's exactly right, really, that the more we dwell on negative things, the worse it gets in some way and I'm just wondering if that's a kind of standard recommendation. We've all got these kind of negative thoughts or stressful kind of events and that sort of thing would your advice be to somehow kind of go into a kind of meditation whenever that kind of thought goes into your mind? Thank you. That's a little bit of a fine line there because we're trying to walk the line between not suppressing and not ignoring. We're building up future problems for ourselves and not indulging like where we spin out and can't actually get our mind back. So, and talking about it often helps people but people need to make their own call and whether it's helping them. But so within the practice when thoughts and emotions come into our mind what we're doing is we're not suppressing, we're not ignoring, we're feeling them as opposed to thinking about them and we let them come and let them be, let them stay if that's where they are in our bodies and then let them go when they're ready to go. So it's not, it's that second arrow that's spinning out that we often do or how could they say that to me or why did this happen to me and this story that we keep spinning that actually increases our suffering and pain. Is that helpful? It's the second arrow effect, isn't it? Yeah. But not to ignore at all the first arrow or to in any way disrespect that we've suffered something very painful and that we need to be allowed to feel that and to grieve or whatever it is we need to work through. Thank you. Any more questions? We have a gentleman at the back. Is mindfulness something separate from or different to practices such as Tai Chi or Alexander Technique? So I don't know about Alexander Technique but certainly for Tai Chi and Yoga and Qigong we can do all of these in a very mindful way and hopefully the teachers are encouraging us to do just that. So yeah, very similar but that would be called mindful movement but we can do that when we're just walking in and out of buildings we can bring attention to our sensations but all of those practices are a wonderful way to come back into sensations in the body. I started out with yoga years ago and sort of gradually found my way more into the head part of it as well but I still do yoga. It's very helpful and lovely to do before you sit down to practice because it helps to shift some of the stuff out of the body already. Thank you. Do we have any more questions? I have a question. Is there anything that you wouldn't use mindfulness for? Thank you. Actually I meant to say that if you're in the throes of a very severe depression or have very major anxiety I would advise that you would talk to a mental health practitioner first equally if you have addiction, drug or alcohol speak to somebody about it first it can help in all of those situations but best to do it with the support of someone. That's great. Thank you very much indeed Fiona Clark.