 Good afternoon everybody and a very warm welcome to our Lunchtime Webinar Express series. We've got a fascinating session today with Jordana Goldstein, who will be talking us through and also demonstrating some mindfulness techniques. If you would like to share any thoughts about today's webinar on the socials, you can use the hashtag CIMEvents. Okay, so now it's time for me to introduce our guest speaker for today's session, Jordana Goldstein. If you'd like to turn your webcam on, Jordana, I'll pass things over to you in a way you go when you're ready. Okay, I just want to say thank you everyone for coming today to this webinar. Healing through the present moment, mindfulness for marketing. We're going to cover a little bit of my story, how I came to mindfulness and how it was helpful in my own life. What is mindfulness? The healing benefits. Mindfulness as it pertains to marketing, the ten attitudes, the practice itself, and the phases of a mindful meditation. And then we're actually going to do a practice and then we'll go into the Q&A. So in my early 20s, I was a professional dancer in New York City and I came down with Graves disease, which is a hyperthyroid condition. And it put me on a whole other path where I was determined to heal myself. So I went to massage school and I studied yoga and meditation. And I met a Zen Buddhist monk and I worked with her one-on-one and in group. And she taught me mindfulness and it changed my life. I became conscious of a lot of things that were hidden inside of me, the shadow aspects of myself, fears and insecurities. And things that nutrition, yoga and other forms of meditation weren't accessing. And so eventually I was able to heal myself of what's considered to be an incurable disease. And so for me, mindfulness became a passion in my healing toolbox. And since then I have been spending the last 30 years of my life guiding people to heal themselves through the paths of body work, meditation, yoga and mindfulness and breath work. I have a center outside of Barcelona where I do all of that work. So mindfulness was a huge catalyst of change in my life. So what is mindfulness? Mindfulness was created by John Kabat-Zinn. He's a scientist in Worcester, Massachusetts, which happens to be my hometown. And he worked at a hospital called UMass Medical Center. And they were working with people with chronic pain. And he was doing all the research. And the doctors came to him and asked him what the research was showing, if the people were getting better through the conventional treatments that they were administering. And the studies showed that they weren't getting better. And so John Kabat-Zinn at the time was studying meditation with Tick Nutt Han, who's a very famous Buddhist monk. And he asked the doctors if he could administer or teach the mindfulness or the meditation techniques of Tick Nutt Han to the patients. And it was the 1970s. And so the doctors were open to it. And so they started what's called now the Pain Clinic at UMass Medical Center, which has huge success in treating patients with chronic pain through mindfulness and meditation techniques. And John Kabat-Zinn created the name Mindfulness. It was originally vipassana meditation, which comes from Buddhism. But he wanted to make it more secular so that it was more available to the general public and people would be more open to it. So what are the benefits of mindfulness? It reduces stress and anxiety and depression. It improves quality of sleep, lowers blood pressure. It improves digestion and alleviates pain. All of these things are aspects that many people suffer from in their daily lives. And it affects us not only in our personal lives, but also in our work lives. The mindfulness meditation helps to bring us into the present moment. We can let go of the past, let go of the future and come into the present and come into the present with consciousness and slow everything down. And that's where all the benefits sort of stem from. In terms of marketing, it'll help us clear our minds, improve concentration, enhance creativity. It connects us with our intuition. It improves emotional intelligence, which will help us to work better with our team members, with our clients. And it raises our consciousness, which for me is like, when I'm more aware, people can see that I'm more conscious when I'm working with them. And I'm more apt to be hired again for a job because of my level of consciousness. Mindfulness and marketing. So there's a philosophy and Buddhism that says what we focus on is what we create. And ultimately, it's the law of karma. So what I put out there is what's going to come back to me. And I don't have to wait to vote every four years in an election. I cast my vote every moment, every present moment with my thought, word and action. So the present is based on my past thoughts, words and actions. And the future is based on my present thoughts, words and actions. So alignment is really important, especially if we're marketing something. So we wanted to have the most success that it can have. And so I need to be in line with thought, word and action. Otherwise, if I have one that's off alignment, I may lose 30% of that return. Also, it's really important that I am conscious of why maybe I'm not aligned with it. And maybe, for example, what can happen and it happens with a lot of my clients is they don't like their jobs. And so they're not aligned with what they're doing. And so then they don't have success. And it can happen in marketing. If I'm not aligned with maybe the ethics of the company that I'm working for, it's something to think about in terms of will I have success? Will I be able to work with this client? And if it's a matter of money, then I can actually consciously say, okay, I'm going to do this because I need the money. But then next time I will be more conscious and try to stay aligned. And then if I have that conscious awareness, the energy will come back to me. And the success of wanting to make money will come back. So it's all about being conscious and aligned and being aware of that circle of energy that I put out there is going to come back to me. This goes along with what's my seat of intention. So every creation that I have needs to have a seat of intention. If I have no intention, it's kind of like I'm going in circles and there's no direction. It's like a car without putting the address in the GPS. So it's really important that every step of the way and my creation of marketing and supporting my client that I have an intention and I'm clear with what I want to grow. That will help also and is a very important part of mindfulness and will practice that in the meditations. Are we creating from mind or from heart? So it's about all about balance, mindfulness and meditation. It's about finding that neutral space. And oftentimes in the material world, we work more from mind and not always from heart. And so it's about finding that balance, taking into consideration the logics, but also taking into consideration the emotions when I'm promoting and also in my own process of creation and my own process of work. Are we creating an illusion or are we creating authenticity? Again, it's the same thing. People nowadays are all complaining about Instagram and how it's such an illusion. And there are a lot of people that are getting turned off by that. Can we find a balance? Can we find the neutral space between the illusion of like wanting to sell something and making it look good, but also bringing in some sort of reality and authenticity. And that balance will help create a solid creation. Otherwise, if it's just in the illusion, the creation might be temporary. It may not be solid. It may not stand the test of time. What do we want for ourselves and the world? So this goes along with the ethics and we may take time to evolve into this part of our marketing and into this part of our work. But to have to just be conscious of what I'm putting out there is what I'm coming, what is coming back to me. Do I want that for me? Do I want that for my children? And if not, I may not have success in the work that I'm doing. So I may want to find clients that are more aligned with my level of ethics. There's no judgment from the practice of mindfulness of what is ethically good or bad because it actually I'm going to go into the next slide now where we talk about the ten attitudes of mindfulness and the first one is non-judgment. So not judging, not going into good and bad. We try to transcend this duality and come to a neutral space and see things as they are. So an orange is an orange and an apple is an apple and no one is better than the other. Mindfulness is also about patience, slowing things down, even if you have deadlines and you may be stressed out. And you may be multitasking to try to take things one step at a time and slow it down. And you'll probably end up having more time in the end. Beginner's mind. We carry a baggage with us of all of our knowledge through lifetime and all the influence from society. It's about trying to let that go and just having a clean slate and a clear mind so that we're open to channel and we're open to receive the creative information that needs to come through us. Trusting the process. Sometimes the process may have ups and downs and trying to stay in that middle path and just observing those ups and downs and not going into them. So trying to trust myself and my solidity with my practice of mindfulness. And this takes time and it takes practice. It's a discipline. The next attitude is acceptance or sorry, non-striving. So non-striving is not entering into competition. So I don't want to push or press or stress anything. The more relaxed I am with my work and with what I'm doing, the more relaxed the energy is and it will come back and it won't have any kind of tension or resistance within the creation. And that will help a lot with the success of my work. Acceptance. So there's an expression in Buddhism. Resistance is persistence and acceptance is transformation. So if I resist something, it's just going to push back and it's just going to go up against me and it's going to stay there longer. But the moment I accept something as it is in the present moment, which is kind of any part of mindfulness. Gratitude. So when I go into those dark moments of insecurities or fears or tension, I like to make gratitude lists because it all of a sudden bumps me up into another vibration of abundance. And that's ultimately what we're trying to create. It's just abundance of good say economic abundance, abundance of joy, abundance of love, abundance of peace, whatever it is that we're trying to create and that will help. Generosity is not just generosity of money, but generosity of time and energy and especially in terms of receiving. Oftentimes we're doing and we're acting and we're giving and we forget to receive. And again, we're talking about that circular cycle of energy in Buddhism and mindfulness, which is giving and receiving and not just one or the other. So the practice can be informal, which means I can do it during any kind of activity. So I can practice mindfulness while I'm cooking, while I'm cleaning, while I'm showering. So there's not usually an excuse of why I can't do it, the practice. And the more practice that we can do, the more we can integrate it into our lives. Formal practice is what we'll do today where we're actually sitting and doing a formal meditation. So that takes a little bit more focus in terms of carving out time for us to do it. Normally, I like to use the breath as a focus, but there are all kinds of focuses that we can use. But the breath tends to be probably the most popular focus and that's what we'll use today. And when we're focusing on the breath, the mind will have its normal tendency to drift off into sensations, emotions and thoughts. That's normal. If that happens a thousand times during a meditation, it's okay. If every time we come back to the breath, we're still meditating. But if I go off into thought and I start thinking, oh, what am I going to eat? What am I going to cook? And what do I need to buy for the recipe? Then I'm thinking. So I need to bring myself back without punishing myself and just bring myself back to the breath and focus again. There may be sounds that may distract me and that's okay too. So bring yourself back to the breath and to the meditation. And also another way that we can bring ourselves into this present moment is through the five senses. So through sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. That automatically puts me in the present moment, takes the past and the future away. And I'm just here and now with my five senses. The sensations, the emotions and the thoughts can also be used as focuses like the breath. But I'm not going to get into that today because it's more of an introspective type of meditation, which is more complex. So you can see that mindfulness is a discipline. The more we apply it, the better we feel. There is a level of ethics because it does align us with our own ethics and it does create compassion and consciousness, which I feel is really helpful in our personal lives and our work lives. So the phases of a mindful meditation. The first part is to have a focus. So today we'll have the focus of the breath. The second part is that I observe where my mind goes. So if my mind goes off into thoughts, I observe the thought and I name it. So if I have a thought of hunger, I just say hunger. I accept that I have the thought of hunger instead of resisting it. I actually love the thought because it's my body saying that I need to eat. But I'm doing a discipline. So I'm going to just tell the thought that I'm going to leave it for a moment and I'll take care of it later and come back. So as I do that, the thought, it's like an alarm and so it'll calm down because it knows that I acknowledge the alarm and it'll just let go and then I can return to my focus. I like to allow three impulses before moving. So if I feel like I have to move, I just acknowledge it and let it go. And then the second time it comes, I do the same. And the third time it comes, that's when I allow myself to move. Otherwise, I'm just reacting on automatic pilot and mindfulness is about slowing down acknowledging things as they are and then moving from there. So I want to do that process with my impulses to move as well. So we're going to begin the meditation now. And so you can just prepare yourself. You can sit in a comfortable position. You can sit in a chair, have your feet flat on the ground or you can sit on the floor, cross-legged in a cushion, on a cushion. You want to keep your back straight if you need something to support your back like a wall. You can sit against a wall. And you're just going to gently close your eyes and just bring your attention to your breath without judging it. So just let it be, without controlling it. Sometimes when we bring our attention to the breath, we control it. So just witnessing the breath without changing anything. And just see if it's fast or slow, if it's deep or shallow. And just bring your attention to the sensations in your body and see if any sensation calls your attention. And just observe it, accept it, love the message, let it go. Come back to the breath and bring your attention to your emotions and just see if any emotion stands out. It may be a negative emotion. Try not to judge it. Try not to repress it. Try not to reject it. You want to accompany it on its process. So just observe it, accept it, love it, let it go, and come back to the breath. And just observe your thoughts and just see if you have lots of thoughts or if your mind is clear. Neither one is better than the other. They're just different and each moment is different. And just observe, accept, love, let go, come back to the breath. And just observe if you hear any sounds, what's your reaction to the sound. Just do those five steps. See if you can remember them and come back to the breath. Try not to move remembering three impulses before moving. And if you feel like it's really difficult to stay present, bring your five senses in. You can bring one in, you can bring two, you can bring all of them. Letting go of the past, letting go of what you need to do in the future and just being in the here and now. Be creating space, slowing things down, allowing yourself to open to this present moment in all that it brings us. So I'm just going to be silent here for a few minutes and I'm just going to allow you to play with this process. Remembering not to judge yourself if your mind goes off a number of times. Just remember to observe, accept, love, let go, come back to the breath. And just slowly bring your awareness back to the room and just check in with yourself and see if you notice anything different from when we started the practice. Notice how you feel, if you notice any change or not, without judgment, without expectation. And when you feel ready, you can slowly open your eyes and come back. You see how this practice, if done over time and for long periods of time can have like a really powerful effect on our personal health. And then if I'm healthy, then my work world is healthy. And what I do in my life is healthy. So it has a huge impact on, here's my cat, on how we live our lives. And it creates peace and harmony and slows things down so we can take things one step at a time. So I just want to say thank you for your attention, your presence, your consciousness, your energy and your participation. We all wake up to mindfulness because the more mindful we are, the more we can create peace and harmony in our lives and in the world. So, and I just wanted to pass my contact information along if anybody wants to get in touch with me. I do teach in groups and privately and I help people along their healing paths. So you can click the QR code to get to my website and learn more about who I am. And thank you again, I'm really grateful to Pippa and Elise and especially to Lorde's Oliver who made all of this happen for me today. I hope you enjoyed the webinar and now we will take it, I'll send it back to Pippa and we'll take questions and answers. Thanks so much, Jordana, that was really fascinating session, really, really appreciate it. We will head into the Q&A as we've already received some great questions. So thank you very much for everyone that's posted those. In terms of questions, so we have had really good questions come in. Looking at when to try and make time to practice mindfulness when work is so busy and life is crazy and somebody doesn't feel that they maybe have the time with their work schedule. What would your advice be to how and when you can actually practice mindfulness? Yeah, so the first thing is to practice the informal practice of mindfulness, which is when I'm doing an activity. So I can be washing the dishes and I can bring my attention into the present moment by bringing in the five senses. So I can smell the soap. I can feel the water and the soap in my hands. I can take it slow and just bring my attention to every single part of the experience of washing the dishes and that's a mindful practice. So I can do that with any activity. And I always recommend that people start with reasonable goals. So I would say carve out five minutes in a day. It's better to do five minutes every day than try to find one hour. One hour is a lot and it's usually hard to find. But if I do five minutes a day and I do that every day and then little by little what I focus on comes back. So the space that I carve out, I'll have more of it in a little bit of time and then I can carve out 10 minutes and then I'll have even more time. And that's the way the law of karma and the law of action and the action works. So I'm actually planting the seeds for more time every time I sit. Fantastic. That's actually just answered another question that's come in in terms of how long should each session be and how long should you try and practice mindfulness. So that has also covered that question really nicely. So thank you. One question somebody had asked was, can mindfulness help with physical health and possibly external conditions that someone might be suffering with? For example, skin conditions or hair loss? Do you think that mindfulness can help in that way? For sure. I mean the condition that I had Graves disease is a hyperthyroid condition. It's a physical condition, but I truly believe that every physical condition has a root that's not necessarily physical. And it's usually oftentimes that maybe I'm not aligned in thought, word and action and something's off. So the skin condition is an alarm that something's off in my alignment. And so through mindfulness, I can maybe come to the awareness through that space of practice. What that is, because when I clear my mind, things will come to me in the meditation and I can even ask questions. For example, this was what I said about you can have a more introspective meditation where you may ask your skin. What, why is it here? What is it? What's the alarm? What's it trying to teach me? And so from there I can learn what's going on and then I can change my life accordingly. And then once I hear the alarm and I make the changes, I don't need the alarm anymore. So it's going to go away. And that's what happened with the disease that I had. I listened to the alarms. I made the changes and it didn't need to sound anymore. And so it went away. Very powerful. Absolutely. Thank you. Another question someone had asked in your presentation, you talked about mindfulness that connects us with our intuition. And how can we become better at this? Yeah. When we let go of judgment because judgment is based on culture and society. So judgments like an illusion, it's not real. It's relative. What's good in my culture might be bad in someone else's culture. So when I let go of that, the only thing I have left is me and listening to my voice. So I let go of listening to the voice of society. And even when it comes to marketing, you know, like what society would say we should do or we shouldn't do. I just try to listen to my inner voice when I listen to my breath is when I start listening to my inner voice. I start listening to me. I'm focusing on me. I'm taking in our daily lives. Our focus is so outside of ourselves in the material world. And when we sit for meditation, it's about bringing the focus inside. So the voice of intuition will start coming through. And the key is, is to listen to it every time it comes through. Because the more we listen to it, the stronger it will be and it will sound. And then we're guided by it instead of being guided by things that are relative that may have, you know, other interests that are not necessarily aligned with our own. Amazing and slightly similar to that response and that answer. If someone is just really struggling with trying to get their mind to stop and be clear, how would how would you advise them to to actually be able to get rid of the thoughts if they they're trying to practice mindfulness, but they their mind just won't allow. Yeah, stop. Okay. In action. So if I say I want to get rid of something that thing that thought is an energy has a consciousness and it's actually here. But if I get one of now if I get put I don't want to get out getting rid of anything with it for a moment. It's important. But when we're sitting for meditation, we can have the intention. Okay, I got the thought I got the alarm. I listened. I'm going to do it later. But right now I'm in a discipline. I'm sitting for meditation. I'm controlling my mind. So I'm going to go back to my meditation. So that way, the thought will know that I acknowledged it and it won't come back maybe another one will come and it is a practice and it does take time. Sometimes people feel like they have to have their minds blank and it's not meditation is not that it's just control of the mind it's a it's a discipline it's a focus it's a game of concentration. Eventually we may get to a place where we just are and we're not thinking but try not to have those expectations and just try to accept and be okay today that today the mind is active and maybe tomorrow it'll be different. So one more question that I have come in was if there are frustrations and feelings that somebody may be struggling with that they feel is affecting their job and their work. How, how would you control those frustrations and what what would you do through mindfulness to try and see some benefits from the point of view of how you are at work and how you can deal with things at work. Yeah. So, again, it's about maybe going into those introspection introspective works and seeing why are we frustrated. You can go into the body and see where your frustration lies in the body where do you feel it in your body. And then you can see, you can try to see if you see anything there. In your mind's eye see a color a shape a form. Ask that part of your body if there's an emotion. If there's a sensation ask it why it's there. If we know why we're frustrated but we never do anything about it, it'll just stay. So accompany the frustration, get to know it, make it your team member. And, and then from there you can help it. But you know what ends up happening most of the time is that we get frustrated with our own frustration, we resist it, we push it away we don't want we don't we don't want it there. I would say invited in, observe it get to know it that's consciousness consciousness is about knowing it's about knowing things on all levels. And so raise your consciousness know get to know that see what it's teaching you what it's showing you, and then you can move from there, but then that's the hard part sometimes is the action, taking action on it because sometimes those actions maybe I have to change my job I have to change my partner I have to move cities, you know, because maybe I'm not happy and I'm frustrated in my life so it's, it's, it's complex but, but the philosophy is the basic and easy. But the complexity is how to integrate it into our daily lives. The more we practice, the more we can have more consciousness of how to integrate it and how to use it in, in, in our lives. Wonderful. Thank you. And a question that's coming. Do you feel that there is a connection between mindfulness and self discipline. Is it really struggling. Perhaps with something where they're, they're self discipline is not as good as they would like it to be that maybe they would like to eat more healthily, or be more active and needing some discipline around that would you feel that mindfulness is a way to help them gain that self discipline. Because mindfulness in itself is a discipline. And so, when, when I put that discipline out there, it'll come back to me in many forms. And that's what I find is missing a lot with people like they understand the philosophy. It's very simple. It's very easy, but it's a discipline and easy discipline because it's five minutes. It can be five minutes a day, or it can be just a moment where I bring myself into the present moment. I have every moment of the day to bring myself into presence. And, and it's just that discipline of like consciously coming back every moment to my breath and to me and to what I'm experiencing. So, yeah, it's just remembering that that's the hardest part is just remembering that. I do that. And I do more of it. It is a discipline. And so it will help me to cultivate discipline in all the other aspects of my life. Definitely. Fantastic. And I just have one last question that's come in. When you were talking about accepting the thoughts and the feelings that will creep in and you have in your mind during mindfulness, does acceptance mean that you have to feel passive or be passive towards things? Yeah, a lot of times people think that and they don't want to be passive. It's like, why do I have to someone's abusing me? Why do I have to accept that? What we have in the present moment is fruit of the past. So we can't change what we have in the present moment. But how I react to everything in this present moment is creating my future. So it doesn't mean that I'm going to have to accept the same things over and over and over again. But what I do need to do is accept what's happening in the present moment so that I'm transforming my future and I won't have to do that again in the future. So it's all about like an evolution of my consciousness. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Jordana. Unfortunately, that's all we have time for in today's webinar. But I would like to thank you, Jordana, once again for the fantastic presentation and also for CIM Greater London Group for organising the webinar. So that just leaves me to say a final thank you for joining us today and we hope you've enjoyed the webinar. Take care everyone and we look forward to seeing you again soon.