Mindfulness Workshops

Mindfulness is the ability to manage your thoughts, feeling and behaviours, allowing you to control how you respond and navigate difficult situations for the best outcome.

When we are being mindful, we monitor our thoughts and feelings and determine if they are useful to our current situation. According to a recent study we have up to 60,000 thoughts per day, and 80% of them thoughts are untrue (hypothetical or assumptions) or unhelpful.

On top of that the vast majority of our thoughts in that day are a repeat of thoughts that we have already had. When these reoccurring thoughts get out of control or associated with negative hypotheticals, we can be stuck in a loop that can trigger anxiety.

It would be useful to have the ability to filter out the unhelpful, untrue and damaging repetitive thoughts, and only listen to the new and relevant ones.

For this we need to look at how the brain and body work together. When our brain has certain thoughts it releases hormones and chemicals into our body that gives us feelings that are tied to that thought. We then base our behaviours and actions on that feeling.

Thought – Feeling – Action

Lets take a piece of cake as an example. We see a piece of cake and we have a thought “That cake looks nice” The feeling we then have is one of hunger and at this point we can see the very real body responses; a stomach grumble, an increase in our saliva. We subsequently feel craving and hunger for the cake, we then take action to have a piece.

We can apply the same logic to any day to day situation. With Harness Change we use the work with the horses to give you strategies and techniques to harness your mindfulness. You will use these techniques to manage your mind and choose your responses. With our techniques and strategies that you practice through the work with the horse you will be able to intervene with your mind and bodies natural process and give yourself opportunity to make a considered choice. In the example above, what if we were diabetic and didn’t want to risk having the cake.

We see the cake and we have a thought “the cake looks nice.” We then using mindfulness recognise this thought as unhelpful to our health. We then replace it with a thought of “I will not have the cake as it is not good for my health”. We may still feel some of the body responses but we are able to manage them through different strategies we learn when working with the horses, allowing you to make the choice to walk away from the cake.