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Join me online, via Zoom, in a small group for this 8-week course. 

Weekly sessions which last around 2 hours, with a break. 

When I became sick in 2018 with Lyme Disease and MCAS, I felt as though my life was over. It was a gruelling battle just to get through each day, and I felt at times that I was going mad. 

I know for many of you, this is a daily reality as you struggle to adjust to life with health conditions like Long Covid, autoimmune conditions, ME/CFS, PoTS, Lyme and MCAS, and chronic pain. 

Living with these conditions is exhausting, physically, emotionally, and mentally. It’s a constant emotional rollercoaster. You feel you can’t trust your body, and you don’t know what each day will bring.

You may be battling to keep working and hold it all together, while you feel like you are falling apart inside. Or maybe you can’t work, and it feels like the illness has taken over your whole life and your identity. 

What’s more, you’ve probably been told to “reduce stress”, without anyone explaining how, or why it would actually help. And anyone who lives with illness knows, that is much easier said than done!

This course explores the science of how the nervous system and chronic illness interact. It offers practical, realistic, evidence-based tools drawn from the fields of mindfulness, psychotherapy, cognitive behavioural strategies, somatic therapy and compassion-based approaches to give you real, practical tools to help you to cope with the challenges of ongoing health conditions.

I’ll be explaining:

• Why stress can amplify pain and fatigue
• Simple nervous system regulation techniques
• How to manage difficult thoughts and emotional spirals
• Ways to respond to yourself with compassion rather than self-criticism
• Tools to access the parasympathetic state, and support your body to heal

I want to be clear, this is not about suggesting there is a magic ‘cure’ for chronic illness, and it is absolutely not about suggesting that illness is “all in your head.” 

I live with chronic pain and illness, and I am also a qualified psychotherapist, mindfulness teacher, and these are the tools that I use to help me to stay mentally well while navigating the day-to-day struggles of illness. 

This is about understanding how our minds and bodies work together, and how we can harness them to genuinely improve our quality of life.

Topics covered:

• Week 1: What is Mindfulness, the science of why it's good for us, and a brief introduction to the basic tool of working with the breath.
• Week 2: Wellbeing Tools. Following on from last week, we learn more about practical tools that can support wellbeing, including the breath, senses, and thoughts. 
• Week 3: Mindfulness Attitudes. How we can use mindfulness attitudes like non-judgement, acceptance, and letting go to help us with illness. How can we be asked to 'accept' this - and what does that actually mean? We explore what these attitudes are, and what they are not. (Spoiler – it does NOT mean giving up hope of getting better!) 
• Week 4 – Looking after Ourselves, Practicing Self-Compassion. We look at tools that can help us to look after ourselves, and the scientific benefits to our health of being compassionate and kind towards ourselves, and what this looks like in practice. 
• Week 5: Dealing with Difficulty. Understanding the purpose of emotions, and tools that can help us to cope with strong or difficult emotions, and difficult life experiences.
• Week 6: Befriending the Body. We look at how we can reconnect with our bodies, encourage our body’s natural healing processes, and begin to feel safe in our body again. 
• Week 7: Resilience and Stress. Coping with stress and building our inner resilience can help us during the difficult times on our illness journey. This week we look at tools that can help us do this. 
• Week 8: Making A Habit - how to integrate these practices into our daily life, and support ourselves to take positive actions each day to support our wellbeing.  

1:1 Mindfulness course options are also available, if you prefer to work privately with me on a 1:1 basis - get in touch with me for costs and availability. 

Also available - one-to-one Mindfulness relaxation sessions - these sessions are great for experiencing Mindfulness and helping you relax, without the theory.