This session includes information on how closely our heart health is connected to our mental health and how, constantly living in our heads causes anxiety and stress. Simple ways to notice how anxiety affects our body (tight shoulders, clenched stomach and jaw etc).

Learning how to calm our nervous system (and our vagus nerve) and create a more coherent heart which helps to regulate our emotions, giving us a more positive outlook. Meditation and writing around the subject of nature and its effect on our heart.

This includes becoming aware of how we talk to ourselves and how this affects our body.

We will use simple exercises to develop self-compassion, self-love and gratitude, all of which are essential for good mental health. Writing around the subject of Taming Our Inner Critic and generating positive heart-based emotions.

Loneliness has been linked to increased heart disease and a lower immunity. One way to ease this feeling of loneliness is to connect to ourselves, which in turn makes it easier to connect with others. Becoming aware of our hearts and our sense of self can help significantly.

Writing and meditation around the subject of: What situations make us feel lonely? What are our beliefs about loneliness? How can we learn to create the inner sense of safety which enables us to be more open-hearted and connect with others?

Our brain tends to have a narrow perception of people, events and situations, often with a negative bias. Our hearts have a much broader, more holistic perspective.

In this session we will look at situations in our lives and how we can view them differently.

Meditation and writing will be focused on imagining and feeling the best possible outcome to potentially difficult situations or relationships. This technique, used by top athletes, has been proven to help us ‘perform’ at our best and develop more creative way of finding solutions.

Healthy ways to connect with and process emotions by learning how to locate the corresponding sensations in the body. Often these sensations are felt in the heart (or stomach) and finding words and a language to describe them.

Participants will be asked to write down what brings meaning to their lives and if they can find the time for activities that make their hearts sing.