Easing Struggle
This is a an ongoing series of drop-in courses held at The Christie.
Facilitated by Annette Dunn and Tim Duerden, volunteers with the Complementary Therapy Service.
Please Note: These sessions are only open to patients and carers attending The Christie.
These drop-in sessions offer simple and gentle mindfulness-based approaches that focus on 4 different issues.
You are welcome to attend just one, any or all sessions and return to repeat any of the sessions whenever you wish to.
Please let us know you may be coming (even if on the day) using the phone number – it helps us to have an idea how many to expect.
By attending all 4 you will have had the opportunity to build up a set of skills that work together to help you find more ease in the midst of difficult or troubling situations.
Each time we run a particular session we will offer variations on the approaches used.
Forthcoming dates:
Sleep: Tues 21st February
Fatigue: Tues 28th February
Worries: Tues 6th March
Discomfort: Tues 13th March
We will post new dates here for each run of 4 sessions as they become available.
Session Information:
Venue: Gym, Rehabilitation
Time: 6.00 – 7.00 pm
For further information contact Complementary Therapy Service: Telephone 0161 446 8236
NB. Staff and students can attend, but please check with us prior to the session.
Most sessions include a CD and other supportive materials. These sessions and materials are provided at no cost to participants but donations to the Complementary Therapy Service to support the provision of these sessions are welcomed: please ask members of the Complementary Therapy Service team about giving to the Cancer Care Therapies fund all of which directly goes this service.
The latest poster is available here: Colour and Monochrome Versions
Our Approach
These sessions all have a common theme. When we are bothered or hassled by difficulties in life or when we are struggling we tend to experience unpleasant or distressing thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations. The result is that not only do we have the original difficulties but we also can feel burdened by these unpleasant reactions and our immediate and understandable reaction is to try to push these unpleasant reactions away or try to ignore or control them. This can work for a while for short lived reactions, but we can easily start getting bothered by these reactions and struggle with them more and more.
In time we can become exhausted by this ongoing struggle as more and more of our time and energy gets invested in trying to keep these unpleasant reactions under control in some way.
For example, if we are experienced disturbed sleep our sense of wellbeing is affected. The longer we struggle to get to sleep or stay asleep the more we may start dwelling on our insomnia, getting anxious about its effects, worrying about it. Quite soon we can start dreading going to bed with the prospect of another night spent struggling to sleep.
So not only is there now the original insomnia which is difficult enough but we are also carrying the burden of all our worries, anxiety and dread about whether we will sleep or not and the effects of not sleeping. We are now in a battle with ourselves, struggling against our own reactions to the original difficulty.
Easing Struggle offers simple approaches that change how we relate to what we find difficult so that we don’t exhaust ourselves in struggling against our reactions to what is happening. This is not about sorting out the original difficulty – there are other services that focus on that. This is about discovering our innate ability to find a restful way to be in the midst of the difficulties we may be facing. Spending even short periods in this more restful state can have profound effects on our overall wellbeing as we are more able to access our inner strengths, resources and creativity. This opens up new ways of responding to the situations we find ourselves in and we can experience much more fulfilment in what we do.
Central to this approach is developing the ability that we all have to choose what we will pay attention to in any given moment. As the sessions will explore, we so easily get drawn into automatic reactions and thoughts and the simple exercises we explore on the course develop our ability to notice when this is happening and strengthen our ability to direct our attention to where we want it to go.
Over the course of the four sessions we offer the opportunity to develop different aspects of these skills – but as each session is self-contained you can learn some of these approaches in just one session.
We will update this page as the sessions continue and welcome your feedback on what you experience.
Session 1: Easing Struggle with Sleep
The recordings below are freely available for use by participants of the course. You need to register with this site to see the links to these recordings and view other course related materials: you can register here.
Botherometer and Botherometer.com
This is a session evaluation tool we are trialling as part of this course.
At present its use is restricted to use by the Complementary Therapy Service at the Christie and use by Integrated Mindfulness. Once through initial evaluation more information will be available and partners interested in working with us to develop the evaluation tool will be welcomed.
The in session version is available here.
An between session version will be available here shortly.
Easing Struggle by Integrated Mindfulness is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http:\\integratedmindfulness.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http:\\integratedmindfulness.com.