3 Days Mindfulness Meditation Weekend in Nature Retreat in Scotland, United Kingdom

Facilities

A mindfulness retreat is the ideal opportunity to simply focus on reconnecting with yourself and become more present and aware. When you're more mindful, you're more open to new ideas, increased creativity, and an enhanced sense of purpose. This retreat will include a variety of mindful meditations practices, experiential work, and group discussions. All workshops will be led by Angela Wilken.

After completing this course, you will feel well-equipped with the tools learnt to integrate mindfulness into your daily life. Mindfulness will increase your level of awareness of yourself, and others, in each and every moment. This increased awareness, brings choice and ultimately more freedom. Mindfulness can help you reduce stress levels at work or at home, become more creative and open to new ideas, more focused and feel a general improvement in your well-being.

What you will learn?

You will be covering the first four modules of the eight week Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR). This includes:

• What is mindfulness
• The science behind mindfulness
• Becoming aware of your patterns of reactivity to stress
• Practicing mindfulness to respond instead of reacting
• How to integrate mindfulness into your daily life
• Mindful eating
• Mindful walking in nature
• Mindful meditations

Sample daily schedule

Day 1: Friday

• 15:00 Arrive, and time to settle in and relax or go for a walk
• 19:30 Dinner served
• 21:30 Meditation

Day 2 Saturday

• 08:00 Breakfast
• 10:00 Mindfulness workshop

Session 1: What is mindfulness?

Theme and learning focus

Cultivating mindfulness can help you reduce the negative physiological and psychological effects of stress reactivity as well as helping you to develop more effective ways of responding positively and pro-actively to stressful situations and experiences.

In this session, you will learn that when you are in “automatic pilot” it is easy to drift unawares into a busy “doing” mode and ruminative thought patterns that can create additional stress in your lives. Continual “doing” mode also robs you of your potential for really living your lives moment by moment.

You can transform this experience by intentionally paying attention to it in particular ways. You begin to practice stepping out of automatic pilot by paying attention intentionally, mindfully, to eating, to the sensations in the body, and to aspects of your everyday experience.

• 12:30 Lunch
• 13:30 Mindfulness workshop

Session 2: Gathering the scattered mind, the power of being present and living all your moments

Theme and learning focus

The mind is often scattered and lost in thought because it is working away in the background to complete unfinished tasks and strive for future goals. When this happens, you miss many of your pleasant moments, perhaps by focusing only on the unpleasant ones, such as crisis or pain. Yet it is possible to have pleasant moments even when you are in pain, and unpleasant moments in pleasurable situations!

In this session, you will learn how to “come back” to the present moment by tuning into the breath and body to reconnect yourselves. Learning on the way that there is no ‘right way’ to experience meditation, instead bringing attitudes of curiosity and kindly interest to your moment to moment experience thereby living more of your lives.

• 16:00 Free time
• 19:00 Evening meal
• 21:30 Meditation

Day 3: Sunday

• 08:00 Breakfast
• 10:00 Mindfulness workshop

Session 3: What is stress? Learning about your patterns of reactivity to stress

Theme and learning focus

Cultivating mindfulness can reduce the negative physiological and psychological effects of stress reactivity, as well as help develop more effective ways of responding positively and pro-actively to stressful situations and experiences. In this session, you will learn that your perception how you see or don’t see things will largely determine how you respond to them.

Its not the stressors, but how you handle them which influences the effects they have on health in mind and body. Mindfulness practices can help you tune into your bodies with a gentle curiosity, helping you to break the negative stress cycle and step out of reactivity.

• 12:30 Lunch
• 13:30 Mindfulness workshop

Session 4: Coping with stress, using mindfulness to respond instead of react

Theme and learning focus

Cultivating mindfulness can reduce the negative physiological and psychological effects of stress reactivity, as well as help you develop more effective ways of responding positively and pro-actively to stressful situations and experiences. Your conditioning and perception shape your moment to moment experience, in fact, there is a statistic that says your experience is shaped by 10% due to the situation and 90% due to your perception!

The session this week continues your exploration of how a mindfulness practice cultivates curiosity and openness to all experience, helps you learn new ways to relate to external and internal stressors, recognize and inquire into your habitual reactive patterns and how to soften resistance and reduce suffering.

Please note that the timings may change.

Toadhall is set in a tranquil rural setting, a five-minute drive from Stonehaven and 10 minutes to Aberdeen.

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This retreat includes all healthy vegetarian/ vegan breakfasts and lunches, two-course evening meal, refreshments, delicious homemade cakes, and healthy snacks.

In your free time, you can go on lovely walks to private beaches.

• Daily meditation session
• 4 mindfulness meditation workshops
• Guidance from certified MBSR coach
• Healthy vegetarian breakfast, lunches, smoothies
• 2-course evening meals
• All refreshments, delicious homemade cakes, and healthy snacks
• Course workbook
• MP3 meditations
• 2 nights accommodation

• Airfare

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• A reservation requires a deposit of 16.94% of the total price.
• The deposit is non-refundable, if the booking is cancelled.
• The rest of the payment should be paid on arrival.