wandered, not just being able to focus on it.” Now Christchurch-based, Nick – through his mindfulness-based cognitive therapy – provides the skills to ‘flow and flourish’ at school and in everyday life. In recognition of his expertise, he has been accredited by the Royal College of General Practitioners (RNZCGP) as a provider of continuing medical education for his Mindfulness of Medical Practitioners programmes. He aims to create a ‘mindful community’, utilising his mindfulness-based stress reduction programme to foster wellbeing, compassion, and understanding of neuroscience to build strength and resilience, particularly among teenagers. Nick explains that, in a nutshell, mindfulness is “paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, to the present moment,
non-judgementally”. Or, to put it another way, “paying attention to our experience, not the story our mind and emotions are telling us about”. Wellbeing, he says, requires a sense of coherence – the belief that “life is manageable”. He cites the four constituents of wellbeing as awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. He says young people are overwhelmed today by all the things trying to capture their attention. Many have difficulty in being able to select what to pay attention to, and what meaning to place on it. “We know young people have a tendency to compare what they see on social media with their own experience. “The problem for parents is that it’s much harder to be present too, because they have the same
pulls on their attention.” Anxiety levels in young people have been rising exponentially, he says, clearly related to the introduction of mobile phones. “And we also have to remember that for the past two years we’ve been telling the kids about the threat to survival presented by the global pandemic, and we’ve tried to contain it by stopping socialising. However, we know that connection with society is one of the things that keeps us well.” He says he hopes everyone who takes part in a Mindfulness programme learns that we have a lot more influence over our physical and mental wellbeing than we may think. Nick points out that “we can influence the mechanism to use our mind to change our brain”.
COLLEGE 2022
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