Meditation for Health

Most of us have an endless chatter box in our heads . . .

Do you realize that when this endless chatter is mostly negative it then affects how we feel? 

Do you know how to stop it or change it or how to restore your sense of mindful peace? 

We all have a mental chatter box, an internal voice of opinions who oh too often insists on having a non-stop conversation with us.  Maybe that in itself isn't so bad most times, but it does stop there.

The major problem is that most of the time, the subject of this internal conversation is mainly negative fears and doubts which negatively affects how we feel? It's this non-stop negative chatter box that often is the source of our feelings of unmanageable feelings of dissatisfaction, frustration, senselessness, which then develop into negative stress, anxiety, anger and depression.



. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

*****

Our Ongoing - Wimmin's Mindfulness Stress & Anxiety Reduction EduGroups™ . . . 

Every 2nd & 4th Wednesday of the month ~ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm

How To Mindfully Make Peace with Your Self through The Self-Compassionate Technique of Meditation

Our on-going bi-weekly womin-affirmative™ EduRaps cover the various stages of the qusetion about wominn- affirmative identity, including  "coming out" process, developing healthy womin-affirmative relationships & dating styles, dealing with stress from partner, family, friends, work and issues of orientation discrimination, developing supportive networks, and effectively using community resources available in the alternative and LGBTQI community.

Participants identify, discuss & are encouraged to practice more effective ways to integrate your wisdom, insight and lessons learned from life experiences. You'll learn to identify your needs without guilt; to reduce stress, fear, and anxiety. And to restore and maintain your self-confidence, unleash your creativity, and simplify your life and love-life as you explore and redefine personal & relational happiness.

Because we are an intentional and supportive group of solution-focused and womin-affirmative wimmin, who are about making our day-to-day lives better, we come together to discuss, encourage and help each other in developing more effective relationship-enhancing, and proactive communications skills.

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the act of being intensely aware of what you're sensing and feeling at every moment — without interpretation or judgment.

Spending too much time planning, problem-solving, daydreaming, or thinking negative or random thoughts can be draining. It can also make you more likely to experience stress, anxiety and symptoms of depression. Practicing mindfulness exercises, on the other hand, can help you direct your attention away from this kind of thinking and engage with the world around you.



What are the benefits of mindfulness exercises?

Practicing mindfulness exercises can have many possible benefits, including:

• Reduced stress, anxiety and depression
• Less negative thinking and distraction
• Improved mood



 Meditation for Health

We all have a mental chatter box, an internal voice of opinions who oh too often insists on having a non-stop conversation with us.  Maybe that in itself isn't so bad most times, but it does stop there.

The major problem is that most of the time, the subject of this internal conversation is mainly negative fears and doubts which negatively affects how we feel? It's this non-stop negative chatter box that often is the source of our feelings of unmanageable feelings of dissatisfaction, frustration, senselessness, which then develop into negative stress, anxiety, anger and depression. 

 EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique)

A powerfully effective and simple, easy to learn, self-help technique to release the emotional debris we carry around with us and keeps us from experiencing the joy, love, health and prosperity we deserve.



This group will help you to learn how to stop the nagative chatter and source of our dis-satisfactions and change it to a more positive mindset.  You'll learn how to listen to what we say to ourselves, and how to be more mindful about what we are saying to ourselves. You'll learn how to tone down the stream of endless negative chatter and to mindfully quite the internal negative conversation so your thoughts and feelings become more Self-affiramative allowing you to have more and more peace of mind.



Are you constantly worried? Feeling overwhelmed? Anxiety manifests itself in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. Do people often tell you that you are too hard on yourself? That you are your own worst critic? Do you find yourself getting "caught up" in stressful thoughts or painful emotions? Do you have a hard time taking care of yourself, or allowing others to care for you?

If so, you may benefit from this 4-week mindfulness-based class designed to help you experience greater compassion for yourself, especially during stressful or painful moments. Learn the tools to reduce stress and anxiety while increasing joy and calmness in your life. Anyone can do it.

Weekly Sit in the heart of Beverly Glen. Here is a chance to get together and sit together in silence. We discuss how our meditation practice is going or not. There may be dharma discussion sighting all the teachers we have in the world. Afterwards is a Metta mediation of compassion and loving kindness. First time to lifetime meditators are welcome.

This class will introduce and practice mindfulness

We will focus on the often-neglected nuts-and-bolts of what to do and how to train our minds. We alternate short periods of silent meditation with an exploration of what actually happened while we were meditating.

We will cover the practical aspects of posture, how to cultivate your attention, work with your thoughts, and develop an attitude that fosters our openness to experience.

Whether you've never meditated or have been practicing for years, the mindfulness meditation group can offer support for a new practice or an ongoing one. Chairs, cushions, and bolsters are all available to support you in sitting whichever way is most comfortable for you. We typically meditate for 20 minutes, take a break for any questions, and then continue meditating for the remainder of the time. 

Life can be so stressful—it really helps to have places where you can learn techniques to help manage the stress and become more compassionate towards yourself and others. Especially for atheists, agnostics, and the nonreligious, it can be helpful to be able to do that in a non-religious, non-proselytizing, science-friendly atmosphere with great, supportive people.

The Humanist Mindfulness Group is a supportive group of people who help each other use meditation and mindfulness practices to reduce stress, clear our minds, calm our emotions, and enhance our compassion – all good things that are supported by science and have nothing to do with supernaturalism. This is the emotional and visceral side of Humanism.

We generally start off meetings with yoga or stretching, followed by a breath meditation or other type of meditation, and concluding with sharing of joys and concerns. It’s a great place for both those who want to learn how to meditate and for experienced meditators who want to try out new techniques and meet great, like-minded friends.

 Through verbal guidance and hands-on energy channeling, this series of classes teaches us how to use meditation as the pathway to deep emotional release and energetic healing. Watch everyday frustrations disappear, and relationship dynamics shift overnight. Learn how to become an active participant in the occurrences of your day, by connecting to and consciously utilizing the source of all life itself: Love.

These classes will begin with a brief introduction and move right into meditation and channeled healing.  We will finish by sharing our experiences and using the power of love to help bridge any disconnections. This is a blessed opportunity to explore the conscious and unconscious blocks being held deep in your emotional, mental, physical and spiritual substance and examine what is holding you back from experiencing your true authentic self and potential.

If you want reminders, you can join either of these meetup groups:



Mindfulness practice allows you to be able to identify, tolerate and reduce difficult, painful and even frightening thoughts, feelings and sensations; it gives you back some sense of mastery over them. Rather than feeling that you are being pushed around by your feelings and thoughts you learn to be able to have some agency over them.

So what is this thing called mindfulness? Below are some definitions:

• The awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment to moment (Kabat-Zinn, 2003).
• The non-judgmental observation of the ongoing stream of internal and external stimuli as they arise (Baer, 2003).
• Keeping one's complete attention to the experience on a moment to moment basis (Martlett & Kristeller, 1999).

Put simply, mindfulness is as simple as becoming aware of your here and now experience, both internally and in the external world around you. It gives you a space in the present moment to be able to more safely deal with the distressing and painful memories of things that might have happened to you in the past. It also allows you to look at and plan for the future, even when you might have fearful thoughts about things that haven't yet happened, from a secure position of knowing that you are in the present moment. In fact, we are never NOT in the present moment – we just lose track of that fact quite often.



Science says we can train our brains, and in a lasting way. Neuroplasticity is our brain’s ability to substantially rewire itself due to learning and experience. Studies led by Dr. Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, for example, show neurons being added to the PFC and connections added between the PFC and the more emotional limbic system (including your amygdalae) in a matter of months. How can you train your brain to include a more powerful inner CEO? You can rewire with mindfulness.

Mindfulness may sound strange to you, conjuring up images of monks or martial artists. But mindfulness doesn’t have to be associated with any particular tradition. Being mindful is as simple as focusing your attention on one thing such as your breath, noticing when you are not paying attention any more, and without judgment, returning your attention.

Being mindful is less about sustaining perfect focus, and more about noticing sooner that your focus has drifted.

Physical balance is a good analogy here. Those with great balance don’t just stay perfectly balanced for long periods. They learn to notice sooner that they are leaning slightly to one side or another. They make smaller adjustments more frequently.

The same is true for those who are practiced at mindfulness. Their attention drifts as well, but they get good at noticing, and returning attention without judgment.

Judging yourself, “Darn it, I wasn’t focusing on breathing,” doesn’t help sustain your focus. To the contrary, judging uses a different part of your brain than sustaining attention. It diverts brain resources from your PFC and further delays your focus from returning where you want it.

Meditation is one practice to cultivate mindfulness. Meditation has many variations. One of the most common is called mindfulness of breathing meditation. This involves sitting still for a few minutes and focusing attention on your breath. Walking meditation is an alternative, where you walk slowly and focus your attention on how your feet feel.

Meditation leads to better health, self-regulation, and relationships

According to a number of studies, meditation leads to better physical and mental health, better self regulation, and better quality of relationships. Studies are clear: happier brains do better work. Happier people are more productive, creative, sociable, engaged, and successful. So investing time in meditation is empowering your inner CEO, so you improve health, self-regulation, and relationships and therefore happiness as well as productivity.





Join our ongoing EduRaps of action-oriented, womin-affirmative,  Questioning, Friendly, Bi-Attracted Bi-Sexual, Lesbian and otherwisely unconventional wimmin, proactively assisting one another as individuals and as a group, to develop more "doable" and self-affirmative relational skills as a way of managing our stressful/ unmanageable life challenges.

We're wimmin who're mindfully working together in identifying and changing any self-sabotaging behaviors that are often-times the main reason for our

unmanageable feelings of anger, anxiety, depression, isolation and frustration.

Previous to attending any of our EduRaps™ or EduGroups™, you will meet [in-person or by phone] with AfraShe for an Initial Consultation.

We meet in Long Beach, California every 2nd & 4th Wednesday at 7:30 pm - 9:0 pm.

Please contact AfraShe Asungi, LCSW at SistahPeace@yahoo.com or 562.498.3318 for info or to arrange for an individual Intake Consultation [in-person or by phone]. The cost for an individual consultation is $25.

Cost: $40 per session or multi-session cost: $120 [per 4 sessions & prepay only]

*****

Proactively bringing SistahPeaceful™, Womin-Affirmative™, SheInspired™ Awareness, Peace of Mind & Satisfaction to issues affecting Wimmin and Communities of Color around Gender, Self-Love, Ethnic, Culture, Relationships and Sexuality Identities.

AN INDIVIDUAL CONSULTATION IS REQUIRED BEFORE THE 1ST SESSION FOR ALL NEW PARTICIPANTS. [This Initial Consultation also covers any other "Open-Format" EduRaps or EduGroups, offered by us, unless participant has not attended a session for more than one year.]

*****

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .