Search / Institutes / Joana Sobreiro
Search / Institutes / Joana Sobreiro
Search / Institutes / Joana Sobreiro
Mindfulness appeared in my life at a challenging time, when I was highly stressed with much workload. The immediate benefit was learning how to breathe! It is amazing how deep and profound breathing helps to balance anxiety and gives you a boost of energy. I found out that doing very simple day-to-day practices with focus on the sensations of the body, increases awareness of the present moment. Repeating these routines every day changes your mindset to enjoy life as it happens moment by moment. I have also introduced the formal practices of yoga and meditation, at least 15 to 20 minutes per day, and I do them in nature every time I have the chance. It has allowed me to reconnect with my core self, be more patient and more gentle with myself.
I enrolled in a 10 week intensive training, and it just came up in a right moment of my personal and professional life. My initial focus and motivation was solving a post-covid cardiac rhythm disturbance, by training the vagus with different practices. I also wanted to establish a mindfulness routine in my daily life. It turned out to be a very rewarding experience, largely surpassing my expectations both because of the trainer quality and presence, by the group weekly meeting and sharings, and finally because of my personal experience and the resolution of the autonomic nervous system physical disturbance that manifested as cardiac arrhythmia. I had just finished the course when my mother revealed a health issue involving intense pain, and the different practices I had learned helped us both a lot both in pain control and also in facing and solving the situation with presence, acceptance and compassion. I am very grateful for this training.
I'm not good at writing, but I'll try to get it on paper. My process was a real rollercoaster of emotions. But most of the time it lifted me up and I felt light and wonderfully peaceful. I had a practice that I was not comfortable with, the lake. But I want to do it again to see what I feel now that some time has passed. The ones that were undoubtedly the most striking; - Conscious breathing (which is part of my daily life) - Body scan( went back there before I lost myself in stress and fell into the hole where I had been for a while. I went back to paying attention to myself and my surroundings, to spaces, people with a different conscience. I had an expectation that I was going to open new paths for the real me, I just didn't know you were going to give me a backhoe to do it!!! A big thank you Joana, because you made a difference in my life
