Mark Leonard - Audio Techniques

Mark comes from a background in sustainability and brings mindfulness to organisations to accelerate culture change. He started his journey adapting mindfulness for workplaces while working as Development Manager for the Oxford Mindfulness Centre. While training staff from the largest veterinary services in the UK, he discovered that communication skills combined with short mindfulness techniques had a powerful impact on wellbeing and team performance. He went on to develop a new social mindfulness programme trialled with NHS staff, which has been internationally recognised as the first of its kind.

Mark speaks and teaches internationally and provides Organisational Mindfulness practitioner training for the Singapore-based Global Mindfulness Academy.

He brings a rare mix of practical front line experience and academic insight to organisations who wish to develop psychologically safe cultures.

Autogenic Relaxation

For your own understanding and safety please read the following carefully.

When practising any relaxation, mindfulness or meditation techniques, if you should experience any emotional or physical discomfort that feels overwhelming, then open your eyes and select objects in the room to focus on. Picking up their shape and colour. It may also help to place your feet on the floor and experience the sensation of the floor beneath your feet as a comforting solid sensation. Give yourself a few minutes to re-engage your senses with the room. These moments, which may feel overwhelming, could be a helpful release of accumulated stress/past trauma. It would be a good idea to discuss any such experiences with 7Futures or an experienced mindfulness or somatic experiencing practitioner so that they can guide you as to how to maintain your practice and work through such releases. Or you may wish to consider discussing your experience with your GP or other medical professional. The following exercises are not meant as a replacement for any medical advice and are provided for educational and general wellbeing purposes only. If you are suffering from any mental or physical health issues you should always bring these to the attention of any teacher providing instruction with such exercises.

The audio track accompanies the ‘Autogenic Relaxation’ script (click here to view), click on the play icon to play audio.

3 Step Reset

Use this short, structured mindfulness exercise to stop for a moment and disengage attention from the internal narrative to give your nervous system a rest. It has three distinct stages, which introduce some key themes in mindfulness practice:

• self-awareness and self-acceptance

• focusing attention on sensations of breathing to reduce mental activity

• grounding awareness in the body.

Use this recording to practice stopping and starting again several times a day. When you've got an idea of how it goes, just use it without the recording frequently during the day.

Mindfulness of Feelings

The greatest work is to know ourselves. Our inner world is shaped by our relationships with others. Connection with those we love and respect feels good. The feelings we have in difficult situations make us feel uncomfortable. The mindfulness of feelings meditation helps us to get to know the different stories we act out in different contexts. Its purpose is to empower us to become the masters of the worlds we create – in our lives and with others.

Concentration and allowing the mind to wander

The concentration and allowing the mind to wander meditation is an introduction to advanced stages of mindfulness meditation practice. This all boils down to a balance of the effort involved in concentration and relaxation in posture and attention to developing a field of awareness grounded in the body, where patterns of thoughts and sensations arise and fade away in the mind. This is supported by understanding the ‘how’ and ‘why’, which you have learnt about and practiced in the other recordings – which is also supported with material in the book, Social Mindfulness: A guide to tracks from Mindfulness-Based Organisational Education.