Last Updated on February 14, 2024
What is mindfulness? For people who are not familiar with it, the word mindfulness sounds very vague and obscure; perhaps not something we would usually associate with health care.
Why? Because when we hear the word “health”, we often think about bodily symptoms and physical illnesses and often disregard the mind. Yet the mind is one of the most important aspects of our health.
It is the mind that determines our actions and our body’s responses, and it has a very strong influence on the state of our body. According to research for example, we are twice as likely to contract a cold when our minds are stressed.
That’s because stress weakens our immune system and affects its sensitivity to certain hormones which can exacerbate our symptoms and make the cold worse.
If we want to take care of our health, it is therefore also essential that we take care of our minds and this is where mindfulness comes in.
One functional definition of Mindfulness is, it is the ability to know what’s happening in your head at a given moment without being carried away by it (Dan Harris, 2014). It develops good coping skills and makes us more resilient to stress-inducing stimuli.
It is a practice and a discipline that is being adopted by numerous companies from different fields of work like Starbucks, Google, Intel, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, Facebook, etc. It has research-proven benefits like improved productivity, stress reduction, boosts in working memory, less emotional reactivity and more cognitive flexibility.
Finally, it is mindfulness that FriendlyCare has now included to its array of affordable quality health services.
The Mindfulness-Based Wellness for Stress Reduction (MWSR) in the workplace is a program by FriendlyCare and developed in collaboration with The Centre for Mindfulness Studies (CMS) from Toronto, Canada, to suit the Filipino working class’ needs.
CMS led by Executive Director Tita Angcangco and Faculty Director Patricia Rockman have trained FriendlyCare facilitators and equipped them with the skills necessary to hold mindfulness-based workshops and teach Filipinos how to be mindful of themselves and take better care of their health.
The MWSR program offered by FriendlyCare is the first of its kind in the Philippines. It is a group-based, drug-free, portable 4-week workshop that comes with one 3-hour learning session each week.
In the four-week workshop, the participants will learn how to develop life skills including self-awareness, focused attention, conscious choices to respond versus react, emotional regulation, and mindful observing, that ultimately result to compassion, wisdom, empathy, resilience, and taking care of self and others.
FriendlyCare’s MWSR program is conducted in an experiential manner, which means that participants learn not merely through lectures but rather learning by doing. It guides participants in integrating mindfulness into their everyday lives and enables them to have a mindful habit. Also, since FriendlyCare is committed to providing its clients with quality but affordable health services, we are offering our MWSR program to all interested participants, at a friendly cost.
If you wish to be mindful and take better care of your mind, if you want to be able to cope with all the stressful situations life brings you to, and if you desire to become a more resilient, well-rounded person why not try to become mindful?
We, at FriendlyCare, would be more than willing to help! Call us at 722-5205 now!
You may also visit our facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/mindfulness.friendlycare/.
Sources:
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/07-08/ce-corner.aspx
http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2012/04/02/why-stress-makes-colds-more-likely/
Mindfulness Tool
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