Member Article

Award winning therapist among founders of new Mindfulness Network

As founding members of the North East Mindfulness Network, not-for-profit company Mindful Therapies has seen a great deal of growth and success in the past few years. From their humble beginnings on a kitchen table, Mindful Therapies is now based in the centre of Newcastle and receives funding from some of the UK’s most recognisable companies to provide mindfulness training and mental health services throughout the North East. The company provides mindfulness training to individuals and organisations throughout the region and has a mission to make the benefits of mindfulness accessible to everyone, regardless of situation or income. Rachel Jones-Wild, award-winning mental health expert and mindfulness trainer, is one of the directors at Mindful Therapies and is a founding member of the NE Mindfulness Network. The NE Mindfulness Network was set up to share good practice amongst mindfulness teachers and ensure that service users have access to good quality mindfulness interventions. Rachel said: “Mindfulness is becoming increasingly popular and while this is a positive thing, it is difficult for service users to assess the quality of the services they are receiving. Mindfulness teaching must come from a depth of personal experience to be authentic. Without adequate training and experience, mindfulness interventions can be unsafe. Poor quality mindfulness interventions can, at best, give service users a negative impression of what mindfulness is and, at worst, can be triggering and retraumatising for service users with complex needs and difficulties. “Setting up the Network with a number of other highly-skilled mindfulness trainers in the region will ensure that service users receive quality, accredited therapy to help them develop mindfulness skills of their own. We’re working with network co-founders, Skills for People who provide people with learning difficulties with mindfulness skills to manage their mental health and wellbeing too.” Rachel and her business partner Mark Sidney work in a variety of settings with a diverse range of service users, clients and customers. Rachel continued: “Mindfulness is such a powerful intervention tool, which can have a huge impact on people’s lives. The NE Mindfulness Network aims to ensure that impact is positive rather than negative and aims to deliver mindfulness training in an ethical way. All of our teaching members are formally trained in meditation and mindfulness, have significant meditation practice and are undertaking ongoing supervision and CPD training.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Keith Newman .