CPD06 Mindfulness for a Meaningful Life
October 2, 2023 @ 8:30 AM – October 2, 2024 @ 5:00 PM
(Year-round monthly Fridays 9:30-12:30; 11 consecutive classes for a 50hr course)
Founded in state-of-the-art science and lived experience, mindfulness for a meaningful life offers you a chance of learning proficiency in the teachings that have been personally effective within Celia’s life. Moreover, you will have the opportunity to create deepened embodied meaning within your life.
Spread over the course of the year, and available for entry at anytime, mindfulness for a meaningful life will cultivate an accessible energy of healing, compassion, altruism; ultimately you will come away not only with continued professional development to assist your clients, so too you will attain your own sense of freedom built upon sustained resilience.
2023 schedule
3 February 2023 – Insights in the Night: How to Meditate in Your Sleep with Celia Roberts
3 March 2023 – 5 Steps to Achieving Enlightenment (Evidence Based) with Celia Roberts
31 March 2023 – How Your Thoughts Shape Your Digestion (Evidence Based) with Celia Roberts
28 April 2023 – Meditations for Inducing Tears & Reducing Stress (rui-katsu ‘tear-seeking practices’) The Spiritual Effects of Crying with Celia Roberts
26 May 2023 – Meditations for Mastering Your Dopamine Release ~ Focus, Motivation, Conscious Manifestation & Fulfilment
14 July 2023 – Meditation & the Neuroscience of Pain Relief with Melissa Day
11 August 2023 – Meditations for Inducing States of Bliss and Transcendence (research based) with Celia Roberts
8 September 2023 – When the Body Says NO: Meditations for Understanding PsychoNeuroImmunology (PNI) with Celia Roberts & Alisa Craig
6 October 2023 – Trauma is Stored in The Body – Move your body out of the Past with Celia Roberts, Alisa Craig and Samantha Lindsay-German
3 November 2023 – Vedic Meditation & Ayurveda for Your Mind with Celia Roberts & Anita Cassidy Bowman
1 December 2023 – The Science and Practice of Mantra Meditation & Marma Point Sound Healing with Celia Roberts, Anita Cassidy Bowman & Tumul Dubey
2024 schedule (Topics TBA)
February 2, 2024
March 1, 2024
April 5, 2024
May 3, 2024
May 31, 2024
June 28, 2024
July 26, 2024
August 23, 2024
October 4, 2024
November 1, 2024
December 6, 2024
About the Teacher
Celia Roberts BSc is the Founder Director of BIYOME Celia has a deep dedication and embodied understanding of the practices of yoga, meditation, Ayurveda combined with Western Medicine. Celia imparts this experiential understanding to others with deep joy and generosity of heart. Celia is fascinated by the deeper dimensions of yoga and wishes to bring this light in the modern practice of yoga.
Insights in the Night: How to Meditate in Your Sleep
This retreat will teach you how to bring your sleeping hours into a valuable resource for deep meditation.
Many of us receive valuable insights in the night that must not be ignored. The Tibetan yogis promote that we are truly awake in the night and asleep during the day. In fact, there are many practices that span across the Eastern traditions that see these 8 hours of the night as a valuable opportunity to awaken, receive insight and peer into another reality.
How do we turn towards this truth and really practice meditation throughout our slumber?
Let us merge the science and spirituality and explore:
- Surrender into Śavāsana
- Master Śavāsana, the corpse pose
- The Mysteries of Deep Dreamless Sleep
- The Yoga Sutras on Dreaming and Deep Sleep
- Yoga Nidrā: Psychic sleep
- Dream Yoga: More Than Lucid Dreaming
We welcome you to attend face to face, livestream or online post event.
5 Steps to Achieving Enlightenment (Evidence Based)
It is my pleasure to invite you to come along and learn how to experience for yourself transcendence and enlightenment states based on the work of Dr. Andrew Newberg, cognitive neuroscientist and neurotheologist. In his book, “How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain,” Dr. Newberg discusses the five steps that are necessary for achieving enlightenment.
In this workshop, you will actively learn and meditate upon the five steps to achieving enlightenment. These steps are based on evidence from brain imaging studies that look at the brains of people who have experienced transcendence and enlightenment.
How Your Thoughts Shape Your Digestion (Evidence Based)
Your thoughts shape your digestion. The way you think about food, the way you think about your body, and the way you think about your health all have a profound impact on how well your digestive system functions. This is why it’s so important to learn how to meditate and to understand the role that your thoughts play in your digestion.
At our meditation retreat, we will teach you how to use meditation to better understand your digestion. We will also provide evidence-based information on how your thoughts can shape your digestion and nurture your body-mind. With this information, you will be able to better support your digestive health through meditation, thought power, pleasure and other healthy habits.
Meditations for Inducing Tears & Reducing Stress (rui-katsu ‘tear-seeking practices’) The Scientific Effects of Crying
The retreat will be led by two expert Senior Teachers and based on the work of Master Rui-Katsu, a world-renowned expert in the field of rui-katsu. They will guide you through a series of meditations and exercises to help you release your tears and reduce stress. You will leave the retreat feeling refreshed, relaxed and with a better understanding of the spiritual effects of crying.
Crying has a physiological effect on the body, such as releasing neurochemical substances that can improve mood. Crying also helps to remove toxins from the body and increases heart rate and blood pressure, which are beneficial for the body. In addition, crying is associated with enhanced social support and increased feelings of connectedness. According to scientific research, crying has a number of health benefits, including the following:
- Crying helps to relieve stress and anxiety.
- Crying releases “feel-good” hormones that can improve moods.
- Crying allows us to express our feelings and emotions.
- Crying can help us to connect with others.
- Crying can boost our immune system.
Please come along to our retreat to learn all about the spiritual and health benefits of tear shedding and experience this amazing practice for yourself.
Meditations for Mastering Your Dopamine Release ~ Focus, Motivation, Conscious Manifestation & Fulfilment
The meditation retreat could be heralded as a “Dopamine Masterclass”. You will work towards better understanding the neural circuitry of dopamine in the brain and body and ignite your inner pharmacy with powerful practice. Learn how to master your dopamine release with Meditation and Lifestyle Medicine tools to improve motivation and focus. We will explore the role of dopamine control in addiction and depression and the outcomes of dopamine depletion. Learn practices and tools to affect sustained increases in baseline dopamine and protect dopamine neurons.
Following this, we shall explore evidence-based mindsets behind good health and well-being, including the attitudes and mindsets of high achievers.
Finally, the retreat will bring back the element of spiritual practice merged with the science of attention, contentment and fulfilment. You will explore how to find purpose with a simple method. Conscious Manifestation as a spiritual practice will close the retreat.
What we shall explore:
- Neural circuitry of dopamine
- Dopamine depletion
- Understanding dopamine’s role in addiction and depression, underwhelm and poor performance
- Mastering dopamine for motivation, focus, reward, satisfaction and contentment
- Mindsets behind good health and well-being (Evidenced based)
- Mindsets of high achievers (Evidenced based)
- Science of fulfilment and contentment
- How to find your purpose in 5 minutes
- Conscious Manifestation as a Spiritual practice
Meditation & the Neuroscience of Pain Relief with Associate Professor Melissa Day
“In this 3-hour workshop I will present the latest research and theory on the neuroscience of pain and mindfulness meditation to demonstrate how meditative practice harnesses processes of neuroplasticity to work for you, rather than against you, to retrain the brain to more adaptively respond to living with persistent pain. I will then provide theoretical and experiential training in several of the mindfulness meditation techniques that have been empirically demonstrated to harness this neuroplasticity to reduce pain and improve function. I welcome questions and discussion along the way, and by the end of the three hours I hope you will leave with a new understanding of the brain in pain, as well as additional “tools for the toolkit” for more effectively managing it.” ~ Associate Professor Melissa Day
Meditations for Inducing States of Bliss and Transcendence (Research based)
I am inviting you to a special meditation retreat that will be focused on inducing states of bliss and transcendence. The retreat will be based primarily on the research by Andrew Newberg, who is a world-renowned expert on the neuroscience of religious and spiritual experiences. Other research work in this area will also be explored.
The neuroscientific and transcendent qualities of meditation are well-documented and offer you a chance to improve overall well being and state of mind. If you are looking to improve your mental state, or if you are interested in learning more about the benefits of meditation for your spiritual heart and enlightened brain, consider attending our upcoming meditation retreat. ~Celia Roberts
When the Body Says NO: Meditations for Understanding PsychoNeuroImmunology (PNI)
Is your body saying NO?
Based on the emerging research in the field of PsychoNeuroImmunology, this is an opportunity for you to personally experience how to use meditation as medicine. Using research from many thought leaders in the field, Celia uniquely brings the research into a meditative, bodily-based experience. Meditations for Understanding PsychoNeuroImmunology (PNI) will explore our body language, facial micro-expressions, posture and ultimately, how stress & depression is stored in our body. Alisa Craig, an accredited Breathwork Therapist, will join Celia to guide you through this journey. Alisa helps people use the restorative power of their own breath to improve emotional health and release subconscious programmes in the mind and body from negative past experiences.
Gabor Mate’s work has inspired both Celia and Alisa. Gabor is a thought leader in psychiatry and PNI, and his teachings continue to inspire the medical world to understand how our thoughts and emotions can affect our physical health. Yoga and meditation have explored this truth in mind-body medicine for over 5000 years. Can we merge ancient mysticism and medicine? Can we integrate science and spirituality for better health outcomes for ourselves and those around us?
The retreat is an experiential moving meditation exploration with Celia, combined with an extended group breathwork session with Alisa Craig, who will both combine their wisdom to teach you how to bring somatic experiencing, breathwork and compassionate self-enquiry into your everyday life to achieve liberation from everyday health conditions and limiting beliefs that the body may be holding onto. Celia and Alisa warmly invite you to attend to improve your emotional intelligence and health while creating loving, secure relationships with yourself and those you love.
Trauma is Stored in The Body – Move your body out of the Past
This will be a fascinating self-exploratory retreat, noting where our past is stored in our body.
It will include acknowledging where we store emotions in our body and you will develop heightened psychosomatic awareness and free your body of the trauma, the memories of the past.
We will be looking at six ways to bring unification and harmony through moving meditation. Using a healing life force (Prana, Qi, Chi, Ki) as a solution to liberate yourself from the body and past.
‘Who we are’ is a complex combination of evolution, ancestry, experience, chemistry, chance and the choices we make.
It is now a known scientific fact that trauma is stored in our body. According to the Ancient yoga sutras; our face, body and our posture store the history of our lifetime. Metaphysically and now proven scientifically, our past is stored in our cells, our genes and our DNA. Trauma not only affects our cells, but it changes our body, our gut, our brain wave patterning, our nervous system and our brains.
In this course, we will use meditation techniques to explore the way grief and trauma can affect the nervous system, the mind, our muscles, organs and fascia. Furthermore, we will bring presence to body and breath, bringing the freedom of movement and mind into the present. Breathing together, moving together, touch and eye contact with trusted others help us to dissolve the past that lies in our body, even our genes.
This 3-hour workshop will introduce the theory and research behind this evidence informed meditations for grief, shock and trauma.
Join us to find freedom within your heart, acknowledging with deep respect and humility the unbreakable human spirit within.
Vedic Meditation & Ayurveda for Your Mind
A Friday Morning 3hr Special event retreat will be exploring Vedic Meditation as it pertains to the Vedas, as an ancient practice that we often use in yoga asana and meditation classes today.
We will be looking at the Bija mantras, sound vibration and more Vedic practices to inspire your mind and body into meditative states.
Most importantly, have a look at the science and how Vedic Meditation could really work for you!
Vedic meditation unlocks many health and wellness benefits using sound, rhythm and music. Mantra is used to bring the mind to deep focus and the sound to vibrate and touch all sacred areas of the body.
The benefits of this kind of mind and sound healing include:
- Decreased pain
- Improved heart health
- Lessened symptoms of depression
- Lower blood pressure
- Reduced PTSD & Trauma
- Deeper and more restorative sleep
- Reduced anxiety and stress
- Stronger vagal tone and heart rate variability — key measures of your resilience to stress.
The event will be conducted by Celia Roberts, who is an experienced Vedic meditation teacher and Ayurvedic practitioner. She has been teaching meditation for over 15 years and has a wealth of knowledge about how to use this practice to improve your health and well-being.
The upcoming Vedic meditation retreat will help you practice the scientific and transcendent practices behind Vedic Meditation.
The event will be a great opportunity to learn more about how Vedic meditation can help you manage stress and anxiety, and how Ayurveda can help you maintain balance in your life. You will also have the opportunity to ask questions and get advice from Celia about how to incorporate these practices into your own life. Do join us for a wonderful morning of meditation practice that falls under the banner of Ayurveda for the Mind or Ayurvedic Psychology.
The Science and Practice of Mantra Meditation & Marma Point Sound Healing
Mantra meditation is a form of concentration in which the object of contemplation is a word or phrase, called a mantra. The research about the use of Mantra for the mind is wonderful and ever-growing. The vibrational pattern of our mind is based on sounds and words. Each word is associated with certain emotions, experiences, feelings and thoughts. Feelings and thoughts give additional meaning to words, rooting them in a deeper memory. Moreover, the inner voice also controls the mind. Therefore, the calm inner sound, which can be achieved through mantra, can still the mind. Unlike the inner thoughts or words, the repetition of mantras does not evoke emotional responses; instead, it causes a unidirectional reduced activation of cortical networks leading to a basic state of rest (Berkovich-Ohana et al., 2015).
Mantra also allows us to connect the mind, external and internal speech, and ultimately achieve connection with the environmental and universal sound vibrations.
Sound is the vehicle of Transcendence that we will explore for this meditation retreat. Here, we shall use Mantra to facilitate the flow of prana through the marma points, an important tool of marma therapy. Mantras protect marma points, called “kavacha” in Sanskrit and so we use Mantra or sound to heal and protect certain vulnerable areas in the body.
This retreat will introduce you to Mantra Purusha, a daily practice that can be used to implement Mantra and the ancient Sanskrit alphabet into the body’s sound vibration and to heal each marma point.
This Ayurvedic practice can be used to achieve many different goals, such as greater self-awareness, inner peace, spiritual growth, and enlightenment. Do join us for this very special end of year retreat.
Course Video Preview
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=849751372522668
