Online meditation classes for depression anxiety and bipolar disorder

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With sufficient repetitive practice, the brain can be deeply transformed literally rewired, a quality known as neuroplasticity. Neuroscience has transformed our understanding of what meditation brain training does to the brain, we can now begin to develop meditation techniques specifically adapted to rewire the brain and combat some of the root functional causes of depression, anxiety and bipolar.

Although these classes are developed for mental health problems anyone is welcome, the techniques also improve resilience to stress, concentration and general well-being.

Since the late 2000’s neuroscience has dramatically changed our understanding of how meditation rewires and changes brain structures to produce real medicinal effects. We now know different types of meditation and even specific components of a meditation exercise affect different regions of the brain. The techniques I teach incorporate the latest understanding from the neuroscience of meditation to emphasise particular therapeutic effects.

The meditation techniques you will be learning are specifically developed to:-

• Stimulate rewiring of the brain to treat mental health problems including depression, anxiety, OCD, bipolar disorder and ADHD, but you don’t have to have one of these problems to benefit, everyone’s welcome.
• Train the brain to switch off overactivity in the default mode network present in mood and anxiety disorders, when the DMN is active we ruminate on depressing and anxious thoughts.
• Dampen down overactivity in the amygdala observed in mood and anxiety disorders.
• Regrow the lost synapses and function of the cortex and hippocampus, features of depression and bipolar.
• Reduce inflammation in the brain causing neurotransmitter imbalances and the loss of synaptic connections, and now known to be a driving force behind mood disorders.
• Stimulate and strengthen the anterior cingulate cortex, prefrontal cortex and anterior insular areas of the brain involved in controlling worry and anxiety, improving these areas may be the primary way meditation reduces anxiety.
• The techniques are developed to be quickly accessible for beginners and give the expert new ways of enhancing the benefits of meditation.
• To be time efficient and stimulate rewiring in the brain quickly by adopting some intense focus techniques similar to the efficient muscle/training techniques of pushing a muscle to its limit for short repetitive bursts. Doing passive meditation does produce results but takes a long time, we now know that the more intense the experience the more rewiring occurs in the brain and applying this to meditation I believe we can get greater benefits in a shorter time.
• In the classes you will learn several techniques: directed focus mindfulness, several breathing techniques including some especially good for anxiety, compassion/lovingkindness techniques which are especially helpful for anxiety but also for improved tolerance, anger management and depression.

I specialise in treating mental health problems and have been in practice as a functional medicine practitioner since 1988. I 1^st learnt meditation in the 1980s and have been adapting and modifying traditional meditation techniques to be an accessible and effective treatment technique for mental health problems.

Just 20 minutes practice a day for several months has been shown to stimulate rewiring in the brain[i] in a way that reduces the severity of mental health problems, improves one’s resilience to stress, improves concentration and mental well-being.

The cost of the online classes is £15 (about $19 US variable on the exchange rate) for a 2-hour class on Facebook messenger or Skype and can be attended without prior booking on a drop-in basis.

Future Dates:

• Coming soon

How to join a meditation class

I’m intending to live stream the classes on YouTube, to join the class use the PayPal donate button at the bottom of this page and prepay £15 for the next class, you don’t have to have a PayPal account, it accepts credit cards. When you are making the payment you will see you can write the reason for the payment, don’t forget to use this and say the payment is for the meditation class.

After the payment has gone through I’ll email you a logon link which you will simply click on to join the class.

You can make the repayment at any time up to about 20 minutes before the class after that there may not be enough time to send the payment and receive the logon link.

Refund policy

If you prepay and miss a class I can either give you a credit towards another class or issue a refund but after deducting the PayPal transaction fees both ways you will lose a significant percentage.

Meditation safety and disclaimer

Meditation is incredibly safe and side-effects are very rare however there are cases of people having bad psychological experiences from meditation however when you look at the details of these cases they invariably involve people doing ridiculous amounts of overtraining. Meditation is exercising and training the brain, in many ways it’s similar to weightlifting in the gym, if you’re a beginner and you intensively train with heavyweights you’re likely overstrain and injure some muscles, ligaments or tendons, even if you are quite advanced you can still harm yourself if you engage in ridiculous amounts of overtraining.

When I hear about people that have only been meditating for a few months or even a few weeks doing an intensive 10 day retreat meditating for 5+ hours a day and in silence without speaking having a depersonalisation experience I’m not that surprised, meditation stimulate rewiring in the brain and that much meditation could cause such rapid changes that it may destabilise your equilibrium. I wouldn’t even recommend one hour a day for the 1^st few weeks especially when you have a mental health problem, but 20-30 minutes a day should just gently produce healthy changes in your brain. Furthermore, in the beginning, I only advised people to do directed focus meditation and avoid empty mind and introspective style meditations that can potentially open up a can of worms; when your healthier and if you don’t have schizophrenia or a psychotic depersonalisation condition these meditations can be very helpful and healing. I’ve been teaching people meditation for years and occasionally people have some mild unpleasant feelings but this only occurred when the person over-enthusiastically practised for 2+ hours a day.

I believe the way I teach meditation to be completely safe however if you attend my classe you are fully responsible for choosing to meditation and any consequences thereof. You must be over 18 or have parental approval. If you have schizophrenia or a psychotic condition contact me via email before joining the class.

[i] Britta K. Hölzel, James Carmody, Mark Vangel, Christina Congleton, Sita M. Yerramsetti, Tim Gard, Sara W. Lazar. Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 2011; 191 (1): 36 DOI: 10.1016/j.pscychresns.2010.08.006