Mindfullness meditation

“Mindfulness produces positive effects on psychological well-being that extend beyond the time the individual is practicing it. Over the last three decades mindfulness  practices have been increasingly incorporated into programs, to take advantage of these benefits. A large body of research has established the effectiveness of these mindfulness-based interventions in reducing symptoms of a number of disorders, including anxiety , depression , substance abuse , eating disorders , and chronic pain , as well as improving well-being and quality of life. Mindfulness  involves the development of awareness of present-moment experience with a compassionate, non- judgmental stance .It has been suggested that this process is associated with a perceptual shift, in which one’s thoughts and feelings are recognized as events occurring in the broader field of awareness”    Harvard Medical school Boston MA 2010

Palladium Private  is proud to use Mindfulness Meditation techniques and invites you to learn more by checking out Wikipedia 

Why do we function as a health retreat program?

simply because an immersive program gets better long term results.

Remember when you were a kid and you were at school and you were either cold or hungry, this became your priority and the amount of information you learned went straight out the window as your brain was trying to fix its priority (food or warmth). Our guests are usually highly stressed and emotional and very very good at distracting themselves which is a common part of having depression or anxiety. If you cannot fix it then sometimes the best you can do is distract yourself which becomes a continuous cycle.

So an immersive program that limits communication with the outside world set in beautiful natural surroundings with  daily exercise great food and relaxation therapy is all designed to bring down a persons stress level  simply so they can pay attention and take in more information.It also has the benefit of when they finish a program they leave us in a much better physical condition but the whole process is about giving them mental room to process and reassess how they think, not only about their reality but about themselves, giving them a chance to like and love themselves again, increasing self worth, understanding stress and where their emotional symptoms leading to behaviour are coming from. To be able to be quiet in your own mind and understand that life is a journey not a destination and it is about how we react to life rather than what happens to us.

Mental health issue or stress based disease?

When mental health issues arise the conventional approach is to do what the majority of people have been doing for the last 50 years when they have a serious health issue which is to see their trusted but overworked doctor who will then usually prescribe (within 15 minutes) antidepressant medication and refer to a psychologist or psychiatrist who will then engage in talk therapy and more medication, labels will be applied (and rarely removed) lowering self worth and therapy will be ongoing for years confirming that there must be something wrong otherwise why would it take such a large amount of time and effort just to manage symptoms? Eventually if no relief is in site then a person will turn to short term solutions like drugs or alcohol simply for relief ultimately compounding these issues.

If a person does not respond well to conventional therapy they are often not given alternatives but are asked to repeat the process causing frustration anger and despair as they start to believe there is no solution and that they are fundamentally broken and have little worth. Not only that but if a viable alternative solution is put in front of them they may reject it as they have been told many times by many people including professionals that the condition they have is unfixable only manageable through session after session of describing their emotions combined with mind altering drugs and their side effects. They believe at a core level that they are unfixable and stop looking for solutions.

Here at Palladium we thought there has to be a better way. We looked beyond the emotional symptoms of depression and anxiety and the behavior of addiction to find the cause. We asked what if the actual root cause of these emotional states was actually in the mindset or in layman’s terms the way a person incorrectly deals with stress and pressure and ultimately measures their worth? What if it wasn’t about what happened to a person but how they interpreted it? What if the solution was educational Not chemical? And over the last ten years we found some interesting answers.

We found that a person is not born with a set of stress management techniques and ways to measure their worth highly. Like a blank canvas They learn how to do this by watching and learning from those they trust around them and this makes up the way they interpret their normal world for the rest of their life. This can also make it hard for them to see the problem as this has always been the way they deal with stress, how are they to know any differently or as we say here at Palladium, “ how can you know what you do not  know?”

We found that people with stress based disease states had learned to measure their worth solely on their environment and the achievement of goals. They measured this  by what they earned, their appearance or what they owned, or even by the opinions of others as examples. When things decreased in these areas their self worth would crash, as this was the only way they knew how to measure their worth. Thinking that the goals in life that would define them as successful are unachievable they naturally think there is no point having goals at all and the apathy and emotional symptoms of depression set in.

We found that emotions are a by-product of thinking not a cause. To change the way you feel you must ultimately change the way you think. Describing your emotions doesn’t actually change the thought process that created them. Educating a person about the way they interpret their reality and measure their worth does. Without drugs and with long-term success.

Or lets think of it in another way. We have evolved to have emotional pain for exactly the same reason we have physical pain. There is something that is threatening our survival that needs our immediate attention. The difference from physical pain is that emotionally what defines a threat must come from our mindset or how we view and interpret our world and measure our worth. Changing this can literally change our entire emotional landscape, relieving depression and anxiety and massively increasing self worth.

Fixing depression

I am asked frequently how we define depression and how we go about trying to fix it. Well, our starting point is that everybody in life has goals. They may want to get married, have two children, finish their law degree, go and become a solicitor. As long as life goes to plan, people do not develop depression. If every day, you got up and made a plan and it all happened, you would never develop depression.

But that’s not how life works as we all know. That lovely wife unfortunately went off with our best friend. All of a sudden, we had to replan our lives. The cause of stress is always life not going to plan.  Once we start to understand stress, we start to demystify it. We do not feel that we are crazy, we understand that we are stressed.

Stress is experienced in different ways. We feel life is not going to plan, or potentially may not go to plan. Or we could feel literally on the wrong path. Or we should have, would have, could have done something different.

We are always lamenting something.

When things go wrong, part of us thinks: maybe we deserve it. Maybe the fault’s in us. Maybe we’re not as sharp as we thought we were. Eventually we always blame ourselves partly when things go wrong. Part of it always relates to self-esteem. The average human being sets goals, and when things go wrong, it undermines his self-esteem.

The logical thing to do when something is affecting us negatively is to stop doing it. A person who has major things in life go wrong decides to stop making goals. That way, he won’t feel worse. But unfortunately we can’t stop having goals because depression is when we do not have any goals.

Depression is when someone has no belief in the future. The reason is society teaches us to set your goals and achieve them. It’s a success model. Get our life right.  We are always boasting about our achievements. But we may decide, we are not going to have any goals any more, because we feel worse every time we do not achieve a goal.

How do we fix depression? We have to give the person another reason to have goals beside achieving them. How many big picture goals will I make this year? Fifty to 100? We will be lucky to achieve 20. The other 80 will be fantastic learning experiences. We define myself by my learning, not my achievement.

We work on the basis that people can learn to live better and  to regain their equilibrium. That’s the nub of our approach. I suggest that if you know someone who is suffering depression that you get in touch with us. We are here to help,

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