Mindfulness in your creative life

We are very pleased to welcome Buddhist teacher and mindfulness practitioner, Vajradaka to the Women's Resilience Centre for a five week course on mindfulness in your creative life.

Week 1, Thursday the 4th of April 

Your inner life determines your outer life

Simple and easy to use mindfulness methods for finding what is important for you

Exploration of what effectively helps you achieve your direction and values

Coming into  a sense of  confidence in your strengths and being effective

Week 2, Thursday the 11th  of April

Have everything going in the same direction

Dealing with distraction and keeping a sense of direction

Entering into a sense of wholeheartedness and motivation

The relationship between discipline and spontaneity

Week 3, Thursday the 18th  of April 

Being engaged and fully present

Dealing creatively with obstacles to decisiveness

Keeping a sense of momentum 

Skills for breaking out of habit

Week 4, Thursday the 25th  of April

The fun/serious dichotomy

Having a big picture of what is in your best interests

Working from your strengths

Enjoying the process of personal development, even when it's hard

Week 5, Thursday the 2nd  of May 

Overcoming expectations and getting real

Understanding what being in a process means

The creative process of being receptive and keeping the initiative

Dealing the double-edged consequences of being successful

Although this course is for women it is led by a man. 

Vajradaka  is an ordained Buddhist who is acclaimed as  one of the most experienced practitioners and teachers of mindfulness and creativity globally. 

Because of his long experience of leading communities and teaching mindfulness  and our own personal perception and experiences  of him as a teacher who is safe and supports the vision of the women's resilience centre, we have invited him to help us seed the vision of our centre to lead this course.

 The Kazuri team.

Mental Health Friday by Farah Damji

Friday afternoon, I took a tour to easternmost (well almost)   Bow to the old Victorian Cemetary  to see one of our customers (they're tenants but they're so much more, tenant / landlord relationship has the connotations of modern day Rachmanism and I prefer the word customer or client to service user, blame our CEO Viv Ahmun,  for inducting me into this customer friendly language) fulfilling the volunteering requirement that we ask all of them to complete, as part of their residence in one of our properties. The minimum is five hours a week and we have racked up a few thousand hours, putting good will and hard graft back into the local communities where our customers live.

She is volunteering at the Providence Row  Housing Association  horticultural therapy project, Ecominds. Seen that amazing eco bar on the top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall at the South Bank Centre? That's the fruit of this talented lot's endeavours.

I didn't really know what to expect  but the walk through the peaceful but neglected cemetary allowed me some space away from the hustle and the bustle of my day-to-day. There, nestled away in a corner of the rambling plot with spectacular views of the Gherkin, Canary Wharf and the neighbouring crawling council estate, just over the ten foot high stone wall,  were a dozen or so people dressed in gardening gear and steel capped boots busily chopping down trees, planting wildflowers and moving logs of wood. On a portable gas stove there was a   vegetable curry  / spicy chilli bubbling over and some eager stirring  meant the scent rose up into the warm early spring air.  Here,  a real life diorama,  depicted the disparity which is Tower Hamlets Borough,  so much potential and so much wealth, yet such deprivation. Recent reports confirmed that 58% of Tower Hamlets young people lived below the poverty line, so on  10 pounds  or less a day, for an entire family, a world away from the glass cages and luxury penthouses along the river in Wapping.



Paul, one of the founders who was formerly homeless (picture below, third from right, standing)  started Ecotherapy Grounded, and looks like a weathered Jesus, skin worn and sundried with the healthy gleam of  hope in his sparkling blue eyes. Kelvin Barton (left), a former social worker joined Paul and together they run a project on Friday afternoons for people experiencing mental distress  who seek some company and to feel useful and the combination of camaraderie and physical labour  appears to have direct positive results. The project is now in its sixth year with some  volunteers attending consistently over a number of years and all had a good word to say about their experiences on the project, brimming over with a sense of pride and ownership.

I get lots of background noise from various agencies and my colleagues about insisting upon the volunteering aspect of the Kazuri model but this is what makes it different and (touch wood) successful. No other social lettings agency which  rehouses ex offenders, vulnerable women and people from supported housing embeds the community aspect in the offering. By being supported by and interconnected with the local community at the grassroots level, projects which work for the hardest to reach group are primed to succeed, they engage a sense of stakeholder-ship and stewardship at the micro level. This breaks away from the dependency  model  and stigma of social housing and empowers people to feel more confident, straight away.  

This part of the tenancy is made very clear before we offer any propective clients a tenancy and we help identify a local volunteering scheme, in which they are interested  and which doesn't feel like a burden. It looks great on their CV and doesn't affect their welfare benefits, as long as the unpaid work is declared.

Part of the process of desistance is a sense of belonging and being a contributing, participating member of society (a steady job and the love of a good woman), and we've watched our customers evolve and blossom as they reaffirm their social bond through this simple gesture of restorative justice. Volunteering work has lead to paid work and sustainable employment, through increased self confidence and self worth.

I was truly impressed by the team spirit, the real sense of equality and the obviously great sense of achievement which has manifested itself in the corner of that tumbledown graveyard. Trees are being cleared away so that butterflies and other insects will pollinate the area and the life cycle is restored by repairing broken links in the food chain. Many of the service users have been chronically homeless, have multiple needs and  can suffer from a dual diagnosis. Some have long histories of offending behaviour. Something about a good bit of hard graft and being around people who also want to move into an empowered, authentic self has more than ticked the statutory boxes of reducing depression and reoffending. I left feeling pleased that I had taken the time out to go and visit our customer on the project and we are actively looking at how we can refer more of our clients, particularly those in Tower Hamlets, into this patently effective way of boosting health, self esteem and well-being.

Rt Hon Mr Iain Duncan Smith, take note, this is not compulsory, it is volunteering into community projects in return for a clear, contractual benefit ( housing and supported tenancy). Dump the failing Work Fare  Program and try this instead!

For more information please contact Ecominds directly on kbarton@prha.net

Mentally ill offenders: Our fear of introducing them back into society

Forensic nursing is one of the most demanding and misunderstood areas of care in the NHS. Nursing manager Theo Bello gives an inside view about the challenge of working with mentally ill offenders and public fear about their release back into society.

Mental health is one of the least popular areas of nursing and you can go one better – by specialising in forensic nursing which looks after offenders whose mental illness precludes them from prison.
At present, there are about 4,000 patients being treated in secure units around the UK for a variety of conditions. Typical crimes include murder, rape and sexual offences influenced by accompanying mental illnesses including bi-polar, schizophrenia and personality disorders.

Everyone coming into a secure unit is assessed before admission and we get our fair share of fakers who pretend to be ill thinking life in a forensic unit is preferable to prison. However, it’s difficult to fake mental illness for any length of time and it is often people’s rationality that trips them. People with full-blown psychosis are genuinely distressed and that can be someone who is climbing the walls or standing stock-still for hours at a time.
I can’t pretend nursing started as a personal choice for a vocation, but it has certainly become one in the 15 years since my initial career in civil engineering hit the rocks after my overseas qualifications weren’t recognised in the UK.
I remember asking a careers advisor at the time what was the most cast-iron job in terms of employment and demand, and he said people were always going to get sick so why not try the NHS?
Nursing can be a tough profession, but also a very rewarding one and you learn a lot about yourself in the process – especially in an environment like forensic services. People do however carry a lot of preconceptions about working on secure wards. I know I did before I joined the service, with the usual concerns about the threat of physical violence and wondering if I could work with people who’d committed some disturbing crimes.
I remember one patient who had murdered his girlfriend’s child while she went out to get a pint of milk. He calmly sat down after leaving the body in the kitchen, lit a cigarette and waited for her to come back as if nothing had happened. This  really shook me up because I had a child of same age at the time and I just kept re-running it through my mind. I was looking at this patient’s actions with my own moral compass and values which is pointless when someone has a serious mental illness.
People do the most shocking and bizarre things but at some level it makes perfect sense to them even if it leaves the rest of us shaking our heads in disbelief.
Our job is to find out why patients behave the way they do, what triggers their behaviour and if their condition can be effectively treated.
I’d say good communication skills, empathy, maturity and respect are key skills in being a good mental health nurse, along with a commitment to build a strong therapeutic relationship with patients and colleagues.
A lot of incidents involving confrontation are down to a perceived lack of respect that staff shows patients. It’s something we work hard to bridge because so much rests on it. Just a fraction of a correction in that social interaction makes a huge difference and everyone gets what they want.
One of the biggest conflicts of interest I have is restraining a patient from hurting themselves or others. I personally struggle with the fact that I am here to build relationships with patients and help treat and support them yet may also be called upon to restrain them if they become violent.
At present, we’re at something of a watershed in forensic services because we need more effective mechanisms for getting patients back into the community which is free from political interference.
There is huge public fear around mental health and that irrationality goes through the roof when a murderer is mentally ill.
The circumstances are tragic but no-one can provide a cast iron guarantee that any offender won’t commit another crime on release and that fear is multiplied when it involves mental illness.
Politics, sensationalist media coverage and widespread public prejudice about mental illness are a potent cocktail that keeps us in stalemate because it’s the safest position to occupy. Ideally, all mental health services will maintain a safe and effective process of treatment and rehabilitation through the stratification of patients according to the risks they present.
I believe specialised community housing, a close-knit support group of mental health workers and close monitoring would all make a move into the community more effective in the long-term.
Re-offending rates are low compared to those leaving the prison system and the chance of an individual being murdered by someone with a psychosis is about one in ten million – the same as being struck by lightening.
A revised approach has to be found and it’s a case of who is going to be brave enough to seek a new way forward free from the blame game when a serious incident does take place.

Theo Bello is a nursing manager with Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust and oversees the management of several low and medium secure units at Chase Farm Hospital in north London.
This article first appeared in the Independent