Top Tips on Finding Wellbeing from the Edinburgh Wellbeing Festival

The Wee Seeds team were lucky enough to hit the Edinburgh Wellbeing Festival last week: the flagship weekend-long festival dedicated to health, fitness and wellbeing. There were so many interesting talks and workshops—including an intense fitness class led by Dame Kelly Holmes—but we’ve chosen our top two highlights from the packed weekend to share with you….

On Saturday we got to hear Gelong Thubten, Buddhist Monk and author of A Monk’s Guide to Happiness, talk about his book and his passion for meditation for all in society, particularly youngsters. There were so many takeaways from his talk but here are our favourite three:

1. Thubten spoke really insightfully about mindfulness and meditation and we found this description really interesting: Mindfulness and meditation is about more than relaxing, it’s about connecting with compassion. Compassion has to start from within and then spread, and meditation is such a great way to make peace with your own mind to allow this to happen.

2. Thubten told us it is really important to learn both online and offline meditation techniques so you’re not reliant upon an app to meditate, and can introduce ‘mini mindful moments’ into your everyday life. Meditation doesn’t have to be a formal practice; you can meditate in queues, while travelling, during your commute.

(This is precisely why we’ve brought both types together in our digital toolbox, including offline exercises like Focus Eyes to encourage you and your little ones to introduce mindfulness into all areas of your life.)

3. Thubten also talked extensively about his passion for mindfulness and meditation becoming normalised and prevalent in schools. He says that meditation is a great protector from getting sucked into the fast pace of modern life, technology, social media. It gives young minds a chance to sharpen their concentration and attention levels amidst the technology in the world.

(One of our volunteers, Zoë, had the opportunity to chat to Thubten about Wee Seeds; and although his focus is primary and secondary schools, he was really excited to hear about our progress working with nurseries to deliver mindfulness and meditation and instil these skills from an even younger age!)

As if that wasn’t inspiring enough, on Sunday we got to listen to the amazing — and absolutely lovely — Dr Rangan Chatterjee talking about the advice he imparts in his latest book, Feel Better in 5. At the core of this book is the ideology that taking five minutes to focus on your mind, your body and your heart will radicalise your health and happiness — a total of 15 minutes a day to change your life! He was equally inspiring and motivational and we’re feeling really empowered to make some changes. Here’s the top three takeaways:

1. Dr Chatterjee spoke very passionately about how, in order to get a new habit to stick, we’ve got to make it easy for ourselves. So, if you want to start journaling everyday then leave your pen and notebook in the place you’ll be writing, every day. If you want to exercise more, look out your exercise clothes in a place you’ll see them. He even shared that his family have put up a little chart on their fridge where they tick off their 5-minute health activities as they complete them each day.
   (It was with this ideology type of routine in mind that we created the 28-Day Wee Seeds Calendar: a daily 28-day schedule of Wee Seeds exercises to help families on the start of their journey with mindfulness and meditation. It’s free to downloadYou can find more info, here.)
2. Within his book there are lots of activities you can choose from for each of the health categories: mind, body and heart. His favourite (and ours) within the heart section is called The Tea Ritual. He suggests sitting down at the same time every evening with a loved one and a cup of tea — no phones, no devices, no distractions — and just talking. He says he can’t believe the level of intimacy it’s reintroduced to his relationship, having a short amount of time of complete focus on one another.
   
   (We don’t see why this can’t translate for the whole family; why not see if you can spend just 5 minutes with your wee one and an activity that doesn’t involve technology? If you fancy you could follow it up with some simple breathing exercises from Wee Seeds)
3. Very excitingly, Dr Chatterjee shared with us his vision and top goal for 2020 of getting exercises from his book into schools around the country. He’s currently looking into working with education professionals to create free, easy-to-use resources to implement the practices into classrooms, improving the health of our youngsters nation-wide. He, like us, really believes in the impact practices like meditative breathing and journaling can have on young minds.

So there you have it—six tips for wellbeing from the experts! We felt so inspired after these talks, particularly how they both emphasised the wellbeing benefits of mindfulness and meditation for children. We really believe that they are incredibly powerful tools that can change the health and wellbeing of our littlest ones. If you believe so too, please check out our crowdfunder and help us provide free access to mindfulness and meditation for more families.