Megan Kenealy Counselling

19/07/2021

17/07/2021

Some helpful tips to manage anxiety.

The pandemic has added extra stress to all our lives, and for those with anxiety disorders the last year has been particularly gruelling. Here, we suggest some effective measures to help you navigate these difficult days

15/07/2021

If you, or anyone you know needs help, please know that there are resources available and you are not alone. I am also available should you need someone to talk to. Please send me a message and I will get in contact with you.

05/07/2021

Learn to master your thoughts and emotions so that you not only survive, but thrive!

Mental health doesn’t just happen. Like physical fitness, it takes effort. Three principles spell the difference between just surviving and outright thriving.

03/07/2021

Some really good advice on how to help children manage difficult emotions.

Experiencing emotions is a vital part of being human. Emotions give us information, motivate us and prepare us to act, and give others information about how we are feeling. However, emotions can also be difficult to handle, particularly when the intensity of the emotion grows beyond what we can easi...

16/06/2021

Mindfulness meditation can improve your well being and reduce stress, anxiety and depression.

Psychologists have found that mindfulness meditation changes our brain and biology in positive ways, improving mental and physical health.

15/06/2021

Sleep is so important and new studies show that we are getting less and less of it! This article explores the benefits of meditation and how it can help you get a better night’s sleep.

Are guided sleep meditations really effective? If so, how to meditate into sleep? And how do we go about exploring meditation for sleep?

03/06/2021

Therapy terms that can help you with every day life.

Ten concepts that can help you improve the quality of your life.

01/06/2021

Being mindful does not mean that we just sit for hours on our meditation cushion in a retreat or monastery. There are many ways to practice mindfulness that can be fully integrated into our daily living. Besides conscious breathing, we can do walking meditation, sitting meditation, smiling, mindful listening, mindful speaking, and mindful working. We can practice concentration and looking deeply in all the activities of our daily life. Even while walking, we can practice stopping. We can walk in such a way that we arrive with each step - not walking just to get somewhere else. We can walk to enjoy each step. If we practice stopping while attending to e-mails, surfing the web, attending meetings or appointments, folding the laundry, washing the dishes, or taking a shower, we are living deeply. If we do not practice this way, the days and months will fly by without our awareness, and we will lose many precious moments of our life. Stopping helps us live fully in the present.

- Thich Nhat Hanh, in ”Savor”.
Painting: © Chen Pei Yi

26/05/2021

This is an interesting extract from Search Inside Yourself, Chade Meng Tan’s book on the mindfulness programme he runs at Google, “the secret to unbreakable concentration, complete relaxation and effortless self-control”. Here he explains the benefits of meditation and how an 8 week course in mindfulness can reduce anxiety, increase one’s happiness levels and improve one’s immune system.

“One of the most telling of all research studies on meditation was conducted by two pioneers in the field of contemplative science, Richard Davidson and Jon Kabat-Zinn. The study was eye-opening for many reasons. It was the first major study conducted in a business setting, with employees of a biotechnology company as subjects. The study showed that after just eight weeks of mindfulness training, the anxiety level of the subjects was measurably lower, which is nice but not surprising, since the name of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s training programme is Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. More surprisingly, when the electrical activity of the subjects’ brains was measured, those in the meditation group showed significantly increased activity in the parts of their brains associated with positive emotions. The most fascinating finding had to do with their immune function. Near the end of the study, subjects were given flu shots, and those in the meditation group developed more antibodies to the influenza vaccine. In other words, after just eight weeks of mindfulness mediation, subjects were measurably happier (as measured in their brains) and showed a marked increase in developing immunity. Remember that this study was not conducted on bald guys wearing robes living in a monastery, but on ordinary people with real lives and real high stress jobs in corporate America.”

24/05/2021

Be kind to yourself this week! 🙏

Self-compassion exercises are crucial. They can help to enhance the relationship we have with our innermost self while also alleviating the weight of many all-too-common human struggles.

24/05/2021

The important role of the gut-brain axis in managing depression and anxiety.

A new study highlights the gut-brain connection in psychiatric patients.