Group Coaching for Tourette Syndrome
A Five-Week Online Program: October 18 – November 15, 2022
Tuesdays, 7:00 – 8:30 pm Eastern Time
$200 USD
A Five-Week Online Course
October 18 – November 15, 2022
Tuesdays, 7:00 – 8:30 pm Eastern Time
$200.00 USD
Tourette syndrome brings a great deal of tension, claustrophobia, and chaotic energy. This five-week program will help you relax your body and mind, ease some of your Tourette struggles, and learn Tourette specific tools to bring more balance into your day-to-day life.
Mindfulness meditation has helped me tremendously to lessen my Tourette’s struggles. Mindfulness is possibly the simplest practice ever created, and yet, I have to be completely honest and tell you that it’s not an easy practice, for anyone. However, as challenging as it is, the benefits can be life changing.
Ease may feel out of reach if you have Tourette’s. But through simple practices done in a caring community atmosphere, you could suddenly relax and find yourself here and now.
About Mindfulness for Tourette Syndrome
Within a supportive community setting, this program will instruct in several mindfulness based practices, and help you apply the practices to your everyday challenges with Tourette Syndrome.
A common misconception about mindfulness is that it’s about trying to stop your thoughts and/or empty your mind, which are impossible anyway. Rather the practice is about being present with your experience, and developing a more spacious, more relaxed, kinder relationship with yourself.
Mindfulness has the capacity to benefit many people in general, and people with Tourette Syndrome are no different in this regard. However Tourette Syndrome presents a number of unique challenges for mindfulness practice, and this program was created with these challenges in mind.
How does mindfulness for Tourette syndrome work?
In the design of this program, the urges to tic and the ticcing, are very much part of the practice. Here’s exactly what this means:
- Mindfulness practice in general relates with thoughts and emotions by simply noticing them non-judgementally and letting them be without struggling against them.
- With the mindfulness for Tourette syndrome practices, this same approach applies to the urges to tic, and the ticcing. There is no effort to suppress urges or tics, but we simply notice them non-judgementally, and let them be, just as they are, without struggling against them.
All of this may sound easier said than done, and indeed it is. Mindfulness practice is difficult, for everyone. It’s not easy for anyone to be with our intense thoughts and emotions and struggles, and additionally with Tourette’s, with our urges to tic and our ticcing.
Nevertheless as challenging as it is, mindfulness can be powerful. With dedicated practice over time it has the potential to help you soften the intensity of your struggle, and help you be more relaxed and kind with your experience. This can bring life-changing relief, as well as more agency in how you relate with your energies and your state of mind.
For myself as an individual with Tourette Syndrome, mindfulness practices gives me much more awareness of the premonitory urge, and it gives me more agency in choosing when to tic or not. Beyond that, mindfulness practice helps me actually soften a lot of the deep Tourettic struggle within my being.
How do you know if this program will help you?
Everyone is different, and ultimately the only way to know if this program or if mindfulness practice in general will benefit you, is to try it and find out for yourself. But here are a few program details that may help you to decide if the program feels like a good fit:
- The overall program theme and intention is to create an atmosphere and experience of ease, to help you learn to relax more with your Tourette’s, and with life in general.
- The sessions of sitting meditation during the course are brief: We’ll begin with three minutes, and work up to 15 minutes by the end of the third week of the course.
- Sitting mindfulness sessions will be interspersed with walking mindfulness, somatic mindfulness practices, and communication exercises.
Potential program benefits
The program has the intention and goals to help you experience the following benefits:
- Learn to relax more in your body and mind.
- Feel more grounded in your sensorial, bodily experience.
- Discover more 'space' around the urges to tic and the actual tics.
- Uncover more clarity, confidence and courage.
- Ease your overactive thinking brain.
- Put your best self in the driver's seat of your life.
During the course we’ll work with three mindfulness processes to help you slow down, tune in and ease your struggles with Tourette’s. The methods are shaped specifically with the challenges of Tourette syndrome in mind:
- Sitting and walking mindfulness meditation
- Somatic mindfulness to release and unwind tension
- Communication practices
Mindfulness Meditation
We’ll practice an embodied mindfulness, in the form of brief periods of sitting and walking mindfulness with a specific focus for Tourette syndrome. A 2014 study of mindfulness for Tourette Syndrome resulted in “significant reduction in tic severity and tic related impairments.”
- Reduce stress, anxiety and depression.
- Improve the ability to be aware and attentive in the present moment.
- Strengthen emotional regulation.
- Increase mental flexibility, clarity and focus.
- Increase compassion for self and others.
- Improve sleep.
- Improve overall mood.
- Strengthen the immune system.
- Improve overall life satisfaction and wellbeing.
Somatic Mindfulness
These Tourette syndrome specific practices are designed to help you:
- Develop more ability to be with your bodily experience rather than struggle against it.
- Have more creative agency in working with urges to tic.
- Develop your inner somatic resources and abilities to relax.
- Develop your abilities to feel pleasure and flow.
- Feel more confident and strong in your body.
Communication Practices
We’ll work with two communication methods that help you become more relaxed and confident with speech and communication, and to give everyone opportunities to learn from each other. These practices will also help us create a friendly supportive community.
These processes work together to create a “layered synergy” to activate significant change and benefit, including: body, mind, heart, and spirit. This is not a shift to a foreign new state, but rather a shift towards a more relaxed, authentic version of yourself.
- Fee: $200.00 USD
- The course is limited to 18 so register soon to reserve your spot.
- Location: Zoom
- Dates: October 18 – November 15, 2022
- Schedule: 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm Eastern Standard Time Zone
- Please log on 5 minutes early at 6:55 so we can all be ready to start at 7 pm.
What to Bring
- Relaxed clothing
- Notepad and pen
- Water and other refreshments
* Course is limited to 18 participants.
If for any reason after the first class and before the second class you are unsatisfied with the course and wish to drop out, I’ll return your full payment within 2 business days of request. If you cancel before attending the first class you’ll receive a refund minus a $50 processing fee.
The Facilitator
Hello I’m Craig Mollins, a National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach, meditation teacher and passionate proponent of the human capacity for betterment. I hail from Halifax, Nova Scotia, a small city on the east coast of Canada, and currently live in Mexico City.
In my 42 years as a student of Tibetan Buddhism I’ve has spent extensive time in meditation, study and retreat. I’ve attended well over 100 training programs including over six months in the Colorado Rockies, dozens of intensive solitary retreats of over 400 days in total, and many weekend programs at various urban meditation centers. Also in seven different trips to Asia I’ve spent a total of 11 months at two monasteries, in India and Nepal. For 2.5 years I lived at a Buddhist monastery in Nova Scotia, Canada.
In 1995 I was trained as a meditation teacher and have been teaching meditation in various contexts ever since. I’m thrilled and honoured to now be offering this program for people who struggle with Tourette’s. My wish and intention is that it helps you find much ease and inspiration.