Topic guides: Self-care, mindfulness and meditation: Content

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Dementia Australia resources

Support for families and carers by Dementia Australia
Family members and friends often find themselves in the role of a carer when a loved one is living with dementia. While caring for your loved one can be rewarding, it can also have its tougher days. As you care for someone with dementia, you may not be taking as much care of your own emotional, mental or physical wellbeing. Whether you’re the husband, wife, partner, daughter, son, brother, sister or friend of the person, your relationship will change. Dementia Australia offers support for families and carers so you don’t feel alone.

Self-care for carers by Dementia Australia
This page discusses the importance of taking a break from caring, how to organise it and who can help. Caring for someone with dementia can be physically and emotionally tiring and stressful. Families and carers can easily become isolated from social contacts, particularly if they are unable to leave the person they are caring for. Regular breaks mean that you can have a rest, go out, attend to business or go on a holiday.

The benefits of mindfulness: webinar
In this webinar, Meditation Facilitator Peter Hoare describes mindfulness and leads you through some simple exercises to highlight how quickly you might feel its benefits. You will learn: that self-care is not just about distracting yourself, it’s about directing your focus towards something that offers nourishment; the benefits of mindfulness; and some simple mindfulness exercises.
Hold the moment podcast by Dementia Australia
Season 2, Episode 7: Carer fatigue: Looking after yourself while caring for others

eBooks

When a Family Member Has Dementia - Steps to Becoming a Resilient Caregiver by Susan M. McCurry; Linda Teri (Foreword by)
Publication Date: 2006
Caring for a person with dementia is a difficult and often , overwhelming task. In addition to the inevitable decline in memory and physical function, most people living with dementia develop one or more changed behaviours. These changes can be highly idiosyncratic. No two patients are alike, and interventions that work well with one person are often ineffective with another. Caregivers often become stuck: either unable to figure out how best to help their loved one, or unable to consistently implement positive practices they know would improve their situation. This book offers caregivers a set of practical and flexible tools to enable them become more resilient in the face of difficulty and change.
Mindfulness for Carers by Cheryl Rezek
Publication Date: 2015
Carers are particularly vulnerable to feeling stressed, worried and worn down by the vast demands that often come with caregiving, be they physical, psychological or emotional. Mindfulness can be enormously beneficial to carers, whether professional or voluntary, as a means of developing greater inner stability, resilience and gaining more control over their thoughts, feelings and emotions. The book includes easy-to-use and enjoyable mindfulness exercises, short enough to fit into a busy day, as well as accompanying audio tracks to support and guide the reader through these exercises.
Calmer Waters by Barbra Cohn
Publication Date: 2016
Barbra Cohn offers a spiritual and holistic guide to help caregivers feel happier and healthier, have more energy and time for themselves, sleep better, feel more relaxed and confident, and experience inner peace, despite the obstacles they face. With pathos, humour and compassion, Calmer Waters includes the author s compelling life story, inspirational essays and rituals from spiritual leaders, stories from family caregivers and twenty healing modalities from renowned experts that can be practically incorporated into a daily regimen. An added bonus is that both care partners - the caregiver and memory-impaired individual - can use most of the healing modalities, allowing for a stronger connection between the two.
Five Good Minutes : 100 Morning Practices to Help You Stay Calm and Focused All Day Long by Jeffrey Brantley; Wendy Millstine
Publication Date: 2005
The 100 simple practices found in Five Good Minutes® are designed to help even the busiest person start the day right. Using just five minutes of mindfulness, relaxation, or imagery techniques during their morning routines, readers can set their intentions and greet the day feeling calm, centered, and energized.
The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris; Steven C. Hayes (Foreword by)
A guide to ACT: the revolutionary mindfulness-based program for reducing stress, overcoming fear, and finding fulfilment.
Popular ideas about happiness are misleading, inaccurate, and are directly contributing to our current epidemic of stress, anxiety and depression. And unfortunately, popular psychological approaches are making it even worse!
In this easy-to-read, practical and empowering self-help book,

audioBooks

Resilient :12 Tools for transforming everyday experiences into lasting happiness by Rick Hanson
Publication Date: 2018
Rick Hanson is known for his trademark blend of neuroscience, positive psychology and contemplative practices. In Resilient, he explains how to build the very foundations of well-being by harnessing the power of positive experiences to build an unshakeable core.
Dr. Hanson has distilled 40 years of clinical work and teaching into 12 highly effective tools. Working with these tools allows you to enter a positive cycle which creates a sense of well-being, which in turn establishes resilience, which feeds upon itself to strengthen you.
Daring Greatly How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead by Brené Brown
Publication Date: 2016
In a powerful new vision Dr. Brené Brown challenges everything we think we know about vulnerability, and dispels the widely accepted myth that it's a weakness. She argues that, in truth, vulnerability is strength and when we shut ourselves off from vulnerability—from revealing our true selves—we distance ourselves from the experiences that bring purpose and meaning to our lives.
Meditations for Happiness by Rick Hanson
Publication Date: 2011
Happiness is far more than a positive feeling that comes and goes. Science is now proving that happiness is a skill that you can develop. Bridging neuropsychology with the great contemplative traditions, Meditations for Happiness brings you a series of practices that allow you to literally rewire the neural pathways in your brain to experience deeper and more lasting contentment. On part one, Dr. Hanson discusses the nature of happiness, its role in our evolution, how our brains both make us happy and create suffering, and how we can use and shape our brains over time to experience more joy and ease in everyday life. He then guides you step-by-step through more than a dozen meditations and exercises including:
When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron
Publication Date: 2016
How can we go on living when things fall apart—when we are overcome by pain, fear, and anxiety? Pema Chödrön's answer to that question contains some spectacularly good news: there is a fundamental happiness readily available to each one of us, no matter how difficult things seem to be. To find it, according to traditional Buddhist teaching, we must learn to stop running from suffering and instead actually learn to approach it—fearlessly, compassionately, and with curiosity. This radical practice enables us to use all situations, even very painful ones, as means for discovering the truth and love that are utterly indestructible.
Mindfulness for Beginners audio by Jon Kabat-Zinn
Publication Date: 2006
Explore five guided meditations that lead you breath-by-breath into the essence of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), a program offered in medical clinics and hospitals around the world. Cultivate the Seven Key Attitudinal Factors of MBSR—qualities of heart and mind that lay the foundation for mindfulness practice and for seeing and accepting things as they are as a first step to working wisely and compassionately with stress, pain, illness, and sorrow as well as life's joys and pleasures. Free yourself from limiting perspectives, and become more intimate with your own boundless awareness. You're already in the perfect moment for inhabiting this liberating awareness, which is always available, teaches Jon Kabat-Zinn. With Mindfulness for Beginners, he invites you to cultivate mindfulness as if your life depended on it, which it surely does, and experience the magnitude and beauty of who you already are.

Videos and Podcasts

Resources and Websites

Guided Mindfulness Exercises / The Free Mindfulness Project
Free resources to support your practice of mindfulness.
Mindfulness resources / Oxford Mindfulness Foundation
Free mindfulness resources from the Oxford Mindfulness Foundation. An organisation promoting evidence-based mindfulness practice in all areas of society.
Relax the mindful way workbook / South Western Sydney Local Health District
This workbook is for carers. It is an introduction to the benefits of mindfulness to manage stress. Mindfulness activities are free, quick and easy to learn. This workbook has some examples of mindfulness activities for you to try. The activities are useful for any one. They do not replace counselling, medical treatment or other therapies that a carer may access to support their wellbeing.
Self-compassion for carers: being on your own side / Carers Australia
Self-compassion practice helps you when things get tough, to support and be there for yourself like an inner friend, helper or coach rather than being an inner critic or bully, or moving into unhelpful shame or guilt.

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