“The brain is the soil you plant the little seed of mindfulness in. In order for the seed to grow, you need to tend to it, that’s the practice.” – Dr Patrizia Collard

 

Sitting in a dingy classroom in Stratford, six lonesome leather chairs are facing senior lecturer Dr Patrizia Collard. It’s extremely hard to believe that she is a number one best-selling author for mindfulness.

 

The colour grey seems to dominate the classroom, all four walls are painted in the drab and emotionless colour. All that is suspended from the walls are a few pictures that look like images of the human brain. Well I think they are images of the brain...

 

The writings on the wall emphasises the importance of staying calm but “teaching mindfulness from a closed classroom is also a tad ironic” laughs Dr Collard.

 

Dr Patrizia Collard has been working at the University of East London for 16 years, as well teaching the art of mindfulness she is also a psychotherapist, mindfulness coach and a multi-modal counsellor, but has decided to cut down her days teaching at the establishment to work on her upcoming book that is being released in February 2019.

 

“My new book (The Little Book of Meditation: 10 Minutes a Day to More Relaxation, Energy and Creativity) is not a sequel to the Little Book of Mindfulness which I have sold 700,000 copies of around the world, it is an expansion of it with new exercises and new mantras” says a smug looking Dr Collard.

 

(As she places her ‘thinking’ cup on her desk, which could have just simply been a mug with the human brain on it, which she purchased in Asia on her travels.)

 

“I started practicing yoga and meditating in China where I spent nearly a decade in, before I realised I can be doing this to inspire others. That is when I returned to the UK in 2000 and started to include my meditative experience in my therapeutic teaching.”

 

Mindfulness is all about practice- “I practiced it for years and every day something about mental health is on the news,” says a very passionate Dr Collard with a beaming smile on her face.  “My aim is not to cure people because everyone is their own person and individual, my goal is to help them with what they already have.”

 

“There is a stigma with mental health and no one really speaks about what you can do to embrace it and deal with it. The media portrays mental health as an illness but the main gist of my books are to help the individual with practicing mindfulness in a bitesize book that can easily fit in your coat pocket” says Dr Collard as she flips through the Little Book of Mindfulness (TLBOM) pointing out her favourite pages in the 96 page “bundle of joy.”

 

Reading the paperback copy of TLBOM and seeing that every single page has a unique illustration about the case studies, exercises and mantras is probably why she has over 700 positive reviews on Amazon. She also says “laughter is always a cure”, whilst she cackles over the fact that “Amazon only gives her 5% of the profits and wishes she gets more so she can stop working and start writing full time.”

 

 

Dr Collard mentions the easiest way to explain mindfulness is “when you eat, just eat. when you walk, just walk. That’s mindfulness” She goes on to say “paying attention to one thing particular, make it your object of awareness, rather than multitasking. We can’t actually multitask; we just switch from one task to another.”

 

She says mindfulness is not that challenging to learn. An example Dr Collard gives is something simple like drinking a cup of tea, and “really drinking it. Feeling the cup, Feeling the heat. Feeling the taste of the tea and smelling it.” That is just one example of really being in the experience of mindfulness.

 

When asked what is the greatest piece of advice she has given, Dr Collard answers “negative thoughts are like Velcro, they stick. But positive thoughts are like Teflon, they slip off.”

She carries on to recommend the E.G.S method when dealing with anxiety, which is “every day write something you ENJOYED today, something you are grateful for and lastly something you are SATISFIED with”.

 

Finally, she deeps out the fact that “2 years down the line it will not matter” and strains the fact that “time passes.” She recommends conducting 10-15 minutes of mindfulness activities daily.

 

She advises, “If after each activity you do, you take one mindful in and out breath and really feel the soles of your feet, soften your shoulders and soften your face in 5 seconds intervals, it will add up to 15 minutes a day.”