Mindful Relating
We offer in-person workshops in Mindful Relating to support students' wellbeing, resilience and mental health. Through solo, paired and group exercises we teach mindfulness, active listening skills, personal boundaries, and how to regulate the nervous system.
Mindful Relating sessions are experiential and embodied, to complement our consent workshops, in which we share ideas and generate discussion. All our sessions are designed to build a culture of consent and wellbeing within universities.
There is now overwhelming evidence that mindfulness based interventions (MBI's) support mental states of wellbeing. Mindful Relating is at the intersection of mindfulness and consent skills, as shown below:
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​Mindfulness means paying relaxed attention to the present moment, for example by focusing awareness on our thoughts and feelings, or on our immediate surroundings. It is often a solo practice, but mindfulness can also be applied to our interactions with others.
Mindfulness helps regulate our nervous system, which can be invaluable in supporting our wellbeing, resilience and mental health, especially during stressful or challenging periods of our lives.
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Consent means making clear, informed agreements with others in all areas of life. This includes with friends and family, as well as in our most intimate connections with others, including sexual consent.
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Mindfulness supports our consent skills by helping us listen more attentively to others, whilst also supporting us to notice and get clearer about our personal boundaries.
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"We can talk about consent 'til we can’t talk any more, but without a way to teach people about consent, not just conceptually but in the body and in the voice, we won’t arrive at the consent culture we seek.”
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Carol Queen, Sex and Relationships Educator
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Wellbeing, Consent and Mindfulness
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All UK universities are now required to provide consent education for their students. New E6 guidelines from the Office for Students (paragraph 26) state that trainings on sexual consent and bystander training should be "designed and delivered by persons with credible and demonstrable expertise." This is exactly what the Art of Consent offers. Our professional team of facilitators have many years' experience working in this field.
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However, our experience also tells us that a one-off, hour-long consent workshop, whilst being an essential first-step, is highly unlikely to generate the sea-change required to build a genuine culture of consent across our universities.
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This is why we have developed further trainings to help students embed both the principles and practices of consent.
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The most popular of these workshops is Mindful Relating, which brings together training on personal boundaries, embodied awareness, listening skills and nervous system regulation. Importantly, these are offered as practices, rather than only as concepts - because a confidently felt sense of bodily awareness is key to students knowing what their personal boundaries are - sexual or otherwise.
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Contact Us to learn more about the trainings we can offer your students.
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Nervous system regulation -
an essential skill for wellbeing and mental health
It is widely accepted that, rather than being caused solely by a few bad actors, sexual assault and harassment are systemic, and can therefore only be effectively addressed by building a culture of consent within colleges and universities.
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Numerous studies have shown high rates of sexual assault and harassment on campus. Universities have a duty of care toward their students, yet are frequently criticised for failing to address these problems. It is widely accepted that, rather than being caused solely by a few bad actors, sexual assault and harassment are systemic, and can therefore only be effectively addressed by building a culture of consent within colleges and universities.
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