About

Our principal instructor is Donnah Day

BSc, Hons, MSc, Cert IV TAA, HPCE, CIMI

Donnah’s experience with mindfulness and meditation spans nearly 40 years, having practiced mindfulness since she was a young girl.

Image 2aIt started when she experienced chicken pox and then eczema (psoriasis) after major surgery on one of her legs. Being unable to relieve the itchiness under the plaster she taught herself how to tolerate and accept one itch underneath the plaster at a time. With practice she found that she could do this with the itchy areas outside the plaster as well.

As a teenager she explored meditation more deeply and has rekindled and reengaged with her interest in mindfulness and other meditations in earnest over the last five years.  These techniques are powerful and Donnah has used them to remap her body image and eliminate phantom pain following below knee amputation of her right leg in April 2015.

Her training includes:

  • Open GroundIMTA logo
  • Tallowwood Sangha
  • ACT Mindfully
  • Power Training and Coaching Institute
  • The Gawler Foundation
  • ACT Mindfully
  • Hypnobirthing Australia
  • MindUp!
  • International Association of Infant Massage
  • Infant Massage Information Service (including special needs extention studies for:  Autism, Cerebral Palsy, Down Syndrome, Pre-Term Babies and other variations on infant health)

 

She is a full member of the International Meditation Teachers’ Association.

 

The most defining moments which led to the inception of Lotus Patch were:

Learning about the white bear experiment of social psychologist Daniel Wegner.

In this experiment two groups of students engaged in a very simple and elegant study. One group was told not to think about white bears and the other group was told to think about anything they liked. The group told not to think about white bears found they thought of nothing but …. white bears. This experiment shows that trying to suppress thoughts, ideas, memories and sensations does not work. If, however, we simply allow these things to arise, arrive and be, we can learn to disengage and accept they are there whilst we continue on more comfortably.

Reading “Man’s Search for Reason” by Viktor E Frankl.

Dr Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who survived the holocaust and Auschwitz.  Man’s Search for Meaning is his reflection on those experiences and was written in a mere six days.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.