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Think Well, Be Well, Love Well | Holly Dixon

When most people think about mindfulness, they tend to think about formal mindfulness meditation, sitting cross legged, with your fingers in this particular shape, in some dreamy location,” mused Holly Dixon during her Raising the Bar talk, ‘Mindfulness in the Bedroom and Beyond’. “But that isn’t the only way to practise mindfulness. In fact, at its core, mindfulness is not about meditation, mindfulness is really an approach to life.”

Holly Dixon holds a Masters of Arts with first class honours and is a PhD candidate at Auckland University’s Department of Psychological Medicine. She is also the co-founder of Togetherly (togetherly.co.nz), a social start-up that aims to teach everyday folk how to be better at relationships by using evidence-based tools like mindfulness. Though Holly has led the health and wellbeing curriculum at her university’s medical programme for the past couple of years, and has conducted lectures, it was her first Raising the Bar event—so I begin by asking how she felt it went.

 

“Well, you can’t have notes and you can’t have slides which means I had to remember a 45-minute talk off the top of my head while making it sound off-the-cuff!” she chuckles. “But it was really good fun—I actually enjoyed myself immensely, and people laughed at my jokes, which was a relief.”

 

Holly has always harboured an interest in wellbeing and attachment histories, as well as relationship health—partly in response to her parents divorcing when she was a youngster, and partly due to some personal past issues with mental health.

 

“My research looks at relationships and health,” she says. “The translation of this research for the mainstream, via Togetherly, is not designed to be therapy, or a replacement for it. I kind of consider it psycho-education.” Mindfulness, she believes, can be “the birthplace of every good thing that happens in relationships”.

 

 

Contrary to Freud’s suggestions, Holly says our strongest impulses are not sex or aggression, rather the need for close and comforting connections. Our childhood need for security continues into adulthood, and she compares a good relationship with a good diet and vitamin intake in terms of health benefits, citing that it even improves our physical wellbeing, too. However, Holly laments that we’re prone to sabotage such relationships to the point where they may become among “the most threatening, challenging, traumatic experiences of our life”.

 

The reasons for this may be multifold: we get too used to our partners, leading to complacency and boredom; we fail to acknowledge or accommodate our partner’s needs; and we are too easily distracted. “Research shows that our minds wander 47 percent of the time,” says Holly. “Our body might be present but our mind is ping-ponging between things in the past and worries in the future.”

 

Enter, the concept of being present in the moment. Enter, mindfulness.

 

“It’s a way of processing experience, a quality of consciousness, of relating to your individual experience,” says Holly, “and though I would agree that it is a personal journey, the effect can be applied interpersonally.”

 

Including, as the title of her Raising the Bar talk states, in the bedroom.

 

 

“If you get the basics and your relationship right, and you have greater intimacy and sense of connection, it is obviously going to flow on into the bedroom,” says Holly. “Mindfulness also not only increases the harmony between women’s sexual arousal and desire, but has been shown—in small studies—to be beneficial in combating erectile dysfunction.”

 

I ask if Holly is adept at using her mindfulness research to better improve her own relationships.

 

“You should call back later to ask my partner! I think the biggest skill that I have developed is the ability to catch myself if I’m, say, being overly critical. I consider myself a recovering anxiously-attached person—as well as a recovering perfectionist. These things affect relationships. It means I can be hyper-vigilant to signs of rejection, so one of the things I feel I do well now is to acknowledge my own thoughts with greater objectivity.”

 

And is your partner on board with the mindfulness philosophy?

 

“I like to think of it as a way of life. Of relating to your thoughts and feelings in a non-judgmental matter, so I hope that he is cultivating that capacity within himself. He doesn’t meditate, but you don’t have to—mindfulness is not synonymous with meditation. He did say to me a couple of months ago that he thinks everyone should have at least some relationship education in their lives, which I thought was amazing!”

 

Our main job within our relationships, muses Holly, is to support and nurture each other, while providing security, and “mindfulness helps you to do just that”.

 

For more information please visit togetherly.co.nz