Civil servants had classes in crystal healing to beat stress

CIVIL servants were offered a ‘crystal healing for beginners’ session to ease their work stresses, it has emerged.

Classes available earlier this month included a two-day wellbeing programme called ‘It’s all about me’, which focused on ‘being kind to yourself’.

Another event was entitled ‘Reshaping negative thoughts and language into positive affirmations’, according to the Guido Fawkes website.

An afternoon session called ‘Time to Unmind’ aimed to provide staff with ‘tools, training and exercises to support your mental wellbeing’.

The day started with an hour-long counselling session for ethnic minority colleagues.

The ‘Beginners Guide to Crystal Healing and Deep Relaxation’ was an interactive class about the alternative therapy that claims crystals and semi-precious stones have curative properties, but has no scientific basis. Celebrity adherents include Victoria Beckham and Katy Perry. A min

‘This is hocus pocus you’d expect in LA’

ister told the Guido Fawkes website: ‘This is hocus pocus b ****** s which you’d expect in LA, not in Whitehall.’

A spokesman for the Cabinet Office, which distributed the list of activities, said: ‘Like most large organisations, the civil service runs events aimed at improving the wellbeing of staff.

‘We are putting in place additional due diligence to ensure our internal offer to staff is appropriate and value for money. The session in question incurred no cost to the taxpayer.’

Yesterday it emerged that an anti-racism trainer had been drafted in to give lessons to civil servants despite making anti-Semitic statements in the past.

Mizanur Rahman oversaw a session at the Cabinet Office in 2019 entitled An Inclusive Britain. But in social media posts from 2014 he had compared Israel to ‘white supremacy’.

In 2019 the Home Office was criticised for spending nearly £3,000 on sending civil servants to a recreation of TV game show the Crystal Maze.