Mindfulness Courses
"I just want to say thanks for the really great course. I got a lot out of it and would certainly recommend to anyone considering it. I found I built up quite a rapport with some of the other attendees. You have to work at it to get the best out of the learning but there's no such thing as a free lunch!
So I'm back at work doing a different role and working 5 hours a day. Life is good thanks to people like you."
Courses available
2024
What course should I do?
In a nutshell........
MBCT - If your problems are generally based on what you think or you have been told by a health professional that you are depressed or anxious
MBSR - If you generally feel like you could do with reconnecting to yourself, the world and others through meditation and some basic stretching/body movements
MBCT(for life) - If your problems are generally based on feeling negative and would like to balance both positive and negative approaches to life
Introduction to Mindfulness- If you are really new to mindfulness and would like to learn the basics
MBCT and The 8 Week MBCT Course
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is the integration of Cognitive Therapy with mindfulness approaches. The MBCT training can help us as Mindfulness helps you observe and identify your feelings while Cognitive Therapy teaches you to interrupt automatic thought processes and work through feelings in a healthy way. This helps to to reduce the tendency to ruminate, overthink or worry too much about things and/or to recognise behaviours such as avoidance or suppression.
The 8 week Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) course was developed by Zindel Segal, Mark Williams and John Teasdale Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (mbct.co.uk)
The Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) course is closely modeled on the MBSR with some important differences originally designed specifically to help us deal with depressive mood states. The course has now been shown to be highly effective in helping with other mood states such as anxiety, stress and general emotional distress. MBCT is included in the NHS NICE guidelines
Online and Face to face 8 week courses are run frequently throughout the year. For more immediate inquiries please contact me for more information.
Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy for Life
(Cost for January course - FREE)
A more accessibe Mindfulness course driven from the underpinnings of the MBCT course and developed by the Oxford Mindfulness Foundation, that has some subtle changes that are more available to us all. The ultimate aim of the MCBT- L course is to help participants to make a radical shift in their relationship to the thoughts, feelings and body sensations. Participants are encouraged to develop a home practice of approximately 20- 30 mins a day. All participants are given a handout each week with the main learning points and Home practice as well as access to a link to download the weekly meditations.
MBSR and The 8 Week MBSR Course
Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is an eight-week evidence-based program that offers secular, intensive mindfulness training to assist people with stress, anxiety, depression and pain. Developed at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in the 1970s by Professor Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jon Kabat-Zinn - Mindfulness Training (mbsrtraining.com)
MBSR uses a combination of mindfulness meditation, body awareness, yoga and exploration of patterns of behaviour, thinking, feeling and action.
MBCT or MBSR Online one to one 8 week course
One-to one psychological interventions that focus on reducing and managing emotional distress. Enrolling on the full 8 week MBCT course evidence based practices and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy principles to create a bespoke Therapeutic intervention that can be very effective in the management of emotional challenges.
All of the meditations that accompany the course and the extensive Participants Handbook are included in the price. We meet online once a week for 1.5 hours. In the session we reflect on the work done at home, do a meditation practice together and explore the next week's theme. You will need to commit yourself to building in and practicing each day both the meditations and the mindful practices. Click here for more details
Online introduction to Mindfulness
Course cost - £100
Information
This, popular online introduction to mindfulness, is about accessing the well-being, wholeness and wisdom that resides within each of us. The course consists of 3, one hour zoom classes and covers 3 key meditation practices: sitting, walking and a body scan. The body scan audio will be provided to each participant for continued practice beyond the course.
Course Objectives:
Recognize the relationship between stress and mindfulness
Learn and practice 3 meditations: sitting, body scan and walking
Connecting with others who are new to mindfulness
Creating a practice of mindfulness that fits your life
Course Outcomes:
Experience more presence and joy
Develop skills for dealing more effectively with stress
Improve your sense of resilience, and of the capacity to recover from life's challenges
What you will need:
A stable internet connection
Zoom downloaded on your laptop/pc
Course time and dates:
All 8 week course breakdown - Individual, Face to Face or Online
(This is a generic overview of all programmes, however, there are subtle and significant differences in all course, which will be guided by Lee. In a nutshell, MBCT mainly focusses more on our our thoughts and our distress)
Session 1 - What is Mindfulness?
Cultivating mindfulness can help us reduce the negative physiological and psychological effects of stress reactivity, as well as helping us to develop more effective ways of responding positively and pro-actively to stressful situations and experiences.
In this session we will learn that when we are in “automatic pilot” it is easy to drift unawares into a busy “doing” mode and ruminative thought patterns that can create additional stress in our lives. Continual “doing” mode also robs us of our potential for really living our lives moment by moment. We can transform this experience by intentionally paying attention to it in particular ways. We begin to practice stepping out of automatic pilot by paying attention intentionally, mindfully, to eating, to the sensations in the body, and to aspects of our ever-day experience.
Session 2 - Living in our heads
In this session we will start to learn about how our mind can be busy and sometimes scattered. We will learn how to intentionally take awareness to our breath to explore the possibilities of being more focussed and gathered. We will begin to look at the minds habitual patterns and of the minds intentions to label events. We will start to engender terms as gentleness, non-judgement, curiosity and respect.
Session 3 - Gathering the scattered mind.
The mind is often scattered and lost in thought because it is working away in the background to complete unfinished tasks and strive for future goals.
In this session we will learn how to “come back” to the present moment by tuning into our breath and body to reconnect ourselves. Starting to learn that there is no ‘right way’ to experience meditation, instead cultivating attitudes of curiosity and kindly interest to our moment to moment experience.
Session 4 - Coping with Stress and recognising aversion.
Our conditioning and perception shape our moment to moment experience.
Session 4 continues our exploration of how a Mindfulness practice cultivates curiosity and openness to all experience, can helps us learn new ways to relate to external and internal stressors and can can allow us to recognise and inquire into our habitual reactive patterns and therefore how to soften resistance and reduce suffering.
Session 5 - Mindfulness of Thoughts
When we relate differently to our thoughts we free ourselves from the ruminative doing mode and see clearly that negative thinking can be a distortion of the mind. It can be enormously liberating to realise that our thoughts are merely just thoughts. During this session we will be learning how to observe and relate to our thoughts as events so that you can come to the realisation that you are not just your thoughts.
Session 6 - Mindfulness of Emotions
The same way we consider our thoughts, whenever you feel a certain emotion, a whole system is activated. This system includes the thoughts and images that enter your mind, the memories you have, past and future events and your behaviour, and the actions that you feel like doing.
In this session we will move to become aware of specific emotions and how mindfull awareness can move us out of the emotional mind trap. The practices in this session will help you see emotions as just emotions and enable you to consider more helpful, useful responces, rather than finding yourself caught up in them.
Session 7 - How can I best take care of myself?
If we turn towards our experience with a developed kindly awareness we can find and resonate with the deepest kind of peace and happiness that comes from within. Developing an understanding of ourselves in a compassionate way can help us reconnect with the world and our own lives in a particular way that not only has an effect on you but can open into kindness and compassion for others. This session will see a development in formal meditation so that compassion may arise more readily enriching both our own day-to-day lives and the lives of those we meet and interact with.
Session 8 - Planning for a new way of living
Planning for a new way of living - the last session is the rest of your life! Maintaining and extending a more mindful and caring way of being requires clear intention, attention, attitude and planning.
It is helpful to link regular mindfulness practice to a personally significant value or positive reason for taking care of yourself. Perhaps, start by asking yourself “how do I feel differently to the start of the programme?” Has the benefit been worth the squeeze?
