Chapter 3
Putting Mindfulness into Practice with the Eight-Week Course
In This Chapter
Tailoring MBCT to suit you
Getting rid of false preconceptions
Maintaining a practical and pragmatic attitude
Realising how beneficial MBCT can be
The cornerstone of practising mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) successfully is to practise regularly. In this chapter I introduce you to the core of this book – the eight-week course that comprises Chapters 4 to 11. Over this period you discover how to be more present and to experience your life now, while it’s happening, to help alleviate worry, fear and any number of other problems. I help you to understand gradually the importance of a regular personal mindfulness practice and what this decision may lead to for the rest of your life.
You discover in this chapter how to personalise the course to your requirements and maintain your motivation. I also dismiss some erroneous preconceptions you may have and spell out the benefits that you can expect to gain. Please bring a childlike curiosity to the eight-week course – the willingness to taste life moment by moment, even the ones that leave a bitter taste behind.
Life is an ongoing series of changes and a constant adventure. Explorers find out and discover wondrous things, but during their journey they also experience challenges, pain and loss.
Creating a Personal Practice that Works
I’d like to emphasise the importance of creating time and space for MBCT in your life, over these eight weeks and for the rest of your life. Only if you commit personally to it (the more the better) can you experience the power of this tool for better living. In the end, I intend this book to be practically useful for you. You know how it is when you make a New Year’s resolution, such as buying a membership for a gym: come March, those people who are still going are the long-timers, the ones who already committed prior to Christmas.
Speaking of gyms, when you first start exercising in a gym, you may well have one of the personal trainers checking in with you and helping you to create your own highly unique exercise programme. In the same vein, you can decide after tasting the eight-week course how you want to continue your own regular practice of mindfulness for the future. You can stick to the routine I describe in this book or change and adapt it according to your needs or wants.
Good news! Mindfulness is far less expensive than an annual gym membership and you’ve no time restraints when the mind gym is open. You don’t have to travel to it and if you do ever lapse, rest assured that every morning is a new beginning. Even better: every moment is a new start.
Although practising MBCT may sound relatively straightforward at this stage, it’s certainly not effortless. In fact, unless you discipline yourself, your early enthusiasm can become swamped by old habits that are so automatic you may not even be aware of them. You may find yourself resorting to:
That gin and tonic when you arrive home and put your feet up
That automatic cup of tea and reading of the newspaper
Sitting down just to watch the news briefly (and then finding yourself asleep a couple of hours later)
To prevent any backsliding, I suggest that you make a firm appointment with yourself for your mindfulness sessions in your diary or always do them first thing in the morning.
Also, consider finding a friend who wants to practise with you – experimenting with others can help avoid procrastination. You can perhaps exercise in pairs and make observations about each other or even make recordings of instructions for exercises.
Setting yourself goals
If you prefer to build up to something in baby steps, you can choose to do so with the course.
Perhaps start small and pick one of the shorter practices, such as the Breathing Space (see Chapter 6), but regularly set yourself little goals. For example, say: ‘for one week I’m going to meditate for ten minutes at a time and try to eat the first spoonful of my cereal mindfully.’ Please don’t be annoyed or disheartened if you don’t manage to achieve these ten minutes every day! Just do the practice whenever possible and give yourself the encouragement and motivation to carry on.
At the beginning you may need to see a little success to keep going. You can say to yourself: ‘I want to practise for ten minutes every day.’ You may find that this amount of time is achievable despite the fact that you may have many other commitments. After you timetable 10 minutes, perhaps you end up doing 12 or more minutes. You’re most likely going to feel gratitude and joy when you achieve this goal, and when rooted in this ten minutes you can slowly venture out into longer practices. When you taste the sweetness and tender gravity of mindfulness, the wonderful gift of simply being without having to do something, you start to look forward to it – as a time just for you and your rebalancing.
Please set a do-able goal for yourself right now and write it down in your mindfulness diary (see the later section ‘Keeping a practice diary’). Here are a few examples:
‘I will practise ten minutes of the breathing meditation (from Chapter 6) in my allocated meditation spot. I will also eat one fruit daily with true awareness.’
‘I will practise a brief walking meditation every day and two body scans (from Chapter 4) at the weekend. I will also play the guitar for a few minutes a day and really be present when doing so.’
‘I will listen to bird song and other nature sounds first thing in the morning. I will drive mindfully to work and be patient when stuck in traffic. I will take a mindful lunch break three times a week.’
Making the practice part of your daily routine
As I mention in the preceding section, practising mindfulness over these eight weeks is more convenient than going to the gym: you don’t need to go far or have to take a shower afterwards. You can, however, choose having a shower as one of your daily routines. The idea is to let all everyday activities become a natural mindful experience.
When you’re having a mindful shower, feel the water, the temperature, the smell of your soap or shower gel and be fully present in mind and body. Patiently let mindfulness become part of a daily routine. When you dry your body, notice the feeling of your towel soaking up the pearls of water.
Another idea for experiencing everyday awareness is preparing a meal mindfully. You can start when you shop for the meal, looking for the ingredients, appreciating their colour or packaging and their smell (such as the fresh coffee or fresh baking smell). When you pick up an item, say a melon, really feel its weight, shape and texture. When you start the cooking process at home, notice how you mindfully cut vegetables, for example, paying attention to their texture and their smell in particular and also enjoying the variety of colour. You may even taste different pieces of vegetable prior to cooking and after cooking and compare taste and texture.
Let your whole experience of life become an ongoing experiment, with mindful actions slowly but surely being introduced until you’re living mindfully (check out Chapter 4 for more everyday mindfulness suggestions).
One important aspect of mindfulness is compassion and self-compassion. Part of integrating MBCT with your daily routine is remembering to act with compassion, but also recognising where you’re already letting compassion influence your relationships with other people and yourself. Please write down a list of all the different roles you fulfil in your life. Work, for example, is also divided into many sub-roles. A teacher, for example, can also be head of a department, a figure of parental support, a figure of peer support and even a student when attending professional development courses, whereas a mother can be a protector, an organiser, a pacifier, a household maintainer, a close confidante and so on. Creating this list may well reveal how challenging creating a space for MBCT is in such a busy life. On the other hand, each role benefits hugely from a little more awareness, patience and gratitude.
Making time, not finding time
I make a distinction between finding and making time. You need to be disciplined and make the time for MBCT practices to happen! Here are some tips for doing so, and don’t worry, I remind you repeatedly of this fact throughout the book:
If you like watching the TV, make a conscious decision on which programmes you choose to watch and create at least 30 free minutes by reducing your couch time.
If you record your favourite programmes on the commercial channels, you can often shorten your viewing time by fast-forwarding through the adverts to save 10 to 15 minutes an hour (shush: don’t tell the advertisers).
If you read a daily newspaper, perhaps you don’t have to watch the news as well. Just choose one or the other, or perhaps alternate.
If you check your emails regularly, write down how many minutes you spend on the computer or smartphone daily. Can you devote 20 per cent of your computer time to mindfulness?
When I was young, computers and mobile phones didn’t exist, People survived (and yes, we did survive quite well!) by writing letters and cards. Maybe once a week you can write a mindful card to someone instead of replying by email.
If you’re worried about offending friends and family, just tell them what you’re endeavouring to do so that they understand that you’re going to be unreachable for a whole half hour a day.
Drawing up a schedule
Pencilling in a mindful appointment with yourself in your diary is helpful. Mindfulness is a crucial part of staying well, and is as important as going to see friends, to the movies or out to dinner. By the way, you can take MBCT with you wherever you go and apply it to almost every life experience. Therefore, I suggest drawing up a schedule, whether daily or weekly, of what kind of things you want to focus on in your mindfulness training.
Keeping a practice diary
Starting and continuing with a mindfulness diary is an essential part of your journey through MBCT and I refer to it throughout this book – kindly get the sort of diary to write or draw in that you find inspiring! After all, it constitutes your private practice journal, so make it look special.
Employ a little creativity when designing and filling in your diary. Choose something with a beautiful cover or even create the cover yourself out of personal photos, cuttings you selected from magazines or your own drawings. Making your mindfulness diary can be a really inspiring and mindful act in itself!
I discuss logging your reactions in your mindfulness diary in Chapter 4.
Dispelling the Myths
Many myths and false ideas exist about mindfulness, meditation, yoga and so on that may hold you back from fully committing to MBCT. They’re often based on lack of knowledge, and on missing or misunderstood information, as follows:
Myth: ‘Mindfulness is an Eastern practice and you have to become a Buddhist or yogi to practise it.’
Not true: this book trains you in a secular way. Even if you do become interested in spirituality, you certainly don’t have to give up whatever religion, if any, you believe in.
Myth: ‘By practising mindfulness meditation, you become so relaxed and peaceful that nothing ever hurts or bothers you again.’
Not true: bad things happen, now and then, but by focusing merely on one single object of attention you may feel very much at peace and even relaxed. You don’t float above the ground, however, and you need to remember that each exercise session is different and has different outcomes. Each practice is a new experience – moment by moment.
In fact, MBCT encourages you to take a different stance in relation to difficult thoughts and sensations. You find out how to observe early warnings signs of an assault (of say depression, migraine, panic attack, and so on) and handle them competently.
Myth: ‘You have to stop eating meat, chocolate, sweets, drinking alcohol, smoking, and so on.’
Any of these habits are absolutely your choice. Whether they give you pleasure or grief, again, only you can decide. The more mindful you are, the more you notice which foods and drinks serve you well and which are causing you discomfort or even pain. You become so in touch with your body that you simply know what to do gladly and what to let go of, if anything.
Myth: ‘Mindfulness is just another thing the media wants people to spend money on.’
Perhaps partly true, but unavoidable in a consumer society where the media is so pervasive and so many things are promoted and sponsored. However, mindfulness meditation has been around for a long time (close to 3,000 years). When you stop referring to written texts about mindfulness and start remembering how you experienced life when you were a young child, you remember moments of just being alive. Furthermore, you can read up on thousands of research studies that show that it’s a proven method of healing from within.
Children can be so much more mindful than the most trained meditator. They haven’t been corrupted yet by expectation, rules, guilt and resentment. Watch a toddler for a day, or a cat for that matter, and you see unrehearsed mindfulness at its purest (or should I say purrrrest!): the joy of being alive!
Feeling that you lack the necessary experience or knowledge
If you’ve never participated in any sort of self-help programme or experienced these kinds of exercises before, you may think that you’ve no idea what you’re doing. Fear not, for all you need to know is already seeded within you. This book is more like the manual to help you look after the seeds and water and feed them so they can flourish and bloom.
This book isn’t a volume for experts, yogis or people who want to teach MBCT to others: it’s very much designed for the curious beginner. From your first exercise of week one (in Chapter 4), you find yourself invited on a voyage. The journey takes you logically and gradually through eight chapters that open your mind and heart to being alive, helping you to take in the goodness that you can find in life and giving you options on how to deal with the painful and difficult experiences in life.
You can’t lose your way, because I provide ‘Getting Your Bearings on the Course’ and ‘Reviewing Your Accomplishments This Week’ sections in each chapter for orientation.
To see how the course progresses and how each of the eight chapters focuses on a specific aspect, flip to the later section ‘Introducing the Eight-Week Course’.
Assuming that mindfulness is all spiritual mumbo-jumbo
Cynicism can be a big mindset to get over. Cynicism is quite understandable, with so many fake prophets telling people how to lead better and more spiritual lives. But MBCT isn’t some pseudo-religion – it’s simply a way of uncluttering your mind and allowing your mind and body to function better.
MBCT encourages you to feel a bit of kindness, patience, awareness, acceptance, empathy and emotional intelligence. Research shows that you can have a more fulfilling life and more rewarding relationships if you practise these skills. (For a long list of the mental and physical ailments that mindfulness meditation has been proved to improve, turn to Chapter 1.)
Research is ongoing and ever-expanding. Everything you encounter is based on scientific research and decades of experience, and I hope that helps you to let go of worry and try it out. Only you can judge whether MBCT works for you.
Unless you give it a good and regular go, you’ll never know for certain whether MBCT is for you. So try the eight sessions before you judge the outcome.
For more on the Eastern aspects of MBCT, read the later section ‘Practising oriental disciplines’.
Distinguishing between meditation, mindfulness and awareness training
You may well have heard these terms before, and similar ones too, and may now be wondering what they mean in the context of MBCT. The following list should clarify some issues for you:
Meditation: A general term for any practice that involves sitting or kneeling (sometimes even standing) and focusing the mind on an object, sound or feeling.
Mindfulness meditation: Focuses on the here and now and uses an anchor of awareness to keep your mind from flitting off into ruminating, thinking or planning.
Awareness training: Becoming more mindful by intentionally becoming aware of the present moment over and over again.
Awareness training (which is sometimes called focusing) is similar to mindfulness training: only the name is different.
Meditation comes in many different types and with many different names: transcendental meditation, visualisation and concentration, among many others. MBCT is a secular form using ancient meditative practices to put you in touch with what’s happening in this moment. It’s down-to-earth and pragmatic – an all-inclusive and productive way of working within a secular framework that’s available to all (check out Chapter 1 for more about MBCT’s development and history).
Believing that you can do it by yourself
Although you can find not having a teacher to guide you a bit daunting – and having a teacher is no bad thing – this book allows you to accomplish a great deal by yourself. You don’t have to be harsh on yourself and act like a drill-instructor; MBCT is more about being your own mentor and friend, finding out how to trust yourself and holding a gentle discipline in mind.
No single perfect way exists of practising mindfulness. Just develop your personal approach (see the earlier section ‘Creating a Personal Practice that Works’) and remember that every moment can be a new start.
Being Actively Mindful: Theory Rooted in Practice
As I explain in this section, everything about the eight-week MBCT course is rooted in practice – you get to be active, not passively sitting and reading. Therefore, I suggest that you use this book in a particular way: read, leave the book, try something out and then return to the book for guidance.
Please consider reading through a particular exercise twice and then close your eyes and do a speed practice run, where in your mind you go through a five-bullet-point system of how to remember the meditation.
Here’s an example: kindly read the breathing meditation in Chapter 6 twice. Then note down in your mindfulness diary five key points that can help you get through it the first time:
Sit with dignity.
Focus on feet being connected with the ground.
Breath naturally.
Observe the natural in- and out-breath – allowing the breath just to happen.
Bring your mind back from wandering off and reconnect it to the breath.
When you finish the speed practice run, kindly read the instructions once more and see how much you remember.
Practising oriental disciplines
Buddhist, yogic and Taoist wisdom isn’t mystical or old-fashioned: in many aspects, these philosophies contain down-to-earth tools for improving your life. The Buddha, for example, taught for half a century and in a nutshell his message is that ‘life brings suffering and you can discover how to reduce it.’
In the West, what tends to happen to Eastern wisdom is that open-minded people see how practical and helpful many of the ideas are and incorporate them into their regular lifestyles, regardless of whether they’re religious or non-religious. That’s why you come across so few terms in this book that sound unfamiliar or foreign to you.
By beginning to integrate Eastern and Western psychology, you’re already moving towards reducing suffering. So much suffering in the world is caused by the violence that people use to try to force their traditions onto one another, claiming that theirs is the only true way.
Nothing like this violence is going to happen in your MBCT voyage. I make it clear that no right or wrong way applies to MBCT, just your way of leading your life. In the end you’re responsible for your actions and reactions, and mindfulness invites you to choose what sits comfortably with you and experiment with what looks promising or at least interesting.
Adapting old techniques
Several ancient meditative practices have been adapted and unravelled for modern-day use in MBCT. I guide you in simple, down-to-earth language. Furthermore, you don’t have to torture yourself and sit on the floor in the lotus position; you can sit on a chair. If you do want to move to sitting on the floor, you can do so slowly and gradually.
In fact, only sit on the floor cross-legged if that feels comfortable. Alternatively, sit on a chair, up against a wall, kneel or stand.
In addition, the course includes a fair amount of cognitive behavioural therapy interventions, which have been used successfully for more than 50 years. (Chapter 1 describes this aspect of the MBCT course.)
Certain other practices (such as the 3-minute breathing space in Chapter 6) have been developed specifically for this course.
Joining body and mind
MBCT isn’t a physical or a mental workout – it’s about connecting body and mind.
The mind in itself isn’t just your brain but also your emotional mind; your feelings. The Japanese and Chinese languages reflect this by having one single character (symbol) representing ‘mind and heart’. Often thoughts and feelings affect how your body feels. Many times, the body gives clues as to what problem you’re experiencing.
Perhaps you’ve ignored an inconvenient body sensation in the past and eventually your body had to knock so hard on your awareness door that you had to listen. Here are a few examples:
Feeling hungry: Can lead to dizziness and feeling faint.
Feeling thirsty a lot: Can point to diabetes.
Heart racing: Can indicate anxiety or high blood pressure.
Knot in stomach: Can mean you’re afraid of something.
Light headache: Can lead to a throbbing tension headache (can also be a sign of high blood pressure).
Lump in the throat: You may be fearful of speaking your truth.
Stiff neck and shoulders: Can lead to migraine or frozen shoulder.
Stomach feeling a little acidic: May develop into an ulcer or gastroenteritis.
The more you bring awareness to physical sensations during the eight-week course, the more you can tell what may be going on emotionally or prevent a stronger, potentially more harmful, sensation from developing.
Psychosomatic disorders
Body and mind are part of the whole; if one suffers, the other is affected too. You may have heard of psychosomatic disorders. The first part of this term (pyscho) refers to the mind, the second (soma) to the body. A psychosomatic disorder is a disease which involves both mind and body.
Some physical diseases are thought to be made worse by mental factors such as stress and anxiety. Skin ailments such as psoriasis, for example, are very often heavily affected if not triggered by mental unease. Other psychosomatic connections are a little more subtle: somebody suffering from depression may not eat regularly or look after himself well, for example. Other illnesses that are particularly prone to worsening as a result of mental factors such as stress and anxiety are eczema, stomach ulcers, high blood pressure and heart disease. It is thought that the physical part of the illness (the extent of a rash, the level of the blood pressure, and so on) can be affected by mental factors.
The term psychosomatic disorder is sometimes also used where mental factors cause physiological symptoms and no physical disease can be detected. For example, a chest pain may be caused by stress when no physical disease can be found.
Focusing on each individual task, and being present in the moment
Every day includes much more nonbeing than being . . . A great part of every day is not lived consciously.
—Virginia Woolf
Reading this insight Virginia Woolf had so many years ago is fascinating. Today people are probably even more mindless than during her lifetime. You live in a speedy society where everything has to be fast, has to be done quickly and efficiently.
In contrast, MBCT trains you in connecting with awareness and attention. When practising, please don’t think ahead to the next task of the day. As best as you can, keep focused on the task at hand and be present and aware moment by moment. If your mind wanders off while you’re going through an MBCT exercise, gently and kindly escort it back to the present moment.
This way you can enjoy the little miracles of life, like the miniature changes in your environment, in your own awareness and in your ability to skilfully stay sane in a frantic world.
Discovering the Advantages Awaiting You
You can gain a great many benefits from practising MBCT. You should never end-game, but realising what you’re working towards is important to keep you motivated.
End-gaming in this context means when you’re looking to the end result so much that you fail to make the most out of the journey you’re currently undertaking and miss out on many a splendid thing. End-gaming is effectively the opposite of mindful living and being in the now!
Adding up the benefits
So many potential benefits are associated with MBCT that a whole book can be filled with them.
Here are some of the benefits to your mental and physical health you can get from adding a little dose of awareness to your life:
Improves sleep
Increases ability in coping with pain and loss
Boosts your immune system
Helps to decrease depression and prevent relapse
Lessens anxiety
Reduces compulsive behaviour (drinking, smoking, eating, fasting, shopping, gambling, and so on)
Aids in the healing of, and being able to live better with, cancer
Helps you cope with ageing
Increases life satisfaction
Increases acceptance of yourself
Aids with dealing with anger
Increases experience of calm and relaxation
Increases energy levels and enthusiasm for living
Increases self-confidence and self-acceptance
Improves brain function (for example, memory, empathy, creativity)
Increases attention, compassion and self-compassion
Prevents you from losing the ability to access your memory
Lifts mood
The benefits may also extend to you and your workplace. For example, you may find that you:
Feel more empowered
Remain more true to yourself/not sell out
Overcome procrastination
Cope better with shyness
Show more kindness and patience
Increase your resilience
Can help you to overcome post-traumatic stress disorder
Become a more mindful teacher
Achieve more focus and attention
Enhance creativity
Achieve a more balanced mentality
Increase your concentration levels
Your relationships benefit too. You may find that you:
Have more acceptance of the idiosyncrasies of others
Befriend yourself
Forgive more readily
Are better at caregiving
Are better at parenting
Really listen to and care for others
Can amend relationships
Are kinder
Are more honest
Have enhanced intimacy
Can accept what is and what can’t be changed
Can let go of unhelpful arguments or demands
Have better awareness of a problem
Tailoring the benefits to you
The MBCT course is a personal experience that you shape around you to deal with whatever you want to deal with. You may start with one particular aspect of your life and then realise, by enhancing your awareness, how the problem may also be part of the solution.
For example, you may be intending to use MBCT to improve your sleep. But you slowly become aware that your sleep isn’t only affected by what you do and how much of it, but also by your environment. So, you may decide to de-clutter your bedroom and reduce your time on your mobile phone or computer before going to bed. Doing so gives you more space (physically, mentally and in relation to time).
Suddenly, many new doors open: not only do you have better, more restful sleep, but you also have more time for relationships, creativity and simply smelling the roses.
Living healthily
MBCT helps to improve your health generally. By practising meditation and mindful living, all your senses sharpen. You become much more aware of what you can do and what you should leave for another moment in time, when you need activity and when you need rest.
You increasingly feel which food really serves your body well, which may lead you to explore new avenues of cooking or experimenting with unknown ingredients. You may also notice what foods or drinks have the opposite effect and cause you discomfort or lack of energy. You may decide to reduce those in your diet, but only because you want to do so.
You become more aware of habits that are life-enhancing (walking in nature or eating healthy food) and those that are depleting (drinking too much alcohol, gambling, smoking – see Chapter 13). By doing so, you exercise compassion towards this one and precious life of yours. You know when a relationship is too demanding and you may have to put it on the back burner. Alternatively, you notice which friends are really nourishing and can be more present in your life (check out Chapter 16 which, although I aim at older people, contains useful advice for everyone on surrounding yourself with positive friends).
You’re likely to become more adventurous – not in a dangerous way, but in a life-appreciating kind of way. You may start new hobbies, new explorations or even a new job.
Slowing right down
With life often moving at such a frenetic pace, MBCT can really help you to slow down. Not so that you have less time to do things; you just appreciate every moment so it doesn’t feel like you’re constantly moving forward without knowing what you’re doing and why. You may well decide to let go of certain activities and decide to simply be more often.
Imagine that you relearn to listen to the birds, watch the clouds and feel the rain, just as you did when you were a toddler.
Helping yourself and others
MBCT helps create a better outlook on life for you, and thus also has a positive effect on those around you. It may well open your mind to more possibilities. You don’t have to become a hippy or crusader (unless you want to!). MBCT never puts an obligation on you to do anything, but you may find yourself wanting to help others and see that this activity brings rewards you can’t get from just living for yourself.
Here are some examples that happened to people who engaged deeply with MBCT, and thus can happen for you as well:
You become more aware of other people and their needs.
You may surprise yourself by offering a seat to a person in public, someone you sense needs it more than you.
You may become more aware of the planet, nature at large or individual countries or causes.
You may start using reusable shopping bags.
You may find yourself helping out in areas that you never have considered before (cooking or serving food in a soup kitchen, for example).
You may also want to assist a charitable cause by donating time or money or both.
You may simply be easier to live and be with.
Introducing the Eight-Week Course
The chapters in Part II focus on what’s normally an eight-week course for MBCT. However, you can go at whatever pace you choose – the eight weeks is just to help break down the elements into manageable chunks.
I recommend that you focus on one chapter for a minimum of one week and that you practise the included exercises no less than six times each before moving on to the next chapter. Of course, you can absolutely take things more slowly if you prefer. After all, you have the rest of your life to practice.
I also encourage you to make notes and observations of your experiences regularly. This way you get a chance to observe how MBCT is affecting your experience of life.
Going over the core skills
You acquire a number of core skills over the course. The primary focus is on methodically becoming more aware, moment by moment, of physical sensations and of thoughts and feelings as mental events. This process creates a new relationship between you and your thoughts and feelings. You find out how to see them as aspects of experience that move through your awareness and may or may not be true at any one moment in time.
In short, you discover that thoughts aren’t facts and that you aren’t your thoughts.
Other key themes of MBCT include learning through experience (via the guided meditations and exercises) and the development of an accepting, open attitude in which you intentionally face problems, pain or negative thoughts.
Increased mindfulness assists you in detecting patterns of negative thinking, feelings and body sensations, allowing you to address them at an earlier stage than if you ignore the warning signs.
Casting a look over the weeks to come
Here’s a brief description of each of the eight weeks included in the course. A lot of research and experience has gone into devising this course and so I recommend that you follow the chapters in this order.
The first four weeks of the course demonstrate the practice of mindfulness meditation for all your senses, showing you how much thinking you’re involved in when you aren’t even doing anything:
Week 1, Chapter 4: Stepping out of autopilot mode. This week introduces your mind and body to gentle, focused mindful activity in order to be mentally present. It includes an everyday mindfulness exercise and the body scan meditation, which may soon become an old favourite for you.
Week 2, Chapter 5: Overcoming obstacles and noticing living in your head. This lesson helps you to create the right mental attitude for engaging with MBCT and managing potential barriers and stumbling blocks that invariably crop up. I introduce a great breathing meditation and the idea of keeping a pleasant events diary.
Week 3, Chapter 6: Developing physical awareness using mindful movement. You meet such subjects as mindful movement and mindful walking, add the three-minute emergency breathing space meditation to your daily routine and explore creating an unpleasant events diary.
Week 4, Chapter 7: Allowing yourself to stay in the present while dealing with difficult thoughts and experiences. The truth is that attachment and aversion cause stress and suffering. In this chapter I discuss stress, its triggers and resulting symptoms. You read more about unhelpful thinking as well as a sitting with thoughts meditation, which allows you to look at your thoughts as an objective observer.
Attachment is wanting to have something, not letting it go and needing reassurance that you can have it forever (or at least again and again): examples include a person, a car, your looks, youth, money, achievements, and so on.
Aversion refers to having an absolute disgust of something, a total intolerance, and investing a lot of effort into not having to do something or accept something or someone, such as being fat or looking old, being poor or losing your importance, or not getting the best results. Aversion can also connect to the inability to accept low or angry moods in yourself or others.
The second four weeks deepen what you discover, encouraging you to be observant of mood shifts and connecting you more deeply to everyday living in the moment. You’re encouraged to be with what is, and only respond to it when doing so is the best option:
Week 5, Chapter 8: Allowing the difficult, as well as cultivating the right atmosphere for accepting adversity. You experiment with acceptance rather than resistance in this chapter. If you experience pain, sadness or lack for something, for now just let it be: bring kindness and compassion to difficulties. Specific exercises include ‘staying with discomforting thoughts’ and ‘being human’.
Week 6, Chapter 9: Dealing with and protecting yourself from negative thoughts and deepening your awareness that thoughts are not truths. You aren’t your thoughts and thoughts frequently get things wrong. I provide information on observing your own life narrative as just a story and not fact, and encourage you to experiment with the pebble meditation.
Week 7, Chapter 10: Being proactive in your own treatment and recovery and taking good care of yourself. I discuss observing when your mood is fragile and planning nourishing and pleasurable activities to balance your mood and wellbeing (the three-minute breathing space is the first intervention when you feel that ‘the weather is changing’).
Week 8, Chapter 11: Assessing yourself and bringing everything together. I lead you through deciding what you’ve discovered that’s useful and you want to continue using, and whether you’ve noticed any changes in your perception of life. I also provide action plans for being mindful for the rest of your life.