Chapter 18

Ten Ways to Expand Your Mindfulness Experience

In This Chapter

Discovering further journeys into mindfulness

Exploring online mindfulness resources

Deepening your experience and understanding of MBCT

When you start experiencing the benefits of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), don’t be surprised if you want to discover more and more. Mindfulness and feeling better are definitely addictive. If you find yourself infected with the mindfulness bug (this bug isn’t fatal, I promise!), you have loads of ways to extend your knowledge and practice.

In this chapter I provide a group of hand-picked resources connected to mindfulness, all of which can expand and intensify your mindfulness journey. The overall selection that’s available is huge, but I’ve personally tried and tested, attended, viewed and found really helpful these ten websites, training institutes, courses and commercial films.

Dropping by the Enter Mindfulness Website

This website (which you can access at www.entermindfulness.com) is part of my own organisation (forgive the shameless plug!) and serves as an invitation for you to delve further into mindfulness. Here you can find:

Information about upcoming courses and workshops

Resources to help you practise mindfulness meditation yourself

Dates for individual coaching and therapy sessions

News and updates about my practice and the world of MBCT

In addition, an evening meditation session takes place once a month (the venue is in London, SE23) that is suitable for people with a basic knowledge of mindfulness meditation. We practise walking meditation in the garden, as well as sitting and loving kindness meditations. Each session takes place on a Wednesday (unless otherwise stated) from 7:30 to 9:15 p.m. As if that isn’t appetising enough, we serve a large variety of teas and biscuits for a final round of sharing the evening’s experience.

Checking out the Be Mindful Website

This website (www.bemindful.co.uk) was created by the Mental Health Foundation (MHF) charity, which is dedicated to reducing the pain caused by mental ill health and assisting people suffering from mental health issues. MHF offers a number of services such as developing research, useful interventions for improving mental health services and campaigning to decrease stigma and prejudice connected to mental illness.

The website was one such development around three years ago. As well as offering an affordable online course, the site is a great source for information about mindfulness, focusing on topics such as:

What is mindfulness?

What is MBCT?

What is mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR: check out Chapter 1 for more on this forerunner to MBCT)?

How to find a course close to you.

The website shares with you how to apply mindfulness to everyday life. A large number of people have used it and experienced life-changing improvements in stress, anxiety and depression. The provided programme contains the core elements of MBSR and MBCT.

Visiting the Mindfulnet Website

The independent (that is, not affiliated with any particular governing body) mindfulness information website www.mindfulnet.org covers a wide range of resources and information about mindfulness. The organisation was created and is maintained by one wonderful and committed lady (Juliet). It's regularly updated and offers a wealth of information.

Topics include:

Research findings

Recommended mindfulness teachers

Uses of mindfulness at work and in the fields of education, the judicial system, medicine and psychotherapy

Books, video clips and other resources

Information on upcoming mindfulness events in the UK

A brief introduction to the brain and what happens to it when you meditate

Videos and media clips connected to the neuroscience of mindfulness, and recent research into how mindfulness helps you become more aware of your thoughts and how it actively shapes your brain

I recommend reading up on the fascinating information on how MBCT affects your brain.

Studying Mindfulness Formally: Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice

The Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice (CMRP) (see www.bangor.ac.uk/mindfulness) is a self-funding establishment based in the School of Psychology at Bangor University, in north Wales.

The Centre shares a deep commitment to the promotion of mindfulness-based approaches and offers training for professionals and the general public. It offers Continued Professional Development (CPD) courses for professionals and part-time postgraduate MSc/MA programmes, and organises an annual conference around Easter time, where leading experts share their research insights and new developments.

CMRP is a wonderful place and the longest-standing centre of its kind in the UK.

Benefiting from Research at the Oxford Mindfulness Centre

The Oxford Mindfulness Centre (OMC) is an international centre of excellence within Oxford University's Department of Psychiatry (the website is at www.oxfordmindfulness.org). Its main focus is to prevent depression and increase human potential by using mindfulness therapeutically. The OMC is at the forefront of research in the field of mindfulness and has incorporated training and education in benefits of mindfulness worldwide with its partners around the globe.

Clinical trials have proved the benefits of mindfulness in preventing serious depression and emotional anguish and the OMC is exploring the implications of these findings. Research is also extended to other disorders, using brain-imaging techniques and experimental cognitive science. The goal is to determine how mindfulness really works, and which practices are best for which conditions.

The Centre is exploring the potential of mindfulness to help people build resilience for the most challenging times of their lives: children and young people at school, adults at work and at home, parenting, older adults and those who care for them when they become frail.

The people working for the OMC are highly respected pioneers in the MBCT field, and having such a place in the beautiful city of Oxford is a feast for your senses.

Taking a Mindful Breath with Breathworks

Since 2001, Breathworks (www.breathworks-mindfulness.org.uk) has taught thousands of people living with pain, stress and illness how to improve and change their quality of life. The programmes are based on key elements of MBSR and MBCT and draw on the personal experience of Vidyamala Burch, who uses mindfulness to manage severe chronic spinal pain. Breathworks offers courses in a wide range of mindfulness skills to relieve the distress associated with persistent pain, fatigue and ill health, as well as stress. You can practise mindfulness skills face-to-face, through distance learning and online (alone or with mentoring).

The Breathworks approach to mindfulness is based on accepting your experience of hurting, ill health or stress and not reacting to it as you may usually do. With mindfulness, you can discover how to perceive clearly thoughts, physical sensations, emotions and events at the moment they occur without reacting in an automatic way.

By developing a new relationship with the conditions that cause you suffering, you can start to respond in new and creative ways. Breathworks’ headquarters are in Manchester, but courses are available in many different locations (UK and worldwide).

Vidyamala has written a couple of books on living with pain and illness, is a fantastic teacher and inspires everybody who hears her talk or reads her words. Check out Chapter 15 for more on Breathworks.

Attending a Mindfulness Course in Scotland

Kagyu Samye Ling (in Dumfriesshire, Scotland) was the first Tibetan Buddhist Centre established in the West and everybody is welcome! It offers mindfulness one-year training via a comprehensive course and is appropriate for beginners and more advanced practitioners of mindfulness (see www.samyeling.org).

Participants are taught progressive skills in mindfulness through presentations, guided meditations and tutorials. A strong importance is placed on discovering by experience, and for this reason home coursework is involved between weekends that include regular mindfulness practice, daily life exercises and journal writing:

Module One: Becoming present

Module Two: Working with distraction

Module Three: Self-acceptance

Module Four: Undercurrent and observer

This beautiful venue isn’t difficult to access and the environment is highly conducive for learning. Samye Ling offers many other courses as well, so take a look at the website.

A special little oasis within this oasis is the Internet cafe. The cakes are fabulous! You can, but don’t have to, connect to the outside world. The two peacocks roaming the land are something else.

Watching Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter . . . and Spring

Korean writer-director Kim Ki-Duk created this magical film (in Korean with English subtitles) in 2004. The tale’s otherworldly setting is a beautiful lake, surrounded by mountains and forests. On the lake floats a small wooden temple. Here live an elderly monk and his naughty adopted son and pupil. The viewer observes the boy’s turbulent course through childhood and adolescence, which all happens in this enclosed environment.

The film’s five concise chapters investigate existence: the bliss and ache of desire, joy and regret, guiltiness and reparation, selfishness and awareness, death and rebirth. The outside world and its temptations come and visit the central duo in summer when a young woman seeks treatment for an inexplicable illness and the teenage monk falls ardently in love and lust with her. The young man follows her into the city where he finds out about the human condition of attachment and loss.

Animals serve as a recurring theme within the individual sections: the boy discovers truths about inflicting suffering and having to accept punishment for it. He tortures frogs and snakes around whose bodies he cruelly ties stones. The monk then ties a heavy rock around the boy, so that he discovers what suffering he caused the helpless creatures. Few words are spoken.

The film is a masterpiece of mindfulness, because everything moves slowly and metaphors open the heart and mind of the viewer. Ki-Duk doesn’t judge the deeds of his characters. Instead he achieves a sense of stillness through exhilarating images of nature and contemplative pacing, without losing sight of the burdens of the human existence. Watching the film is a truly meditative experience.

Changing Lives: Doing Time, Doing Vipassana

This film tells the story of men incarcerated for life having committed horrendous crimes. The filmmakers spent about two weeks inside Tihar Central Prison in New Delhi and Baroda Jail in the Indian state of Gujarat. They interviewed inmates and jail officials. The film shows how a strong woman named Kiran Bedi, the former Inspector General of Prisons in New Delhi, strove to transform the infamous Tihar Prison and turn it into an oasis of peace. She’d heard from a prison guard who changed his life after discovering Vipassana (insight meditation). She hoped that meditation could have the same positive effect on the prisoners.

She invited a famous mindfulness teacher from Sri Lanka, who moved into the prison with his wife and spent ten days in silent meditation with the prisoners. They discovered how to take control of their lives and channel them towards goodness. All underwent profound change, realising that imprisonment didn’t have to be the end but could be a fresh beginning towards an improved and more positive life.

The change was so dramatic that recently the Indian Government decided to apply Vipassana in all the country’s prisons. Other countries are becoming interested as well. What I remember most is how the hearts of all participants opened and in the end all that remained was compassion and kindness.

You can freely view the film on YouTube, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8tZX3dGSM8.

Following One Man’s Mindful Recovery: I Am

I Am is a 2011 documentary film written, narrated and directed by Tom Shadyac (director of many Hollywood films including Ace Ventura – Pet Detective, The Nutty Professor and Bruce Almighty). It explores his personal voyage of recovery after a 2007 bicycle accident.

Shadyac suffered post-concussion syndrome and experienced severe headaches and hyper-sensitivity to light and noise. After medical treatments failed to help, he isolated himself completely, sleeping in his closet and walling the windows of his mobile home with blackout curtains. Gradually his symptoms began to subside at last and the director wanted to share his inner quest in the way he knew best: through film.

Shadyac also donated much of the fortune he earned as a filmmaker to open a homeless shelter. In the film he interviews scientists, religious leaders, environmentalists and philosophers such as Desmond Tutu, Noam Chomsky and many others. The central question is: What is wrong with our way of life and can we change it? The film is about creating a connection with all beings and leading a mindful and purposeful existence.

With his gentle humour, Shadyac comes across as an exceptionally likeable character. Earnings from the documentary go to the Foundation for I Am, which supports various charities.