Our Mindfulness for Life 8-week course (sometimes also called MBCT-L) blends the ancient wisdom of mindfulness with cognitive-behavioural techniques in ways to help you integrate mindfulness into your daily life.
It’s an in-depth, skills-based course created to help you cultivate lasting, sustainable and positive change. It offers approaches to support you with challenges, including recurring patterns of thought and behaviour that can create suffering, and also to help you savour life and flourish.
In this course, you’ll learn:
- To recognise the tendency to be on automatic pilot and how stepping out of it, by bringing mindfulness into our daily lives, can help us to live our lives more fully.
- To notice how often we are lost in our thoughts and feelings and practices which help to recognise this and help us to ‘gather the scattered mind’ and return to the here and now.
- How mindfulness can help us to recognise when we’re caught up in unhelpful patterns of thinking, feeling and acting, understand them and bring kindness to them.
- Skills for keeping our balance through life’s ups and down and for responding skilfully when difficulties arise, engaging with what is most important to us and opening up to joy, contentment and gratitude.
Sessions are group-based and take place weekly over the 8-week period. The first session is 2.5 hours and the remaining sessions are 2.25 hours. The course also includes a 5-hour ‘Day of Practice’.
“This has been for me nourishing, enlightening, thought-provoking. It helps to make sense of my world. It has been an immensely profound experience, more deeply affecting and transforming. My appreciation of how to live in the present and how to live my life with a full richness of experience has only just begun. I cannot recommend this course highly enough – it is for anyone and everyone… I have learnt skills for life. I’m so glad I came.”
Course participant
Mindfulness for Life
What to expect on this course
Each of the 8 group sessions has its own theme and follow a consistent pattern. After greetings and getting settled, you’ll begin with a guided meditation, followed by reflection and discussion around the experiences of the practice.
There’ll then be space for you to share your experiences of the home practices from the previous week. The weekly theme will be woven into the discussion.
Often, there’ll be another short practice or a cognitive exercise and time to reflect on any learnings. Near the end of each session, the home practices for the following week will be explained to you.
You’re also encouraged to continue to practise mindfulness between each taught session. Your teacher will provide recordings for the main practices and ask you to practise up to 45 minutes each day.
This involves a mixture of following the recordings of guided practices, and bringing mindful awareness into your everyday activities.
Full course dates
The dates sessions are running for this course are:
- Session 1: 15 November 2024 (18:30 Finish)
- Session 2: 22 November 2024
- Session 3: 29 November 2024
- Session 4: 06 December 2024
- Session 5: 13 December 2024
- Day of Practice: Saturday 14 December 2024 (13:00-18:00)
- Session 6: 20 December 2024
- Week Break
- Session 7: 03 January 2025
- Session 8: 10 January 2025
We also ask that you please reserve 17 January 2025 (16:00-18:15 UK Time) for the unlikely event that your teacher may need to reschedule a session.
Benefits of Mindfulness for Life
Research shows that mindfulness courses like this one have many benefits:
- Reduced feelings of stress, anxiety, and depression
- Improved ability to cope with pain and illness
- Less worrying and obsessing over things
- Greater appreciation of what is pleasant and enjoyable in life
- Feeling clearer about what is truly meaningful, and living life with a stronger sense of purpose
- Improved overall well-being, even in difficult times
We can’t guarantee all of these benefits for everyone, but our own experience and the published research tell us that changes like these are very common and make the challenges of participating worthwhile.
What others have said about the course
“I’ve heard words, had experiences, connected with my body and self in ways that have helped me to be kinder to myself and to others… What you offer is an exceptional gift and my hope is that many, many more people can be taught as well. Thank you.”
“Thank you for a wonderful opportunity to learn these invaluable life skills. There really aren’t words to describe what an incredible gift you have given me.”
“I came on this course wishing to further my understanding of mindfulness, becoming ‘better’ at longer practices and making mindfulness practice a more integral part of my life. What I gained was far deeper that than. It became a much more ‘embodied’ experience rather than an analytical one. I connected with aspects of myself that I hadn’t connected with before or for a long time. I felt the experience… It was also fantastically taught. Thank you.”
“For me, this has been an emotional and personal journey. I had no real expectation of the course and am so amazed how enlightening it has been. The course structure has particularly helped the learning and understanding of mindfulness – building everything up each week. The most valuable aspects for me have been changing how I react to things and feeling as though I’m not alone when we shared comments in the group.”
What you can do after this course
Once you’ve completed the Mindfulness for Life course, you might choose to explore mindfulness further through the 8-session Deeper Mindfulness, or the 12-session Taking it Further course.
You might also want to join our live online meditations sessions to maintain your practice or one of our monthly day retreats (Day of Practice).
Many of our participants find the course valuable and go on to explore training to teach mindfulness via either our Train to Teach ‘Introducing Mindfulness’ course or 12-Month Teacher Training route.
Entry criteria – who can apply for this course?
You can apply to this course if you:
- Can commit to attending all 8 sessions of the programme and the Day of Practice
- Have both the time and motivation to dedicate up to 45 minutes of personal practice each day
- Are over 18 years of age
- Have access to suitable technology (laptop/PC), a strong and stable internet connection, a private space and the technical ability to join an online training programme via Zoom, with your camera on
- Are able to speak and understand the English language (both spoken and written) to a level where you can fully take part in the course without the need for additional translation support.