Personal Learning courses

Introducing Mindfulness 3-week course

If you’re new to mindfulness, or you’d like to come back to it after some time out, our 3-week Introducing Mindfulness course gives you a brief taste of mindfulness practice and theory.

Delivered weekly, in this course you’ll explore three core mindfulness themes designed to support you in your daily life. Each session builds on the learning and experience from the previous week.

The group sessions are led by an experienced Oxford Mindfulness teacher and combine learning, experiential mindfulness practices, trying out what’s learned in daily life, and group discussions. You’ll also be invited to continue to practise the sessions’ themes through some ‘home practice’.

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Finding Peace in a Frantic World 8-week course

This mindfulness course is based on the best-selling book “Finding Peace in a Frantic World” by Mark Williams, our Founder, and Danny Penman.

If you’re completely new to mindfulness – or perhaps you’ve tried mindfulness apps or other forms of learning – and would like to try a structured course led by an experienced teacher, this course offers an engaging and practical introduction.

Taught as 90-minute sessions over 8 weeks, the course covers a number of themes including:

• Waking up to the life you have
• Gathering the scattered mind
• Relating differently to thoughts and worries
• Practising kindness
• Exploring what nourishes us

To support your learning, you’ll also be set practices to do between the sessions.

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Mindfulness for Life 8-week course

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.

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’

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Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy for Depression (MBCT) 8-week course

Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy for Depression (MBCT) is an 8-week group course recommended in national health guidelines for people who suffer from or have suffered from depression in the past.

Weekly sessions are 2 hours and involve mindfulness meditation with cognitive therapy exercises. These support you to become more aware of your mind and body and begin to dissolve some less helpful habits of thinking, such as rumination, worry and self-criticism.

Our 8-week MBCT courses are offered in collaboration with the Nottingham Centre for Mindfulness, located within the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), who have been providing MBCT to people accessing their clinical services since 2007.

To apply for this course, you need to live in the UK and be registered with a GP.

Watch what others have said about MBCT (Credit: Sussex Mindfulness Centre, NHS Sussex Partnership) 🔽

Deeper Mindfulness 8-week course

‘Deeper Mindfulness: Exploring Feeling Tone Frame-by-Frame’ is an 8-week course developed by Professor Mark Williams and colleagues, designed for you if you’ve already completed a mindfulness-based programme and you’d like to explore mindfulness more deeply.

During the 8 weekly sessions, you’ll learn meditations that prepare you for, then help you tune into, feeling tone – frame-by-frame. This provides you with an opportunity to see more clearly both the tipping points for distress and exhaustion, and also how to flourish by freeing yourself to appreciate life again, even in the midst of difficulty.

Watch Professor Mark Williams introduce ‘Deeper Mindfulness’ – the subject and title of his book with co-author Dr Danny Penman. 🔽

Taking it Further 12-session course

This 12-session course has been created for those who’ve previously completed an 8-week mindfulness course such as Mindfulness for Life, MBCT or Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and would like to take their practice further. It aims to:

• Reinforce and deepen your mindfulness practice
• Deepen and broaden the learning of the key themes from the 8-week course curriculum
• Support you in applying all that is learned in your lives, in ways that are aligned with your values
• Provide a shared community of practice
• Develop your capacity and confidence to deepen and extend learning independently

It comprises twelve themes including ‘Attention’, ‘Inhabiting our bodies’, ‘Appreciating the life you have’, ‘How can I best take care of myself and others?’ ‘Cool head, warm heart’, ‘The art of balance and equanimity’ and ‘Being the change you’d like to see in the world’.

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