An individualised, extended and expanded approach
I offer an individualised approach to mindfulness training that extends and expands the standard MBCT curriculum, tailoring it to meet your particular needs. Working one to one, we move through the core material of an eight-week MBCT programme over six months, meeting fortnightly. This slower pace allows more time for the practice to deepen and for the learning to integrate into your life.
Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) offers a structured way of learning how to live with more awareness, presence and choice.
After teaching many MBCT courses in groups, I’ve seen the real benefits it can bring, helping people meet life’s difficulties with less struggle, and to be more present to life’s joys.
Group learning offers many benefits, including being able to work through the challenges and rewards of the training together, and supporting and learning from each other. But there are natural constraints to a group that uses generalised guidance, and the eight weeks for some is barely enough to get started. Some people need longer to really embed the learning. Others need more personal attention than a group can provide. And for some, when practice brings up strong emotional responses or difficult memories, there simply isn’t space in a group setting to give that sufficient attention.
Because we’re working closely together, barriers can be identified and addressed as they arise. The meditations can be adapted to what works best for you. We take into consideration how your brain works, the emotions you often feel, and the information in your body, and your life circumstances. While this is a skills training rather than therapy, there is more time to locate the training in the context of your life, your history, and your relationships.
Where it’s helpful, I can draw on additional material from other sources, such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT), Compassionate Mind Training (CMT), and traditional Buddhist meditation and teachings. These practices, metaphors and exercises offer highly compatible and complementary input and enrich the core mindfulness themes.
Sessions are offered online for people across the UK and abroad. Anyone can apply as long as they speak English and can attend meetings during usual working hours on Western European Time. Some people may find the adaptations favourable for their circumstances. Others may simply like the idea of working closely with a mindfulness teacher over a sustained period of time.
This format may be particularly suitable if:
This training is best suited to people who already know they want to learn mindfulness, and they like the idea of doing it in this extended and expanded format. While there are a few issues not suited to mindfulness training (such as untreated trauma and PTSD), the decision is mostly one of personal preference.
If it is psychotherapy that draws you, follow that. But if you already know you want to learn mindfulness, and there is no contraindication in the picture, this training may well suit you.
If there are any questions about whether mindfulness training will adequately meet your needs, we can clarify this in the initial session. I will let you know and we can discuss the possibility of starting with psychotherapy.
You can find more information about the differences between the approaches on this page →
Feel free to send me an email with any questions you might have.
“This course has been enormously helpful to me, and has given me an optimism and confidence about my ability to be more resilient. I feel that I have tools at my disposal to live a genuinely better life, reduce my overall stress levels, and combat low mood. I am already making very conscious decisions to savour good experiences, however small, and to minimise negative thought patterns.”Anon, mindfulness training
The content follows the core of the MBCT curriculum, with individualised adaptations and, at times, additional complementary content brought in from ACT, CFT and other sources. The course is experiential, and the learning takes place through guided mindfulness meditations, reflection and inquiry into your experience, and practices that you try out at home. The home practice is where the main learning happens. We have time to reflect on that learning when we meet.
The training unfolds across three broad phases.
Phase one
Sessions 1–4
Establishing steady presence and helpful attitudes
The first few sessions are about establishing the foundations of mindful awareness. You learn how to bring awareness to your experience in the present moment, and we explore the attitudes and intentions that are helpful for the practice, and how to handle the wandering mind.
In this extended formatThe training focuses on building resources and presence. We find out what methods work best for you and can explore more options than a generic course typically allows. For example, if focusing on the breath, or sitting still feel difficult, or being with physical pain feels too much, we can explore alternatives drawing on the wider field of mindfulness research and traditional meditation practices.
Phase two
Sessions 5–8
Practising a new way of meeting life’s difficulties
Having established the foundations of mindfulness, we then turn the attention towards the moments in life that are more tricky, more emotionally activating, to discover how to meet them in a new way. You learn how to meet the things that are hard to feel, hard to open to, with a steady heart and a sense of inner resource. We always go at your pace. This way you widen your capacity to meet all of life, both the joys and the challenges.
In this extended formatBecause we are working together more closely, we can look at your unique circumstances, your thoughts and feelings, to better understand your particular patterns and how mindfulness might help. We explore compassion more explicitly, drawing on CFT and other methods. Compassion is the attitude in the background of all mindfulness practice, and in this programme we can spend some time bringing it to the foreground, to meet pain and difficulty with wise, compassionate awareness.
Phase three
Sessions 9–12
Harvesting the learning and embodying changes in your life
As we move towards the end of the programme, we reflect on what you are learning in the training, and how to apply it to the details of your day to day life. More attention is given to everyday awareness and finding ways of bringing mindfulness to difficult moments, to meet them with steadiness, wisdom and compassion. We reflect on what you have learned about choices you make, how you communicate, how you live by your values, and how you take care of yourself when life gets tricky.
In this extended formatWe can take more time to practise mindfulness in daily life, and look at what it is telling you about your values, and the person you want to be. ACT is a very helpful resource for this work. This helps establish your inner compass that guides your choices in life going forward.
By the end of the training you’ll have a thorough understanding of mindfulness, and what it means for you. For some people that might look like a well established regular meditation practice. For others, it might be a quality of presence and awareness that is more available in their everyday life. Most people will feel equipped to deal with life’s difficulties differently. You will discover over the duration of the course how mindfulness best supports you.
“Learning to be present in the moment, without judgment, only with curiosity, is helping me to have a much clearer perspective on life’s challenges.”Helen, mindfulness training
The training has several distinct components that work together over the six-month programme.
My journey with mindfulness began in 2000 when I started studying and practising Buddhism. I undertook several Buddhist study programmes and many short and long-term retreats, including a three-month silent personal retreat at Gaia House in the UK.
Today my practice is as much informed by bringing mindfulness into my life as it is by meditation practice. I find movement practices, dance, creativity, and interpersonal awareness as valuable places to connect to mindful awareness, sometimes even more so than formal meditation.
I fairly recently received an ADHD diagnosis, which shed a new light on what I was experiencing in meditation. Since then I have been very interested in how to be mindful with the brain I apparently have, and today mindfulness for me is about simple awareness, helpful attitudes and remembering presence.
In 2012 I trained as an MBCT teacher and completed an MSt in Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy at Oxford University (Distinction). I’ve delivered mindfulness groups across a wide range of settings and populations, including carers, inpatient nursing staff, people with autism and ADHD, and workplace groups. I have also trained and supervised mindfulness teachers and participated as a mindfulness teacher in research studies.
My psychotherapy practice is grounded in models that make central use of mindfulness as a tool of transformation: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Compassion Focused Therapy, and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. This current offering of Therapist-Assisted Mindfulness Training was in part inspired by a research trial in which I worked as a therapist delivering extended, therapist-assisted mindfulness training over six months.
If you’d like to read more about me and my trainings in mindfulness, you can find that on my About page.
“The structure is very subtle and gradually introduces material in ‘bitesize’ chunks so that I wasn’t flooded or immediately confronted, but could find my way through the practice. Thanks Jim, I really appreciate all your hard work, dedication and compassion in holding a lovely space for healing such deep emotional pain.”Joshua, mindfulness training
If you’d like to ask about anything you’ve read here, or to arrange an initial consultation, you’re welcome to get in touch.