Deepening your mindfulness journey

The ‘Deeper Mindfulness’ Course

*also known as the Exploring Feeling Tone programme

This new course is designed to help those who have completed a classic mindfulness course to deepen and sustain their practice. You will learn how to put mindfulness techniques into daily practice and relate more skilfully to the habits of your mind.

It is based on recent psychological research revealing that how we begin to experience each moment will determine how we behave or act next. At the core of this process lies the ‘feeling tone’. Mindfulness of feeling tone is the awareness of the felt sense of whether what we experience in body and mind is pleasant, unpleasant or neither.

Based on this felt sense, the body allocates its resources to gear up for real or imagined action (pursuing or rejecting something). This can often guide our behaviour meaningfully, but it can also become exhausting, often without our realising it.

The course offers specialised practices that guide you to become aware of feeling tone. This strengthened awareness is an opportunity to see the tipping points for distress and exhaustion more clearly, as well as the choices available to appreciate life more fully, even in the presence of challenges and difficulty.

This Deeper Mindfulness course has been scientifically developed by professor Mark Williams, co-founder of the evidence-based Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) programme.

What to expect

  • Different formal practices: Grounding, Body & Breath, Thoughts & Emotions, Mindful Movement, Walking Meditation

  • Specialised Feeling Tone practices to tune into habitual reactivity, turn towards difficult emotions, incline the mind towards appreciation and skilfully work with procrastination

  • Everyday mindfulness practices to integrate the learning into daily life (starting in Week 1)

  • Facilitated inquiry to deepen experience

  • Group sharing & reflections

  • Regular home-practice (ca. 20 - 30 min per day)

  • Audio guides offering the choice of 10, 20, 30 minute practices to help you better integrate into your schedule

NOTE 💡

Joining this mindfulness course does not replace any clinical intervention, and should only be taken as a complementary measure, in consultation with your therapist, where relevant. People who are currently experiencing a severe difficulty are advised to postpone signing-up for this training until the worst is past and they feel more stable. Please contact us if you are unsure.

Learning Outcomes

  • Exploring different ways to anchor your attention, to see what provides the most helpful way of stabilising and calming your mind.

  • Befriending your mind by learning to take a pause when it naturally wanders, and cultivating a sense of kindness and gratitude for its role in trying to keep you safe.

  • Recognising the feeling tone of any contact with mind and body, and how it is the tipping point for unhelpful reactions.

  • Allowing feeling tone to be present for longer without reacting, so the mind is freed from habitual patterns of stress and exhaustion.

  • Noticing when and how the body gears up for action unnecessarily, and how to calm the busyness to allow wise action to emerge.

  • Using mindfulness of feeling tone to help turn towards difficult emotions and concerns with a sense of compassion and care.

  • Using mindfulness of feeling tone to notice moments of appreciation in your everyday life and to deal skilfully with the symptoms of exhaustion (e.g. procrastination).

  • Learning ways to sustain your mindfulness practice, including a template for a year of practice you can use or adapt.

Course Structure

Each of the 8 sessions is 2 hours in a small group setting.

Each session builds upon the previous session and what has been introduced before, so it is most supportive to attend all sessions.

Home Practice

As this is a skills-development programme, the course requires commitment of about 20 - 30 minutes of home practice per day. Please ensure that you are able to dedicate this time. Weekly handouts and audio-guides, to support your home practice, will be provided.

Pre-Interview

For those that have not trained with us previously and wish to join this course, an individual pre-course interview will be set up to shed more light on the programme and understand your motivation for joining. This allows us to assess whether the programme is suited to your present life circumstances. This is a complimentary session.