Mindfulness: the eight-week programme

What mindfulness actually does — and what it does not —, the adverse effects rarely mentioned, and a graded eight-week programme to establish a practice without giving up your life to it.

En resumen

This programme is for an adult who has heard about mindfulness meditation, has perhaps tried an app for ten days, and would like to know what actually stands up in all of it. It explains the mechanism, sets out the state of the evidence honestly — including where it is weak and where the practice can do harm — then offers eight weeks of graded training, one skill per week.

This programme supports care, it does not replace it. Mindfulness meditation has demonstrated effects on some conditions and no demonstrated effect on many others; it also produces real adverse effects in a minority of practitioners. Section 7 sets these out before you begin, and names the situations in which you should not start alone. If you are in a severe depressive episode, in a psychotic state, or having suicidal thoughts, this text is not the right answer: contact your doctor or your local emergency services today. Allow forty minutes to read, and eight weeks to practise.

1. Before you start

You are in the shower and you are already in the 2 p.m. meeting. You drive for twenty minutes and remember nothing of the journey. You have dinner with someone you love while replaying, for the sixth time, a sentence you heard at work yesterday. In the evening, exhausted, you wonder where the day went.

And if you have already tried to meditate, you probably concluded that you could not do it: you sat down, your mind went everywhere, and you inferred that this was not for you.

Mindfulness: the eight-week programme

1. Before you start

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