Saturday April 28 10-4.30

£50 / £30 (concs)

Learn mindfulness meditation practices and explore how mindfulness can help you in working with stress and other difficulties. The simple techniques we’ll be exploring are a key to a different way of living. This day is an excellent way to get a taste of them.

Please bring loose clothing and contribution to the shared vegetarian lunch.

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Or Email Us and we’ll send you a booking form

Vishvapani Blomfield, the trainer, has taught mindfulness and meditation for 19 years and leads many mindfulness courses and events.  He’s also known for his broadcasts from a Buddhist perspective on BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day. His biography of the Buddha: ‘Gautama Buddha: the Life and Teachings of the Awakened One’ was published this year.

May 12, 26; June 16, 30; July 14

Bristol Buddhist Centre, 162 Gloucester Rd, 
Bishopston, 
Bristol 
BS7 8NT

Places are available on this course. If you’d like to discuss whether the it’s for you, please call on 07910 829084 or Email Us

£200 (waged); £150 (low waged) £100 (concessions)

The fee covers the course sessions, a workbook and two audio CDs to support home practice. If you’re uncertain whether you qualify for a concession, please ask.

Session Times

The course takes place over five Saturday afternoons and includes all the material covered in the standard eight-week MBSR course format. Saturday July 14 will be a practice session.

Learn more about what happens on an MBSR Course

What happens on the course?

On a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course you’ll learn new ways of handling difficult physical sensations, feelings and moods by developing ‘mindfulness’ – a way of paying attention, on purpose and non-judgmentally to what is happening in the present moment in your body and mind and in the world around you. That can help you break habitual patterns and respond more creatively to challenges and difficulties, from stress at work and physical pain to anxiety, depression and other conditions.

You’ll learn several mindfulness practices and have the chance to discuss your experience of them. Home practice is an important part of the course, and you’ll need to spend 30 and 50 minutes a day between each class. To get the most from it, you need a strong commitment to working on yourself through this gentle but rigorous daily discipline of mindfulness exercises.

Who is the course for?

The MBSR/MBCT programme is known to help with a wide range of problems, both physical and psychological, and greatly enhance your capacity to cope. The course is useful for anyone who is ready to look directly into themselves and learn new ways of responding to what life brings. It is entirely secular and suitable for those of any religion or none.

Sometimes people come because they want to work with a particular issue: depression or anxiety, for example. Some people want to learn better how to cope with stress in their work or family life; and some people simply want to learn to appreciate their lives more fully, letting go of preoccupations. The principles and practices explored in the course are relevant in each case, and through dialogue we will explore how they can apply in your life. Over the years we have worked with people experiencing depression, OCD, PTSD, chronic pain and even terminal illness along with many others.

A word of caution: if you are at an acute stage of mental illness or depression this might not be the right time for you to take the course. Please contact us to discuss your situation and whether the course is suitable for you right now and also consult your health specialist or GP.

The Trainer

Vishvapani Blomfield, the trainer, has taught mindfulness and meditation for 19 years. He trained with Breathworks, one of the leading UK mindfulness organisations, and teaches Breathworks courses in pain and stress management and also trained in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction with Michael Chaskalson and the University of Bangor’s Centre for Mindfulness. He is also known for his broadcasts from a Buddhist perspective on BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day. His biography of the Buddha: ‘Gautama Buddha: the Life and Teachings of the Awakened One’ was published this year.

Forbes Magazine 1/23/12

What makes for a good coach. Douglas Riddle suggests that mindful coaches bring an empty mind, non-reactivity, permissive attention, and that makes for a vital encounter. 

There are countless executive coaches I would never hire for myself, no matter how wise, insightful, dynamic or experienced. Admittedly, I’m a hard guy to please, so what I require might not be a good guide for others. However, if a coach can’t create an environment that dissolves the limitations of history, expectation, and assumption, I’m not interested.

How does a coach do that? By creating in the conversation with the coachee a sense of open, reflective exploration. The coaches who expand my mind, emotions and performance come to the coaching relationship from a place of inner calm. They have quiet minds. They are not beguiled by fancy techniques or elegant coaching models. They are midwives for the narrow, messy emergence into a larger world – and they rely on habits of mindfulness to accomplish that.

As you may have noticed, there’s been an explosion of information in recent years on neuroscience and how the brain handles change – and it’s fueling an interest in mindfulness. If you are a coach or are searching for one to boost your performance, remember this rule: mindful coaching is better coaching. And mindfulness practices have shown benefits for clients in health, decision-making and leadership.

Mindful coaches perfect a form of conscious and comfortable simultaneous attention to themselves, their coachee, the relationship between them, and the mental, emotional, and relational dynamics occurring in the moment. There are three aspects of mindfulness that have particular pertinence to leadership coaching:

1)      an empty mind

2)      non-reactivity

3)      permissive attention

An empty mind. For the coach, mindfulness is characterized by an empty mind, a stilling of the persistent chatter and the cognitive ticker-tape of commentary. This is a challenge for most Westerners because of our devotion to activity and terror of being alone with ourselves. An empty mind is key to letting something happen in someone else. It is the essence of coaching. Like falling in love or falling asleep, it can’t be achieved through greater effort or more action.

As coaches, a busy mind sabotages our efforts to let others express themselves. Think about your conversations with co-workers or with family. How often have you had the feeling that someone was not really hearing you, not really attending to you? You may have told someone about the challenge you were facing, only to find that they couldn’t keep themselves from telling you how you should think about it, or that it shouldn’t bother you so much, or how they have had similar experiences.

Alternatively, when someone hears us with an open, empty mind, we sense our own substance and value. No matter how ‘helpful’ someone wants to be, advice or correction always implies that we lack something. We have to persuade ourselves that someone cares when they give us the impression that they think we can’t figure it out for ourselves.  Unfortunately, more than a few coaches enter the profession because they’ve never been heard themselves. They picture themselves giving important advice to powerful people and receiving their gratitude. That guiding image will never benefit the coachee.

Non-reactivity. Meditation and quiet thoughtfulness help coaches sense that, as they work, they are operating in a vast mental and emotional space with clients. No reaction is required, no matter what the provocation. Instead, coaches are free to perceive the needs of their clients and respond – without escalating the emotional content or misinterpreting any intent. Still, fostering a non-judgmental attitude as a coach does not mean surrendering judgment. Mindfulness in fact leads to wiser judgment about what’s important and what is not. A coach who practices mindfulness doesn’t make things worse Non-reactivity on the part of the coach gives the person being coached room to roam from perspective to perspective, from one incomplete thought to another until they begin to become whole thoughts and the basis for growth.

Oddly, non-reactivity is often experienced quite positively by people who are being coached. I say, “oddly” because so much energy is expended in our culture in empty encouragement that does not actually encourage. Coachees often find that space to think and feel and explore while staying in relationship is invigorating. In addition, this dynamic makes true collaboration possible. The mindful coach creates an emotional space without land mines, where the coachee isn’t worried about being manipulated or controlled.

Permissive attention. A brilliant – and almost pathologically internally-focused – engineer was sent to me for coaching. In the first session, he assured me that he could never benefit from coaching because he couldn’t tolerate a conversation with someone longer than a couple minutes. When he predicted the demise of our session, I let on that I was quite curious to see that, and that we could both be watching for it. “Do you suppose you will see this change as it is coming along, or do think you are likely to be surprised by its sudden dramatic entrance?” I asked. He was made curious by my curiosity and new possibilities were suddenly available to him. I call it permissive attention because I chose to draw our attention to his certainty of this coming disaster as a matter for discovery rather than trauma. He went on to a productive and long-lasting coaching engagement because the spotlight was never on him, but on his growth.

A mindful coach can draw a person into a moment of connection in which all distractions disappear. It doesn’t matter whether the distractions are in the room or in the street outside or in unbidden thoughts or feelings from within the coachee. The ultimate challenge for most leaders is staying focused for more than a moment on any serious line of thinking, perceiving, judging or acting. The coach is repeatedly able to draw the attention of the coachee to those things of importance to him and return the attention to it without coercion.

Modern brain research has shown that we move in and out of various states of focused or unfocused attention throughout our day. Coaching allows someone to stay on a line of thought until it yields new perspectives and answers. It proves especially powerful when these are questions that might have stymied us for a long time. The coach wants to create an encounter in which the two people are in synchronized attention and vast amounts of mental and emotional energy can be directed at the development of the person being coached. This is a kind of mutual trance state, along the lines of being “in the zone” in sports, and most people have experienced it only briefly. The mindful coach can elicit this state and maintain it for the growth of the coachee.

As coaches, we are privileged to serve as midwives to human change – and can impact the performance of entire organizations. How do we contribute to the possibility of change? How do we serve as catalysts for turning experience and reflection into more effective, meaningful lives? Mindfulness offers a powerful alternative to the coercive and linear assumptions that have dominated our thinking. It might be that individual change is not so much driven aspermitted. The question for the coach is this: how can I prepare myself to create a mental, emotional, and relational space in which someone may grow and develop? Mindfulness practices prepare coaches to really help instead of just trying to be helpful.

Douglas Riddle is director of the global coaching practice at the Center for Creative Leadership, a top-ranked, global provider of leadership education and research.

3 January 2012

The BBC’s David Sillito has been finding out if there is a scientific basis for meditation leading to greater levels of happiness.
Part 2 Scans ‘show mindfulness meditation brain boost’

4 January 2012