Health & wellbeing

Mindfulness

Mark Williams and Danny Penman

A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World

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  • Published 2011

Introduction

Mindfulness is a practical eight-week course in paying attention. It is written by Mark Williams, an Oxford clinical psychologist who helped develop Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), and Danny Penman, a journalist and meditation teacher. The authors' starting claim is that much everyday unhappiness, stress and exhaustion comes less from what happens to us than from the way a busy mind reacts to a low mood: it analyzes, compares and digs up old memories, and ends up deeper in the mood it wanted to leave.

The first chapters explain this pattern and the two modes of mind the authors call doing and being. The rest of the book is the course itself, one chapter per week: waking up from autopilot, coming back to the body, learning to see thoughts as thoughts, facing difficulty, being kind to yourself, choosing what nourishes you, and keeping the practice going afterwards. Each week has short meditations, supported by audio guides, and small everyday experiments.

MBCT was first designed to help people with repeated depression stay well, and this book adapts the approach for general readers. It is a guide to a practice, not medical advice and not a replacement for professional care.

  1. 1A low mood does less harm than the way the mind reacts to it
  2. 2The mind has two modes: doing and being
  3. 3Weeks one and two: wake up from autopilot and come back to the body
  4. 4Week three: gentle movement and a three-minute pause
  5. 5Week four: thoughts are mental events, not facts about you or the world
  6. 6Week five: turn toward difficulty instead of pushing it away
  7. 7Week six: friendship toward yourself is the ground of the practice
  8. 8Week seven: choose more of what nourishes you
  9. 9Week eight: the course ends, the practice does not

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Mindfulness by Mark Williams and Danny Penman: summary | Daridanesh