Mindfulness for Life

8 Week Course 

Next start date: TBC

Cost: £195pp

About the course

This course consists of 8 weekly sessions. The first session is 2hrs 30mins and the remaining sessions are 2hrs 15mins. In addition, the course also includes a 5-hour ‘Day of Practice’.

This course has been designed and developed by the Oxford Mindfulness Foundation in partnership with the University of Oxford and has been made accessible for people with sight loss.

Sessions are online and taught in a group. You'll be learning with other visually impaired people in a safe and welcoming setting.  

The course blends the ancient wisdom of mindfulness with cognitive-behavioural techniques in ways to help you integrate mindfulness into your daily life.

It’s an in-depth, skills-based course created to help you cultivate lasting, sustainable and positive change. It offers approaches to support you with challenges, including recurring patterns of thought and behaviour that can create suffering, and also to help you savour life and flourish.

In this course, you’ll learn:

• To recognise the tendency to be on automatic pilot and how stepping out of it, by bringing mindfulness into our daily lives, can help us to live our lives more fully.

• To notice how often we are lost in our thoughts and feelings, and practices which help to recognise this and to ‘gather the scattered mind’ and return to the here and now.

• How mindfulness can help us to recognise when we’re caught up in unhelpful patterns of thinking, feeling and acting, understand them and bringing kindness to them.

• Skills for keeping our balance through life’s ups and down and for responding skilfully when difficulties arise, engaging with what is most important to us and opening up to joy, contentment and gratitude.

What to expect on this course

Each of the 8 sessions has its own theme and follows a consistent pattern. After greetings and getting settled, you’ll begin with a guided meditation, followed by reflection and discussion around the experiences of the practice.

There’ll then be space for you to share your experiences of the home practices from the previous week. The weekly theme will be woven into the discussion.

Often, there’ll be another short practice or a cognitive exercise and time to reflect on any learnings. Near the end of each session, the home practices for the following week will be explained to you.

Course materials will be emailed to you following each session, allowing you to consolidate learning. 

You’re also strongly encouraged to continue to practise mindfulness between each taught session. This involves a mixture of following the recordings of guided practices, and bringing mindful awareness into your everyday activities. It is recommended that you practise for around 30-40 minutes each day. 

Entry criteria – who can apply for this course?

You can apply to this course if you:

• Have a visual impairment. 

• Can commit to attending all 8 sessions of the programme and the Day of Practice.

• Have both the time and motivation to dedicate 30-45 minutes of personal practice each day.

• Are over 18 years of age.

• Have access to suitable technology (laptop/PC), a strong and stable internet connection, a private space and the technical ability to join an online training programme via Zoom, with your camera on.

• Are able to speak and understand the English language (both spoken and written) to a level where you can fully take part in the course without the need for additional translation support.