Thank you to everyone who joined us for the hybrid Wellness Wednesday series with Dr. Mark Williams earlier in the month. We had a very successful event with both in-person and online audience and it was great to see the engagement throughout Dr. Williams’ talk and mindfulness practice. During his presentation, he mentioned some helpful resources and authors of relevant materials. Please see below for the list of resources as well as Dr. Williams’ paper that covers many content from his talk.
Join us this month with Dr. Mark Williams, who will host a special two hour, hybrid Wellness Wednesday on Mindfulness on November 1st at 11am to 1pm.
There are moments in life that decide your fate. They ripple into the future and dictate how you experience the world in the moments that follow; either positive and uplifting, dark and chaotic, or flat and dull.
What if you could recognise these moments before they seized control of your life? What if you could use them to set sail for a better future? What if all moments, big and small, could be harnessed this way?
Mindfulness is used by millions of people across the world and has been proven effective at alleviating mental and physical pain, addictions and depression as well as enhancing well-being. In this talk, Oxford Professor Mark Williams reveals how the latest advances in psychological science, combined with the millennia-old practice of mindfulness, offers new ways forward for those wishing to learn, sustain and deepen mindfulness to help deal with the chaos stress and exhaustion of daily life.
This latest research builds on current mindfulness-based approaches by exploring a layer of mindfulness known as the ‘feeling tone’ - the sense, moment by moment, of whether anything that happens is pleasant or unpleasant. If you are unaware of feeling tones, you are pushed and pulled around by them, often resulting in a cascade of unwanted emotions and impulses.
By exploring what is arising in body and mind 'frame by frame', you can learn to recognise these tipping point moments. So instead of being swept along by a torrent of thoughts, feelings and emotions that seem to appear from nowhere, you are presented with a series of ‘off-ramps’. This gives you far greater control over your life, enhancing mental health and wellbeing. And ultimately, it helps you to approach life with renewed strength, vigour and equanimity.
This event will be offered online and in person at the the lower auditorium of Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health on UBC Vancouver Campus.
*To access the lower auditorium, take the stairs on the left when entering the building or the elevator ahead. You will see BC Brain Wellness Program banners leading you to the auditorium.
Speaker - Dr. Mark Williams
Mark Williams is Emeritus Professor of Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford. The main focus of his research and clinical work has been to understand how best to prevent serious clinical depression and suicide.
With colleagues John Teasdale (Cambridge) and Zindel Segal (Toronto) he co-developed Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for prevention of depression. Research has now found that MBCT reliably reduces the rate of future episodes in those who have suffered the most serious and persistent forms of major depression in the past, and it is now recommended as an evidenced-based approach in many countries across the world.
His books include Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy for Depression (2001, 2013) and The Mindful Way Workbook (2014) with Z. Segal and J.D. Teasdale; The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing yourself from Chronic Unhappiness (with John Teasdale, Zindel Segal and Jon Kabat-Zinn).
Most recently he has been working with colleagues to develop an eight-week follow-on mindfulness programme for those who wish to sustain and deepen their practice after MBSR/MBCT. The new program focuses on exploring feeling tone 'frame by frame' as explained in his new book Deeper Mindfulness (with Danny Penman, 2023).