Tim Dalgleish from the University of Cambridge has kindly offered to return for an evening of further questions and discussions around the MYRIAD research findings. The intention is to offer an opportunity to practise together, ask any further questions and share further thoughts on the implications of the MYRIAD study for mindfulness in education and beyond.

We are delighted to be joined for our May keynote session by Trish Bartley. Trish will join us in May to share some stories, a few practices, and some of her learning from the experience of teaching MBCT to people with cancer.

From mindless distractions and addictive behaviours to cyberbullying and encouraging feelings of inadequacy, we are becoming increasingly aware of the detrimental effects of social media usage on our mental health and wellbeing. Mindfulness Coach Erin Lee shares how understanding the skills and practice of mindfulness can help us navigate our love-hate relationship with social media, and harness the power of these communication platforms in wiser and healthier ways.

In this session we will review a three-fold model for understanding how mindfulness supports human agency, our ability to act intentionally, that was proposed in Jamie’s 2020 discussion paper Mindfulness: Developing Agency in Urgent Times, and explore his latest research and publication launched in March 2022 titled Reconnection: Meeting the Climate Crisis Inside Out.

Drawing from emerging behavioural and neuroimaging research, this presentation with Norman Farb outlines the difficulty of understanding what it means to bring acceptance to our most challenging moments, explore what aspects of breath awareness are actually important for wellbeing, and illustrate how the brain can become quiet without becoming disengaged - a more subtle quality of attention.

In this talk, Dr Sara Lazar will discuss her work evaluating the effects of regular mindfulness practice on a metric of adult development related to how we view and interact with the world.

In this podcast Silke Rupprecht, Head of Research and Development at Awaris speaks to us about bringing mindfulness to teams in organisations. She offers her thoughts on the reasons behind the growing interest in mindful teams and how team mindfulness training may need to be different from individual mindfulness training. Silke also shares insights and gives practical examples of how mindfulness trainers can adapt their delivery to help teams build the mindful qualities and collaborative habits needed to foster wellbeing and performance in traditional and hybrid settings.

Way back in 2000, Mark Williams opened doors for her to start bringing mindfulness to the patients of a Welsh oncology department where Trish herself had just finished treatment. Over the 20 years that followed, she continued to teach enabling the programme to slowly adapt from the original MBCT, with John Teasdale guiding Trish as they teased out what was needed for this particular group. From this, a workbook for teachers was published (Bartley, 2012) followed by a book for people with cancer themselves (Bartley, 2017). Trish has continued to work with people with cancer, including training many teachers in the programme in the UK and further afield, and offering online one to one connections to a few people at the end of their lives.

In the latest episode of our workplace podcast series, Liane Stephan, co-founder of Awaris and the Inner Green Deal, speaks to the OMC about sustainability and the climate crisis. She shares her experiences of working with leaders who clearly have the capacity to affect organisational change. Liane offers some thoughts on how as mindfulness trainers we are uniquely placed to support individuals and organisations to engage with this topic in a very real and meaningful way.