Trainer: Mr James Formosa
Target Audience: All members of staff at UM
Course duration: 12 hours
Mindfulness reveals a set of simple yet powerful practices that you can incorporate into daily life to help break the cycle of anxiety, stress, unhappiness, and exhaustion. It promotes the kind of happiness and peace that gets into your bones. It seeps into everything you do and helps you meet the worst that life throws at you with new courage.
Finding Peace in a Frantic World is a modified version of MBCT, developed by Professor Mark William and Dr Danny Penman. It is aimed at people who are struggling to keep up with the constant demands of the modern world. It teaches the practitioner to become aware of patterns of one’s behaviour which contribute to unhappiness, stress, anxiety, and mental exhaustion. It focuses on promoting genuine joie de vivre, teaching joy and peace rather than banishing unhappiness. It is precisely focused to help people boost their happiness and confidence levels whilst also reducing anxiety, stress, and irritability.
The course is spread over six weeks with each session being 1 and a half hour long.
1. Knowledge & Understanding:
By the end of the course, the participant will be able to:
2. Skills:
By the end of the course, the participant will be able to:
Appropriate unit material will be provided by the tutor/s during the sessions. There are no set texts for the unit, though the tutor/s may recommend appropriate manuals to students who would like to take their work in this area further.
Interested participants may purchase the companion book Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World for further reading in this field.
Mindfulness is a natural capacity in human beings. We can effortlessly experience it when the mind feels at rest in the present moment. However, this natural arising of a mindful moment is flirting and doesn’t necessarily emerge when we needed it most – at times of stressful circumstances. This is why training in mindfulness offers techniques and tools for working with distractions, difficult emotions, and hence, allowing us to cultivate a deeper connection to life. These techniques are often learnt in sitting meditation, yet the ultimate goal is that we can apply it to our daily activities. With training, we can learn techniques to guide the mind to come to a restful state, a place of no-reactivity to external stimuli. When that happens, we open ourselves to notice more choices for relating to what we are experiencing.
In this 8-weeks training programme, you will learn:
This training programme involves independent study and practice time. In addition to the online workshop, participants need to commit to 4 hours of their time per week. This time is broken down in 30 mins of daily meditation plus 30 minutes reading a week. The daily sitting meditation practice will be introduced progressively, starting from 3 minutes a day in the first week, and building up to 30 minutes in the last week of the programme.
