MBCT – A Mindful Approach To Depression and Anxiety
Experiences of recurrent depression and anxiety can leave one feeling exhausted, uncertain about how to move forward or get unstuck, and like life has lost its color. There are evidence based approaches that are effective and empowering to help you break free from patterns that contribute to repeated and prolonged episodes of depression and anxiety.
MBCT (Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy) combines training in mindfulness meditation practices with principles from cognitive therapy. The heart of this work lies in becoming acquainted with the modes of mind that often characterize and contribute to mood disorders while simultaneously learning to develop a new relationship to them.
Cultivating mindfulness offers possibilities and potential for living life in new ways; for learning new skills and wholly new ways of working with and befriending your mind.
How Does MBCT Work?
- Mindfulness practice helps you to see more clearly the patterns of the mind; and to learn how to recognize when your mood is beginning to go down. This means you can ‘nip it in the bud” much earlier than before.
- Mindfulness can help you interrupt the automatic connection of negative mood, negative thinking and bodily sensations such as fatigue and “sluggishness” that often link, trigger or reactivate a downward mood spiral.
- Mindfulness allows you to “shift gears” from a mode of mind dominated by critical and judgmental thinking (likely to provoke and accelerate downward mood spirals) to another mode of mind in which you experience the world directly, non-conceptually and non-judgmentally.
- Mindfulness offers access to another approach to dealing with difficult emotions and moods.
- Through mindfulness, you can discover that difficult and unwanted thoughts and feelings can be held in awareness, and seen from an altogether different perspective – a perspective that brings with it a sense of warmth and compassion to the suffering you are experiencing.
- Mindfulness can help you learn how to be present and appreciate the simple pleasures of everyday life, connect with yourself, and the experience of being alive.