Working Mindfully With Habits

A Four-Week Graduate Course

Fridays 10am-midday, 28th June-19th July 2024

Venue: Via Zoom

Mindfulness is about freedom – the ability to make more conscious choices in our lives. Meanwhile, one definition of addiction is the continuation of a harmful behaviour despite ongoing negative consequences. More generally, habits are actions that are carried out on autopilot, driven by reactivity – the power of automatic thoughts, body sensations, emotions and impulses. In this four-week graduate course, we’ll look closely at how and why habits form, grow and play out in our lives, how we can become more aware of these patterns, and how we can mindfully work with them, developing our capacity for agency and choice. Whatever your habitual tendencies – from over-eating to over-thinking, self-criticism to blaming others, over-controlling to excessive passivity, drinking, smoking, rage, zoning out, procrastination – all are welcomed to be worked with on this course. We’ll explore a range of meditation practices that can help us stay present when the impulse to react habitually arises (eg urge surfing, RAIN meditation, befriending, the SOBER Breathing Space), as well as strategies for working with habit-inducing thoughts, learning to pause at moments of high risk for habitual behaviour, and how to be nurturing, kind and supportive to ourselves. This programme is open to anyone who has already completed an eight-week mindfulness course.

Cost £120. Book your place on the Graduate Home page

Taught by: Ed Halliwell