A new eight-week programme
Over the past few years, a new course has been developed for those who have already completed a mindfulness course and want to explore mindfulness more deeply. It is informed by recent psychological findings that offer fresh insights into the way our attention works, how preferences are formed, and predictions are made.
These new findings reveal that every waking moment, our understanding of the world is dominated by predicting what actions we need to take next, coloured by what is called ‘feeling tone’ – that is, the moment-by-moment ‘read-out’ of whether any contact with mind or body feels pleasant, unpleasant, or neither. Based on this moment-by-moment ‘read out’, the body elegantly allocates its resources as it gears up for real or imagined action. This can prepare us well for action, but we can become exhausted without realising it.
Ancient traditions saw feeling tone as a fundamental element of every moment of experience and an important aspect of mindfulness practice. Registering the feeling tone of what is arising allows us to see clearly the tipping points, those instants when we become caught up in pursuing or rejecting something and become entangled in a web of emotional distress. Meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein has said that mindfulness of feeling tone is one of the master keys that both reveals and unlocks the deepest patterns of our conditioning.
The new book Deeper Mindfulness gives the whole programme. It explains the recent science and gives you access to a complete set of new meditations to help you explore feeling tone.
For an overview of the whole programme, see this talk given to the Asia Pacific Conference, 15 August 2021…
The Oxford Mindfulness Foundation offers a taste of the new course in one-hour sessions (“Mindfulness Frame by Frame”). Week by week, Mark Williams explains the psychology and guides meditations that prepare us for, then tune into feeling tone frame by frame, providing an opportunity to see more clearly the underlying causes of much of our distress and how to free ourselves from it. To watch or listen, follow the links below…
- Watch sessions
- Listen to sessions (podcasts)