Welcome

Welcome to the 8-week MBCT program. MBCT stands for mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. It is a program specifically designed to help you deal with persistent unwanted mood states.

MBCT has been tested in research and proven effective for depression, as well as for anxiety and a wide range of other problems.

You can use this book in a number of ways: as a member of a professionally guided MBCT class, as part of individual therapy, or as self-help.

We wish you well as you embark on this voyage—to discover how you may best nourish your deepest capacity for wholeness and healing.

If you've ever been deeply unhappy with your life for any length of time, you know how difficult it can be to do anything about it. No matter how hard you may try, things just don't get better—or not for long. You feel stressed out, exhausted with the effort of just keeping going. Life has lost its color, and you don't seem to know how to get it back.

Gradually you may come to believe that there must be something wrong with you, that fundamentally you are just not good enough.

This sense of inner emptiness might come from an accumulation of stresses over a long period of time or from one or two traumatic events that unexpectedly dislocate your life. It might even just arise out of the blue without any apparent cause. You might find yourself lost in inconsolable sorrow; feeling profoundly empty; or painfully disappointed with yourself, with other people, or with the world in general.

If these feelings escalate, they may become severe enough to be called clinical depression. But the sort of unhappiness we are speaking of here touches all of us from time to time.

For any of us who find ourselves with low mood of any magnitude or duration—whether it's major depression; persistent, nagging unhappiness; or intermittent periods of the blues that feel disruptive or disabling—the despair and demoralization, the sheer joylessness typical of depression, are never very far away.

When things get overwhelming, we may distract ourselves for a while, but questions keep nagging at the back of the mind: "Why can't I pull myself out of this?" "What if it stays this way forever?" "What's wrong with me?"

Bringing Back Hope

What if, despite what your thoughts may try to tell you, there is nothing wrong with you at all?

What if your heroic efforts to prevent your feelings from getting the best of you are actually backfiring?

What if they are the very things that are keeping you stuck in suffering or even making things worse?

This book is written to help you understand how this happens and what you can do about it.

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)

In these pages we will guide you, step by step, through the MBCT program.

This research-based 8-week course is designed to give you the skills and understanding that will empower you to free yourself from getting entangled in painful emotions.

Of course, depression often arrives hand in hand with anxiety, irritability, or other unwanted emotions. The good news is that while MBCT was developed and has proven extremely effective for depression, research is now also showing powerful effects of MBCT on persistent anxiety and other destructive emotions.

The heart of MBCT is gentle, systematic training in mindfulness (we'll say more about what mindfulness is later).

This training frees us from the grip of two critical processes that lie at the root of depression and many other emotional problems:

1. the tendency to overthink, ruminate, or worry too much about some things,

coupled with

2. a tendency to avoid, suppress, or push away other things.

If you have suffered long-term emotional difficulties, you'll have already discovered that worrying or suppressing doesn't really help.

But you may feel powerless to stop it.

Redoubling your efforts to switch off your troubled mind may give temporary relief, but it can also make things worse.

Your attention is still hijacked by whatever is troubling you: it's so difficult to prevent the mind from being dragged back again and again to the very place from which you want to escape.

What if it were possible to learn wholly new skills that allowed you to cultivate a radically different way of working with your mind?

Mindfulness training teaches exactly these skills: it gives you back control of your attention so that, moment by moment, you can experience yourself and the world without the harsh self-critical voice of judgment that may so often follow you around.

Daily practice of mindfulness reduces the tendency to brood and worry about everything.

You wake up to the small beauties and pleasures of the world.

You learn to respond wisely and compassionately to the people and events that affect you.

We developed MBCT, and we have seen, over and over again, how it liberates people from their burden of low mood and the stress and exhaustion that goes with it. We've seen the extraordinary consequences of their discovery that there is a way to live life more fully than they ever imagined.

Who Is This Book For?

This book is for anyone who wishes to take the 8-week MBCT program.

This might be as part of a class taught by an instructor, as part of individual therapy, or as a form of self-help, working through the program by yourself or with a friend. Whichever of these routes you take, you will be supported on a daily basis by the guided practices recorded on the CD or audio downloads that come with the book.

And, of course, you don't have to have been seriously depressed to find the MBCT program valuable:

• Research is constantly expanding the range of emotional problems that benefit from MBCT.

• MBCT focuses on the core psychological processes that lie at the root of many different ways in which we can get stuck in unhappiness.

Why Another Book?

We have already written one book describing MBCT for a wide audience: The Mindful Way through Depression (coauthored with our colleague Jon Kabat-Zinn, the principal figure catalyzing and guiding the surge of interest in mindfulness that has swept the world in recent decades).

That book and this workbook complement each other; it is very helpful to use them in...