The Mindful Way Workbook: An 8-Week Program to Free Yourself from Depression and Emotional Distress

Product Information

Almost 2 years ago, my wife drove me to a Veteran's Center. For years I had nightmares, irrational anger, irrational sadness and had cut myself off from my closest friends and nearly all my family. 26 years of military service and nearly 10 years of gritting my teeth, overusing sleep aids, pain medications and alcohol left me in a really, really dark place. Diagnosed with PTSD with depression and anxiety, I entered counselling and therapy. My counsellor introduced me to Mindfulness and I tried to practice it but without a real strategy or target. What could be more fabulous than this? An evidence-based treatment for depression translated into a workbook that everyone can use. This is a treatment that has circled the globe for a reason--it works. Fortunately, the authors who translated the treatment into a workbook are the very people who developed the treatment in the first place; all three are expert clinicians and scientists. My advice: 'Try this.'"--Marsha M. Linehan, PhD, ABPP, Professor and Director Emeritus, Behavioral Research and Therapy Clinics, University of Washington; developer of DBT

Fantastic....[It] functions as a trusted friend, counselor, and guide."--from the Foreword by Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD Equally, if feeling constantly exhausted and unable to enjoy life reawakens a deep doubt about your worth as a person, what could feel more important than doing something about that? 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. Three of the world's leading authorities on psychotherapy and mindfulness have developed a workbook of great clarity and value. It outlines an easy-to-follow, step-by-step program for how to train our minds out of repetitive loops and find states of peace."—Paul Gilbert, PhD, Centre for Compassion Research and Training, University of Derby, United Kingdom

Bring awareness to listening and talking. Can you listen without agreeing or disagreeing, liking or disliking, or planning what you will say when it is your turn? When talking, can you just say what you need to w/o overstating or understating? Can you notice how your mind and body feel? If you have been clinically depressed in the past, rumination can create a slide in mood that will tip you into another episode of depression. Every time we are truly mindful, we nourish the precious intention to care for ourselves and for other people. bringing to mind times in the past when things had gone wrong ("Why is this happening again? Why can't you ever pull yourself together?")

I totally recommend to people who do not want to just 'think about' mindfulness, but who want to 'develop mindfulness' in their lives. For any of us it would be bad enough to wake up too early in this way. But Jani's mind just made things worse. These kinds of questions have no clear answer. Nonetheless, we feel compelled to keep chewing away at them—a process that psychologists call rumination. Redoubling your efforts to switch off your troubled mind may give temporary relief, but it can also make things worse.

Free Shipping:

If you have already read The Mindful Way through Depression, this workbook will give you all the additional tools and detailed practical guidance you need to take yourself through the MBCT program. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. This is because, whenever we are very down, the mind is taken over by patterns of extremely negative thinking—thoughts that we are worthless, thoughts that we have let people down, thoughts that life is full of insurmountable difficulties, thoughts that the future is hopeless. The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing yourself from Chronic Unhappiness (Guilford, 2007; co-authored with John Teasdale, Zindel Segal and Jon Kabat-Zinn) is written for a lay-readership, and includes a CD narrated by Jon Kabat-Zinn so that readers may try mindfulness practice for themselves.

Before you go to sleep, take a few minutes and bring your attention to your breathing. Observe 5 mindful breaths.Week 7 Moving from treating yourself harshly to taking care of yourself with kindness and compassion Your actions will be most effective is you can respond as early as possible to signs that your mood is worsening. Over and over, we have seen people learn to recognize these thought patterns for what they really are—just thought patterns—and then gracefully disengage from them by refocusing their attention.

Far from freeing us from the downward spiral, our attempts to get rid of unhappiness by thinking our way out of it are the very things that can deepen and prolong our sad moods. These moods then bring up more unhappy memories and thoughts, and we now have new material to ruminate on.Stage 3: We try to get rid of the unhappiness in ways that actually keep it going and just make things worse.