What is the role of retreats in MBCT for teachers? John Peacock, Ruth Baer, Zindel Segal, Rebecca Crane, Willem Kuyken and Christina Surawy engage in a dialogue on the perils and possibilities around this question.

How can a member of the general public wanting to take an 8-week mindfulness-based class be reassured that what is being offered has depth and integrity? Rebecca Crane of the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice at Bangor University reflects on this question facing those interested in taking a mindfulness course, and a key question in the field of mindfulness.

Jo Rycroft-Malone, Professor of Implementation and Director of Research at Bangor University, and Willem Kuyken discuss the challenges that face the implementation of MBCT in the NHS, questions that were examined as part of the ASPIRE research project.

Catherine Crane and Zindel Segal reflect on the findings of the largest meta-analysis to date of randomised controlled trials of MBCT for relapse prevention in recurrent depression, a research paper published in JAMA Psychiatry in April 2016.

Ruth Baer and Willem Kuyken discuss the potential risks of mindfulness practice, offering three key factors to be considered in teaching and learning mindfulness safely. They draw a comparison with physical exercise as mainstream health behaviour that requires consideration of safety.

Christina Feldman continues to discuss the challenges facing the field of mindfulness for the future, and the lessons that can be learnt from the establishment of meditative traditions in Western culture over the last 45 years, in the final part of this blog post series.

Christina Feldman discusses the challenges facing the field of mindfulness for the future, including the questions of ethics and money, in part three of the series.

Christina Feldman examines contemporary mindfulness from its beginnings in the 1970s and the advances made over the last forty years in the field in part two of the series.

Christina Feldman, Insight Meditation Society guiding teacher and co-founder of Gaia House, provides an historical perspective on the mainstreaming of Buddhism in the West in the last forty years in part one of this four-part blog post series. It provides an extraordinary historical and contemporary analysis of the field.

We were visited by Tony Bates, the founding director of Headstrong in Ireland as part of our Oxford Mindfulness Centre Seminar Series. Anna Sonley gives an insight into this talk by Tony, in which he gave a searingly honest account of his year of living mindfully, in which he practiced mindfulness every day for year,, wrote about it in a popular weekly column in The Irish Times and then on the last day of the year was faced with a life threatening health condition.