We’ve been wrong about what our job is……..We think it is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being – and well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.
~Atul Gawande – On Being Mortal
Trish Bartley
Trish is a senior UK mindfulness teacher trainer and has been involved in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) since the beginning. She has a particular interest in mindfulness and cancer and has published two books – MBCT for Cancer (Bartley, 2012), a handbook for teachers – and Mindfulness – A Kindly Approach to Being with Cancer (Bartley, 2017), for people with cancer themselves. Trish also has a special interest in groups. She offers training in mindful groupwork and co-authored Teaching Mindfulness-Based Groups (Bartley & Griffith, 2022).
She is a founding member of the core training team of the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice (CMRP) at Bangor University / Mindfulness Network and is a guest trainer for the Oxford Mindfulness Foundation (OMF). She also leads retreats, workshops and webinars in Europe and sometimes further afield.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
No forcing, no holding back, the way it is with children.
Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
These deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no-one ever has
Streaming through widening channels into the open sea.
~Rainer Maria Rilke
(trans. Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy)
New Project Work
The Mindfulness and Cancer project is designed for people with cancer, and for health and care workers and mindfulness teachers who want to include mindfulness as a resource to support their patients/clients. There are three collections of video, audio, and text packages that are all drawn from the Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Cancer (MBCT-Ca) program, which has been taught to people with cancer for over 20 years in different parts of the world.
Books and Publications
Trish has written four books:
Teaching Mindfulness-Based Groups (Bartley & Griffith, 2022)
Mindfulness: A Kindly Approach for Being with Cancer (Bartley, 2017)
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Cancer (Bartley, 2012)
Holding up the Sky: Love, Power and Learning in the Development of a Community’ (Bartley, 2003)
Maybe we can play with the possibility that what we do as mindfulness teachers and participants affects far more than we imagine. The ripples that spread out may continue spreading a long way, for a long time, maybe forever.
What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness offers us away of relating differently to our struggles and learning to savour and be nourished by what we find pleasant. The difficulties will not necessarily go away, but by being with them more gently, we find we can hold things with more ease and steadiness at times.
Being mindful is to be aware of the detail of experience as it is happening. As you sit here reading these words, you can feel the weight of your body supported by the seat of your chair – and you can bring your attention to the points of contact between the soles of your feet and the floor.
Finding the courage to gently be with our struggles
