At Talking Therapies UK, we are passionate about equipping professionals with the knowledge, confidence, and compassion to support mental health across diverse settings. With decades of combined experience in clinical practice, public health leadership, and service transformation, our training programmes are rooted in evidence-based approaches and real-world application.
We specialise in delivering high-impact, trauma-informed mental health training tailored to the needs of health, education, social care, and voluntary sector teams. From safeguarding and suicide prevention to emotional resilience and therapeutic communication, our courses are designed to empower practitioners at every level—whether you’re frontline staff, a strategic commissioner, or part of a multi-agency partnership.
Our facilitators bring many years clinical expertise , and a deep understanding of the social determinants of mental health. We prioritise co-production, reflective practice, and inclusive learning environments that foster curiosity, empathy, and professional growth.
Whether you’re looking to upskill your workforce, embed mental health into your organisational culture, or meet statutory training requirements, we offer flexible delivery formats including in-person workshops, webinars, and bespoke consultancy.
Together, we can build psychologically safe, responsive systems that promote wellbeing, reduce inequalities, and improve outcomes for individuals, families, and communities. Let’s shape the future of mental health—one conversation, one training, one transformation at a time..
What mindfulness actually is, what the evidence supports, and how to practise before you teach.
Mindfulness has been evidenced, packaged and oversold in equal measure, and clinicians are left to work out which parts are real. This course gives you the honest foundation: what mindfulness actually is, what the research genuinely supports, and why your own practice must precede any attempt to teach it, for clinicians and trainees across the helping professions.
The first module defines the territory with precision: a working clinical definition, the two lineages, contemplative and clinical, that produced MBSR and MBCT, and the mechanisms, attentional control, decentering, reduced reactivity, through which practice plausibly works, alongside a clear-eyed reading of the evidence base including its limits and its adverse-effects literature. The second module is practical: establishing a personal practice that will survive contact with a working week, and then guiding first exercises, the breath, the body scan, brief practices, with the voice, pacing and debriefing skill that make the difference between technique and theatre.
Full written lessons with key points and practice tasks centred on your own developing practice, with a built-in study tutor throughout. Six hours of CPD, around six months of access, a final assessment, and a personalised certificate on passing.
▶ See inside the digital classroom1 minute 36 seconds · how a course is laid out, how each lesson is taught, and how the tutor helps
Before you start
This is a Foundation course in the mindfulness-based approaches pathway. It assumes nothing: it is written for someone meeting the approach for the first time. What it adds is the working model, its vocabulary and its evidence base, so that the Practitioner course can assume them; it revisits the foundations only as far as it needs to before building on them, so it does not repeat the course below.
The mindfulness-based approaches pathway. Mindfulness for clinicians from the foundations of a personal and clinical practice, through mindfulness-based interventions with clients, to advanced MBCT and contemplative practice.
10 study hours10 CPD hours certified6 months of accessAI tutor in every lessonCertificate on completion (pass mark 70%)
What you will be able to do
✓Explain what mindfulness is, and is not, in clinical use
✓Describe the practice cycle of attention: settling, wandering, noticing and returning
✓Lead short guided practices, including breath awareness and a brief body scan, safely
✓Describe the evidence for mindfulness-based interventions and its boundaries
✓Recognise contraindications and adverse-effect risks, and adapt or pause practice accordingly
✓Establish and sustain a personal practice as the foundation of teaching credibility
What you will study
Module 1: What it is and why it works
Definitions, mechanisms and the honest evidence base.
A clinical definition and the two lineagesAttention, on purpose, present, non-judgemental
Mechanisms and honest limitsDecentring is the shared spine with CBT and ACT
The honest evidence base: what the research actually tells usMeta‑analyses show moderate overall effects that shrink to small when active controls are used.
Clinical Indications, Contraindications and Adaptation of Mindfulness in PracticeMatch the mindfulness protocol to the client’s formulation and mechanism of distress.
Mindfulness and the Therapeutic Relationship: Enhancing Clinical Presence and Empathy- Mindfulness cultivates sustained, non‑judgemental attention that reduces mental chatter and enhances attunement to the client’s experience.
Module 2: Practising before teaching
Your own practice, and guiding the first exercises.
Establishing your own practiceYou guide from inside the practice, or not at all
Guiding first practicesGuide in participles, with silence and normalised wandering
Cultivating a Non-Judgmental Attitude and Self-CompassionThe journey of becoming a mindful clinician begins not with the perfect execution of a guided meditation, but with the cultivation of an inner stance that can s…
The Mechanics of Breath Awareness: Anchoring and Dropping AnchorThe breath serves as the primary anchor for the mind, providing a stable reference point for attention.
Module 3: The core practices
The practices themselves, how to guide each one, and how to choose between them for a particular person.
The body scan: what it teaches and how to guide itThe body scan trains sustained, moving attention and tolerance of the unremarkable
Sitting with the breath, and choosing a different anchorThe breath is the conventional anchor and is the wrong one for a significant minority
Movement, walking and practice for bodies that cannot sitStillness is a method, not a requirement, and it excludes a substantial group
The three-minute breathing space and other short formsShort practices generalise where long ones do not, because they fit into a life
Module 4: Inquiry and what arises
The conversation after the practice, which is where the learning happens, and what to do with difficulty, with the ordinary obstacles, and with the occasions when practice is the wrong thing to offer.
Inquiry: the skill the whole thing turns onInquiry asks what happened, not how it was; description teaches where evaluation does not
Difficulty, aversion and turning towardsTurning towards is a graded skill, trained first on small and neutral discomfort
When practice goes wrong: dissociation, trauma and contraindicationMindfulness practice is not universally benign and has documented adverse effects
Sleepiness, agitation, boredom and the ordinary obstaclesThe common obstacles are information about the person, not faults in the practice
What's included
4 modules and 17 lessons
An 8-question final assessment, with a 70% pass mark
A certificate for 10 CPD hours when you pass it
An extended clinical case study with discussion questions
A glossary of key terms
Private notes, a reflection for each module, and a CPD log you can print or save as a PDF
📖 Written lessons with key points and practice tasks◆ Visual teaching diagrams🎥 Video where it helps🎧 Listen-to-this-lesson narration👩⚕️ A full clinical case study🧠 AI tutor in every lesson📄 Full course workbook (PDF) on completion📕 The course book (PDF) while you study, with your name in it
Speak the language: by the end you will use Mindfulness · Anchor · Decentering · Rumination · Body scan · Breathing space · Inquiry · Doing mode · Being mode · Approach orientation and more, precisely.
The evidence base this course draws on
Segal, Z. V., Williams, J. M. G. and Teasdale, J. D. (2013) Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression. 2nd edn. New York: Guilford Press. view source ↗
