You travel to a venue every week for eight weeks. You'll savour the getting-there, or you'll get irritated by it. Your choice, and worth noticing either way.

Over those two months you spend time investigating your own mind and body, alongside others. The others in the room, their lives and discoveries ordinary and remarkable in equal measure, give you something you might not expect from a bunch of relative strangers: connection and belonging.

You listen deeply. Not only to your own sensations, thoughts, feelings and actions, but to the patterns underneath them – and you get to know those patterns with a mix of tenderness and honesty that turns out to be its own kind of strength.

You listen to your desire too – for things, comfort, experience, oblivion – and how it turns into habit without you choosing it. In analogue time, with curiosity rather than judgement, you look at what your desire and your sense of self are actually serving. Is it this life, the one you've got? Or something else?

You find you can do things differently. Workable differences in how you meet your five-year-old, your boss, your insomnia.

You notice shifts, some small, some larger, in how you want to spend your time.

And you get some confidence back – in your own goodness, and in other people's.

What about the courses that ...

Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction is not one of those courses.

MBSR offers depth, safety, community, and real connection with a teacher who has done this work for years – so you can get to the heart of the matter, and come away with more resilience, more effectiveness, and more authority over your own life.

It will take time. It will be uncomfortable. It will change your life.