Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy for cancer: Masterclass
12 March 2026 at 09:30 to 16:30
An online day workshop for mindfulness teachers and those in training. Learning from the approach of working with people with cancer and those with life limiting or life threatening illness.
This workshop is led by Trish Bartley, an expert in this topic and author of MBCT for Cancer, Gently Turning Towards (Bartley, 2012), Mindfulness: A Kindly Approach to Being with Cancer (Bartley, 2017).
This masterclass will introduce you to the rewards and challenges of working mindfully with people who have had cancer, or life threatening / life limiting illness. You will be encouraged to transfer your learning from the MBCT for Cancer approach to your own mindfulness practice and teaching. We will particularly focus on:
- Group process including inquiry
- Brief everyday practices
- Four Movements of Intention, Coming Back, Turning Towards and Kindness.
- Working with the body and anxiety in the context of cancer / serious illness
Workshop format
The masterclass will be facilitated through a participative and experiential process, giving you lots of opportunities to try out practices, exercises and approaches, and reflecting on them in small groups. There will be an emphasis on offering a choice to engage in whatever is best for you and your learning. There will be some didactic process, but most ‘teaching’ will come out of the group process reflections, inquiries and exercises. We hope you will find the masterclass to be engaging, varied and easy to participate within a safe and inclusive group process.
There will be a focus on ensuring your learning is transferable across to your own teaching, whether you work with general public, workplace courses, offer drop in or short taster sessions, or within specialist courses for particular populations. However, this masterclass will not equip you to teach MBCT for Cancer directly – but hopefully it may whet your appetite to do so in the future!
Workshop content
We will explore a number of core practices, guided in ways that meet the needs of people who have sensitivities in different parts of the body and challenges in the heart mind. We will also bring horizontal and some vertical inquiry into our process following practice, to show ways of safely involving the whole group as we lean into a sense of normalising and common humanity.
People who have had cancer or serious illness are apt to experience significant anxiety and distress at times– and tend to fall into patterns of anxious rumination. We will look at a model of health anxiety that is central to week 4 in MBCT-Ca – and show how Turning Towards gently and gradually can be transformative, if held in a way that is grounded and embodied by the teacher.
If time, we will explore various curriculum exercises special to MBCT for Cancer that also work well with other populations. These will include ‘The Blob’ – that explores a way that contraction can build to amplify difficulty – and ‘The Sea of Reactions’ – another exercise within MBCT for Cancer that works well online and in person. You will also be able to experience for yourself the way that brief practices can be used in class and in everyday life.
Who is this for?
This masterclass is for anyone teaching mindfulness based programmes, whoever they teach – and those in training to teach Mindfulness Based Programmes. It is relevant to those who are experienced and those who are just beginning. It is not necessary to want to teach people with cancer or serious illness in order to benefit from this masterclass. The session will be led in a way that enables the learning from this approach to be as transferable as possible to whatever context you work in.
The facilitator
Trish Bartley
Trish Bartley has been teaching mindfulness to people with cancer since 2001 – working clinically in a North Wales hospital (and the local community) for over twenty years. She was supervised by John Teasdale for many years to adapt, tailor and publish MBCT for people with cancer. (Bartley, 2012). Later she wrote and published a book for people with cancer themselves Mindfulness: A kindly approach for people with cancer (Bartley, 2017). Trish has also co-written Teaching Mindfulness Based Groups (Bartley & Griffith, 2022) and is currently finishing Mindfulness and Cancer, an update book to the MBCT for Cancer programme, which will come out next year.
Trish teaches for Mindfulness Network and Oxford in the UK, several European mindfulness training organisations, and sometimes further afield such as in China and South Africa. This includes general mindfulness pathway trainings, specialist training around cancer, groupwork training, and leading retreats, and offering supervision.
Certificates
This masterclass is valid for ongoing personal development in mindfulness. Certificates of attendance can be supplied on completion of the day’s training, if requested.
How to book
You can book for your ticket for this masterclass here.