People normally join my 5-week Mindfulness-Based Resilience course when life becomes difficult, and they decide to act.
Some people face work stress, while others struggle to adapt to life changes such as retirement, breakups, or health problems when their old coping strategies fail. Others join after a friend’s recommendation or an NHS referral.
What many of them share is a desire to feel more in control, rather than feeling like their mind is in control of them, and their body responds with stress.
This article covers what Mindfulness-Based Resilience is, what my course involves, and its impact, based on 10 years of teaching experience and feedback survey results.
What Is Resilience?
Resilience is the capacity to cope with adversity in a way that helps you cope with future adversity.
Building personal resilience isn’t just about getting through a difficult time; it’s about building a life toolkit that improves with each successive adversity. It’s a learning process. Each adversity that you navigate effectively gives you something you can use better the next time.
When I originally started researching personal resilience, I found a US Navy study listing two A4 pages of definitions for the word ‘resilience’. Despite many studies, there was no consensus on a definition, so I looked deeper into the research until I found the seminal study in the domain. “Whatever Does Not Kill Us,” a study by Mark Seery et al., tracked thousands of people over four years to measure how ordinary people cope with adversity and learn how a lifetime journey affects resilience.
The study found that coping skills improve after initial major setbacks but drop after the fourth or fifth. So, “whatever does not kill us makes us stronger” isn’t always true—it depends on one’s accumulated number of adversities.
The other key finding is that resilience isn’t fixed. At any given time, we are all either becoming more resilient or less resilient.
Personal resilience either grows or shrinks.
This matters because it means you can actively build your resilience. And that’s exactly what the Mindfulness-Based Resilience 5-week course is designed to do.
Why Mindfulness?
At the heart of resilience is mental focus.
If your attention is constantly being drawn into a disempowering narrative, worry about the future, regret about the past, the inner critic telling you you’re not good enough, you can lose hope, optimism, and deplete your natural inner strength.
Mindfulness meditation trains us to notice when our attention has been captured by an inner narrative and return it to the present moment. That’s it. It’s not about emptying the mind or achieving some blissful state. It’s about becoming aware of what your mind is doing so you can choose how to use it.
Once you learn to catch your mind in the act of wandering off into an unhelpful thought process, everything else follows. Stress management, emotional regulation, better sleep, and a calmer mind all depend on this one skill.
The Monkey Mind
There’s an ancient Eastern concept called the monkey mind. Let me tell you my monkey story.
A few years back, I was in India, in the city of Shimla in the Himalayas. Just above the city, there’s a monkey temple of the monkey god Hanuman. The forest around there is full of monkeys, and they roam the temple grounds.
We decided to walk up to the temple one day, and the people I was staying with warned me to hide my sunglasses when I wasn’t wearing them. They warned me, “Don’t leave your sunglasses hooked in your collar like that, as the monkeys will steal them.” I had to suppress a smile as I assumed it was just a silly urban myth.
When we reached the monkey temple, there was a featherlight touch on my arm. I looked down, and a monkey was standing there, holding my broken Chanel sunglasses and looking up at me. Of course, I reached out to get them back. Bad move. It hissed at me. It had nasty needle-pointed teeth that must have been about two inches long, so I let it keep the sunglasses.
I later learned this was quite common. Apparently, in the past, criminals had taught the monkeys to steal from tourists. The monkeys would take the stolen goods back to the criminals, and the criminals would give them bananas. The police chased off the criminals because they were affecting the tourist trade, but the monkeys kept stealing valuables in the hope of being fed fruit.
Eastern meditation teachers refer to an unruly mind as a “monkey mind”. When you have experienced that level of cunning, you realise what they actually mean. Think about the modern mind: procrastination, a lack of self-worth, anxiety about things you know you shouldn’t feel anxious about, and perfectionism. Our minds are often not on our side.
Evolutionary Mismatch
The reason there is often a conflict between our minds and our modern goals is because of something called evolutionary mismatch.
If you go fishing and pull a fish out of the water, it’ll start flapping around violently. That’s a natural response to being out of its environment. Although it will hurt itself with the flapping, it is far better than not being able to breathe. Modern humans are suffering from the same thing. We have evolved to live in nature, with a small group of people we know deeply and intimately. No walls, no secrets. Everybody knows everything about everyone and acts as one.
Walk along Bromley High Street on a Saturday, and you’ll meet more human beings than most of our ancestors would encounter in their entire lives.
Your brain is scanning the crowd for threats, subconsciously assessing everyone’s behaviour. It can be exhausting, and we are so used to it that we don’t even realise it’s happening.
Modern humans are square pegs in round holes. Most of the practices I teach are designed to help us deal with that mismatch between what we’ve evolved for and the world we actually live in.
What Happens During the 5-Week Course
The course is structured to build from the ground up. Each week adds a new layer, and the practices you learn in earlier weeks support what follows.
Week 1: Understanding Mindfulness and Meditation
We start with the foundation. Understanding what mindfulness actually is (through experience, not with language), then learning your first meditation practices. I share the science behind why meditation works, and we address the most common misconceptions, freeing you to learn without pressure.
You’ll learn about emotional intelligence, the capacity to interpret your emotional state and other people’s, and why it matters for resilience.
You’ll also get your first taste of meditation practice, and many people are surprised at how easily and quickly they begin to notice changes.
Week 2: Stress Management
I’ve moved stress management closer to the start of the course because if you can intervene in your stress, you’ll find everything else easier. Stress is the clearest and easiest focus for the training and provides a foundation for all of the practices.
I teach the same mechanisms used in military mental toughness training. You’ll learn breathwork, originally known as pranayama.
You’ll also learn incremental relaxation techniques and understand why relaxation and breath regulation are direct and effective interventions for stress.
Week 3: Building Focus and Working with the Mind
Now that you can manage your stress response, we go deeper into how the mind works. This is where you learn practices like labelling a technique for intercepting and neutralising thoughts.
You will learn to choose whether someone gets a parking place in your head.
Week 4: Resilience and Connection
This is where the training begins to come together. You’ve learned to manage stress, to focus your attention, and to intercept unhelpful thoughts, and you can work on building your resilience.
These skills then become part of a powerful toolkit for a better life.
Week 5: The Emotional Resilience Toolkit
The final session focuses on emotional resilience because personal resilience is basically emotional resilience. Highly resilient people aren’t emotionless; they feel everything. It’s just that those emotions don’t prevent them from doing the best for themselves and the people they care about.
The course gives you healthier ways to handle what’s inside.
What the Research Tells Us
We’ve surveyed 49 graduates of the Mindfulness-Based Resilience course with an anonymous survey.
The results speak for themselves.
98% said they benefited from the course
Only one person out of 49 said they didn’t benefit.
Some self-reported improvements (graduate quotations)
- “I have significantly benefited from attending this course”
- “I have noticed I feel calmer”
- “I feel more optimistic about the future”
- “I have noticed I feel happier”
- “My mood has improved”
- “I have noticed I feel more focused”
Resilience scores improved across the board.
We measured resilience using a standardised scale before and after the course. The biggest improvement was in rest and recovery: “I get adequate rest and awake feeling energised, calm and happy” jumped from 3.4 to 5.15 out of 10 — an increase of over 50%.
Bouncing back from hard times improved from 5.6 to 6.35. Recovery from stressful events improved from 5.1 to 5.7.
What people said
When asked how they benefited, the most common themes were feeling calmer and more relaxed, having practical tools for life, a changed perspective on their situation, and better sleep.
Here’s a selection of what graduates told us:
“Got skills that I will have for life. I look at life in a whole new, positive way. It’s completely changed my life for the better.”
“The course has had a really significant effect on lots of aspects of my life in ways I didn’t anticipate. I feel I have had a subtle but long-lasting shift in my whole approach.”
“That, to a considerable extent, calm and contentment is not dependent on circumstances or other people and that it is possible to discipline the mind in the same way that we exercise the body.”
“I found the course really helped me understand my thoughts are not ‘me’ and how to cope better with a busy mind.”
“Even a few minutes is ‘enough time’ to meditate, and it makes a huge impact!”
When asked what the most useful things they learned were, the top responses were meditation and breathing techniques, learning a new perspective, the gratitude practices, and the understanding that a daily practice doesn’t need to be long — even a few minutes makes a real difference.
One response that stays with me:
“Since the course, I took up yoga again and now practice yoga totally differently and more mindfully. I don’t think I would be recovering from the relationship I was in as quickly without doing this course. My OCD is now quieter, and when it does relapse, this is less severe and shorter-lived.”
If you want to see more positive public testimonials and reviews, check out my reviews online or visit the reviews page.Reviews
Check out our Online Public Reviews and Testimonials from Students and Organisations:
https://www.meditationcourse.live/reviews/
Who Is the Course For?
The honest answer is: anyone who wants to understand their mind better and become more resilient.
Over the years, I’ve taught hospital workers, blue light frontline staff, performance-focused professionals, schoolteachers, people going through divorce, retirees adjusting to a new chapter, carers looking after family members, and people who noticed their minds were becoming busier and wanted to do something about it.
You don’t need any previous experience with meditation or mindfulness.
Many of my students have tried to meditate before and given up. I was one of meditation’s great failures myself. I spent twenty years trying to learn from books and the occasional religious meditation group before it finally clicked for me.
I designed this course to help you overcome this barrier through practical experience, shared practice with others, and someone who can explain what’s actually going on.
Some of my longest-standing students retake the course regularly. Not because they’ve forgotten what they learned, but because the course evolves, they evolve, and they say they learn something new each time.
The Practices Stay With You
Something I’ve realised over ten years of teaching is that meditation doesn’t help you endure difficult situations — it helps you see clearly enough to make the changes you need.
Resilience is about cultivating the clarity, calm, and focus to navigate life in ways that serve you best.
As one of our survey respondents put it:
“I would recommend Robert’s teachings to anybody, those who are struggling and even those who aren’t.”