Welcome to the course

Watch Craig and Richard introduce the course and talk more about what you’re going to learn, and how you’ll go about learning it.

Talking point

We would like to start the course by hearing from you and what motivates you.

There will probably be a variety of reasons why each of you have signed up to do this course, so please introduce yourself and share your reasons for taking part in the course within the Comments.

You might like to tell other learners about who you are, where you’re from and why you are interested in learning about mindfulness.

Also consider reading and commenting on contributions made by other learners or following learners with similar interests as you. You can also ‘Like’ comments or follow other learners throughout the course.

Mental health disclosure

This course is not designed to be therapeutic for any particular physical or mental health conditions, including depression, anxiety, psychosis and post-traumatic stress. So if you have any significant health concerns, we ask you not to discuss personal details about this on a public forum such as this, and we strongly encourage you to seek professional advice and support.

• National Mental Health Commission: 24 Hour Emergency Services in Australia
• spur: Mental health support: Links to various crisis counselling services and information networks around the world.
• Befrienders Worldwide: Volunteer action to prevent suicide
• NHS mental health helplines: Helplines in the UK
• Mental Health Hotline Numbers and Referral Resources: Helplines in the US

This week’s meditation

This week, you’ll have the chance to practise and experiment with Comma and The Body Scan meditations.

Rather than skipping straight to these exercises now, we strongly encourage you to work through the steps preceding these meditations to help better prepare you for these practices.

Filtering and bookmarking comments

Comments on a step can be ‘filtered’ which helps you access them in a way that’s best for you. You can do this by selecting comments by ‘All comments’, ‘Bookmarked’, ‘Your comments’ or ‘Following’ from the drop-down menu in the comments section of the step. You can can also sort by ‘Newest’, ‘Oldest’ or ‘Most liked’.

Mentioning other learners

When replying to a comment, you can also mention other learners that are taking part in the comment thread. You can do this by entering the learner’s profile name as part of your reply. For example, @User3320607 That’s an excellent example. @User4499578 What do you think?

Please note, you can mention more than one other learner in a single comment box. Also, you can only mention others who are in the thread and cannot use the mention functionality in stand-alone comments..

Don’t forget to ‘Mark as complete’

When you are finished on this step, select the Mark as complete button before moving on to the next step. Doing so helps you keep track of your progression through the course.

New to FutureLearn?

If you’re new to FutureLearn, you may want to familiarise yourself with how FutureLearn courses work before getting started. You may also be interested in learning more about FutureLearn’s Terms and Conditions and how they apply to you.