Mark Williams and the Oxford story

If Jon Kabat-Zinn (Episode 1) was the man who brought mindfulness into modern medicine, then Mark Williams is one of the key figures who carried it from "treating illness" toward "living". And the eight-week MBCT-L course we now teach in Hong Kong was developed by exactly him and his team at Oxford.

Three people, one question

Back to the 1990s (as Episode 6 told it). Three clinical psychologists — Zindel Segal, John Teasdale and Mark Williams — set out to solve a hard problem: why does depression relapse so easily? They combined cognitive therapy with Kabat-Zinn's MBSR and created MBCT (Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy). Research showed that for patients who had relapsed several times, MBCT markedly reduced the risk of relapse — and later even the UK's NICE guidelines adopted it.

Starting at Oxford, reaching the public

Of the three founders, Mark Williams kept digging deeper at the University of Oxford. In 2008 he founded the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, giving mindfulness research and teaching an institutional home — turning it from a treatment method into a base that runs ongoing research, trains teachers and serves the public.

Not just patients — everyone

At Oxford, Williams and his team gradually realised something: the benefits of mindfulness shouldn't be reserved for patients. So they adapted MBCT into MBCT-L — "Mindfulness for Life" — a course for anyone who wants to live more awake, less pulled along by "autopilot". This turn matters: mindfulness stepped, officially, out of the therapy room and into everyday life.

He did one more thing: he wrote for ordinary people

Williams co-wrote a bestseller with the journalist Danny Penman — Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World — turning the whole eight-week practice into words anyone could understand, and selling many hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide. He held one conviction deeply: mindfulness shouldn't be something locked in an ivory tower, but a tool every ordinary person can use.

So what does this have to do with you?

The connection is direct: the "MBCT-L eight-week course" you see at Mindfulness Asia is the continuation of this lineage. From MBSR's hospital, to MBCT's clinic, to Oxford's MBCT-L, to today's Cantonese classroom in Hong Kong — the same method, polished over decades of research, now taught back to you in your mother tongue. To learn more, see our eight-week course.