ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) participants are learning to perceive sensory experience in the body. This facilitates an earlier perception of signals of aversion: reactive patterns to unpleasant experience that become part of an experientially avoidant style of processing. The chapter explains the mindful awareness to the activation of these avoidant patterns changes processing to an approach mode. It also explains the position of wider awareness of in-the-moment sensory experiencing plus an orientation of approach towards experience. The underpinning theoretical framework for the phase of work within the MBCT programme is drawn from Buddhist psychology. According to this framework, a critical juncture in the perceptual process is reached when, in relation to a feeling tone they either react automatically with craving/aversion or respond mindfully in a way that ultimately liberates us from such automatic reactions.
