Quotes from Mark Williams

Start living right here, in each present moment. When we stop dwelling on the past or worrying about the future, we're open to rich sources of information we've been missing out on—information that can keep us out of the downward spiral and poised for a richer life.

Imagine what effect it would have on you if someone stood behind you all day telling you how useless you were when you were trying desperately to cope with a difficult experience. Now imagine how much worse it would be if the criticism and harsh judgment came from inside your own mind.

when you start to feel a little sad, anxious, or irritable it's not the mood that does the damage but how you react to it. • the effort of trying to free yourself from a bad mood or bout of unhappiness – of working out why you're unhappy and what you can do about it – often makes things worse. It's like being trapped in quicksand – the more you struggle to be free, the deeper you sink.

Pure awareness transcends thinking. It allows you to step outside the chattering negative self-talk and your reactive impulses and emotions. It allows you to look at the world once again with open eyes. And when you do so, a sense of wonder and quiet contentment begins to reappear in your life.

But research shows that rumination does exactly the opposite: our ability to solve problems actually deteriorates markedly during rumination.

You can't stop the triggering of unhappy memories, self-critical thoughts and judgmental ways of thinking – but you can stop what happens next. You can stop the spiral from feeding off itself and triggering the next cycle of negative thoughts. You can stop the cascade of destructive emotions that can end up making you unhappy, anxious, stressed, irritable or exhausted.

In mindfulness, we start to see the world as it is, not as we expect it to be, how we want it to be, or what we fear it might become. These

We only compound our feelings of depletion if we deal with them by giving up activities that normally nourish us

For some, especially young people, irritability is a more prominent experience than sadness in depression.

Often we see the situation (A) and the reaction (C) but are unaware of the interpretation (B).

the most ancient parts of the brain make no distinction between the external threat of the tiger and internal "threats" such as worries about the future or memories from the past.

depression forges a connection in the brain between sad mood and negative thoughts, so that even normal sadness can reawaken major negative thoughts.

it wasn't necessarily events themselves that drove our emotions but our beliefs about or interpretations of those events.

What if, like virtually everybody else who suffers repeatedly from depression, you have become a victim of your own very sensible, even heroic, efforts to free yourself—like someone pulled even deeper into quicksand by the struggling intended to get you out?

Despite some initial skepticism about what our colleagues and patients might say if we suggested we were considering meditation as a preventive approach to depression, we decided to take a closer look. We soon discovered that the combination of Western cognitive science and Eastern practices was just what is needed to break the cycle of recurrent depression, in which we tend to go over and over what went wrong or how things are not the way we want them to be.

It takes the fuel away from your endless, driving self-criticism. You will eventually be able to see more clearly that some things in life are less important than you had thought, and find it easier to let go of over-caring about them. You will find that the energy that they have been consuming can be used to treat yourself and the world more generously.

Being asked to play one of the butlers is like being picked to play for England. All you have to do is think of the great butlers from the past - Terry-Thomas in 'How To Murder Your Wife,' John Gielgud in 'Arthur' and Denholm Elliott in 'Trading Places.'

I'm stunned that people keep asking me to play characters I didn't expect to play.

Mindfulness meditation teaches you to recognise memories and damaging thoughts as they arise. It reminds you that they are memories. They are like propaganda, they are not real. They are not you. You can learn to observe negative thoughts as they arise, let them stay a while and then simply watch them evaporate before your eyes. And when this occurs, an extraordinary thing can happen: a profound sense of happiness and peace fills the void.

willingness or ability to show up fully in our lives and live them as if they really mattered, in the only moment we ever get, which is this one

When we ruminate, we become fruitlessly preoccupied with the fact that we are unhappy and with the causes, meanings, and consequences of our unhappiness.

Depression is taking a staggering toll on the modern world. Around 10 percent of the population can expect to become clinically depressed over the coming year. And things are likely to become worse. The World health Organization1 estimates that depression will impose the second-biggest health burden globally by 2020. Think about that for a moment. Depression will impose a bigger burden than heart disease, arthritis and many forms of cancer on both individuals and society in less than a decade.

The memories of previous failures and the images of feared future scenarios that we bring to mind in the process add their own twist to the spiral of worsening mood.

The mind is constantly trawling through memories to find those that echo our current emotional state. For example, if you feel threatened, the mind instantly digs up memories of when you felt endangered in the past, so that you can spot similarities and find a way of escaping.