Alumni Spotlight: Dr Melanie Joy Tokley

Dr Melanie Joy Tokley

In the first of our series of guest posts from alumni of the MSt in MBCT, Dr Melanie Joy Tokley, who completed the master's programme in 2016, talks about her experiences of the course and how she is using mindfulness in her professional practice. 

Melanie is based in London. She uses MBCT in her clinical work for the NHS, and also teaches mindfulness at The Mindfulness Project and at Battersea Yoga. 

Thank you, Melanie, for sharing your thoughts with us!

I am a Clinical Neuropsychologist working across both the NHS and private sectors in London.  I am also a qualified yoga teacher, and now a mindfulness teacher!

I came to the MSt in MBCT as a way to blend my personal and professional lives. I have a long history of dedicated yoga and meditation practice; I felt passionate about my journey of self-discovery through Eastern wisdom disciplines and frustrated by an inability to make this same sort of approach to self-healing accessible to my patients.  For me, studying MBCT was the ideal pathway in which the combination of both Eastern philosophy and Western psychology could be delivered in a clinical setting.

My experience of studying the MSt in MBCT exceeded all expectations.  It prepared me to teach the programme and enhanced my clinical understanding of the cognitive mechanisms relevant to human suffering.  But it was also an incredibly rich experience on a personal level.  Over the course of the two years my meditation practice deepened considerably and was undoubtedly informed by the indepth yet accessible teachings on Buddhist psychology that we received, as well as expert supervision.  

Combining my love of neuroscience, mindfulness and yoga, my MSt in MBCT dissertation explored the neurobiology of mindfulness meditation and compared it to other awareness-based practices from the Eastern wisdom traditions (such as yoga asana and pranayama) to further elucidate the neural mechanisms that underpin moment-by-moment awareness.  I am curious as to how this fascinating research may inform the practice components of the structured 8-week courses (MBCT and MBSR), as well as our recommendations for longer term home-based practice.

Since completing the Mst in MBCT I have been teaching mindfulness in a variety of settings.  I am currently running a clinical trial in the NHS investigating the use of mindfulness as an intervention for patients with functional neurological syndrome disorder.  I am also teaching mindfulness to the general public at The Mindfulness Project, both in groups and individually.  I run weekly mindfulness classes at Battersea Yoga, both for beginners and advanced practitioners.  The latter is an opportunity to explore how mindfulness can inform the context of our daily lives and to deepen our understanding of concepts that are not explicitly taught in the 8-week programmes including self-compassion, embodied cognition, and spiritual bypassing.  Teaching mindfulness across a variety of settings, both clinical and non-clinical, has greatly informed my approach to teaching.  Every session is an opportunity to continue to learn and grow in my role as a teacher.  As the practice matures within me I see continually evolving directions for growth and exploration and the students I teach play a key role in informing this process of development. I am grateful for ongoing supervision from the same team of supervisors at University of Oxford with whom I began my teaching journey.