Mark Williams is Emeritus Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Oxford, having held posts at the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge and the University of Wales, Bangor. The main focus of his research and clinical work has been to understand how best to prevent serious clinical depression and suicide. With Zindel Segal and John Teasdale, he co-developed Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and was founding Director of the University of Oxford’s Mindfulness Centre that works to prevent depression and enhance human potential through the therapeutic use of mindfulness across the lifespan.

His books include Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy for Depression and The Mindful Way Workbook (with Zindel Segal & John Teasdale, 2013, 2014), The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness (Second Edition - with John Teasdale, Zindel Segal and Jon Kabat-Zinn, 2025) and Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World (with Danny Penman, 2011). His most recent work focuses on how to sustain and deepen mindfulness through an eight-week programme that explores feeling tone (vedanā) 'frame by frame', as explained in Deeper Mindfulness (with Danny Penman, 2023).

Finding peace in the midst of conflict: what questions, what responses?

Conflict can occur at many levels: within the self, the family and the community. It seems to call for caring, forgiveness, loving-kindness and the courage to face difficulties with openness. This is easy to say, but the lived experience of conflict raises many questions:

• If everything is impermanent, why should we care?
• Does forgiveness mean that we have to allow those who have hurt us back into our lives?
• Does loving kindness mean we have to love everyone?
• Is an aim of mindfulness to face difficulties by dampening feelings?

In this talk, we'll explore whether the second foundation of mindfulness (feeling tone) can help us respond to these questions; how learning how to become aware of feeling tone, and to do so without becoming attached to the pleasant and pushing away the unpleasant, might allow us to discern wise action, even amidst the urgency that conflicts create.