As part of their academic and professional training, psychology students should, among other things, be concerned with their own personal development and develop their professional competences through self-experience. The practice of mindfulness appears to be a useful means of achieving these goals. It is a relatively low-impact approach that can support students in developing their own potential and mental health. However, many students do not have access to mindfulness programmes, are not familiar with its benefits, or for example do not have the willpower to complete the entire programme. The aforementioned has led to the introduction of a compulsory elective course Eight Weeks with Mindfulness for Bachelor's and Master's students in Psychology, in which they follow an eight-week mindfulness meditation programme Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World (MFPFW) in its Czech version.

MFPFW is an eight-week programme developed by the Mindfulness Centre at Oxford University that is easily applicable to everyday life. For the purposes of the course, the programme has been developed into an online interactive curriculum in which students have embedded recordings of meditations in addition to a summary of each part of the programme. The course is delivered as a combination of face-to-face and online formats. Over the course of three semesters, a total of 146 students have taken this course, 85 from the Bachelor's program and 61 from the Master's program.

The effect of the MFPFW programme has not yet been sufficiently verified in the relevant literature. Therefore, a pilot project (N = 65, M = 16.9%, F = 83.1%) was implemented to investigate its effectiveness. The effect of the program on emotion regulation, sleep quality and mindfulness was investigated. This was a quantitative evaluation study in which data were collected using a questionnaire survey. The results showed that after completing the program, students showed an improvement in sleep quality (W = 283.0; p < .001), an increase in mindfulness (t(64) = 10.031; p < .001), an increase in the use of cognitive reappraisal ((W = 1313.5; p < .001), and less frequent use of emotional suppression (W = 405.0; p < .001).

The pilot project was followed by another application of the program designed to maximize students' self-experience - practicing mindfulness was supplemented by writing weekly self-reflections. The advantage of self-reflections is that students have the opportunity to think about themselves, the ongoing process, their actions and they can assess everything, which leads to a deepening of their awareness. Several positive changes have been noted as a result of these self-reflections. Students became more mindful, were able to regulate their attention more, made fewer demands on their performance, appeared less judgmental, became more accepting, and also expressed more compassion for themselves.

During the final reflection, students mentioned several benefits of taking the course. They appreciated the interactive curriculum, which they perceived as useful and well graphically designed. They also mentioned again the positive changes they had observed in themselves. They said they realized the importance of mindfulness for their daily lives and future career orientation. At the same time, however, students were conflicted about several aspects of the program, particularly the length of the meditations, the frequency of repetition, and the online format of the course.

Keywords: Mindfulness, MFPFW, psychology students, university course.