THE REAL DEAL
Search “mindfulness instruction” online and you’ll come up with all kinds of offerings, from private practitioners to independent mindfulness programs. There are Yelp listings of the top 10 mindfulness coaches and smartphone listings of the 10 best mindfulness apps. More and more medical centers offer mindfulness workshops; so do many colleges, universities, and corporations. But how can anyone know if the people who are teaching mindfulness are qualified? What does it even mean to be a qualified mindfulness teacher?
Teachers and leaders acknowledge the need for reliable standards. Counseling people about the mind carries the greatest possible level of responsibility.
People interested in exploring mindfulness aren’t the only ones asking these basic questions. So are many leaders in the field of mindfulness meditation, who have raised concerns about maintaining the appropriate level of integrity among teachers, which many refer to by talking about “professionalism.” While not everyone is comfortable with the commercial and clinical connotations of mindfulness teaching as a profession, almost all teachers and leaders acknowledge the need for reliable standards, since counseling people about the mind carries the greatest possible level of responsibility. “The growth of mindfulness over the past 30 years has been very organic,” says Diana Winston, who directs mindfulness education at the University of California, Los Angeles’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. “The field has evolved without any kind of order. That’s been good in many ways. But now, really anyone can hang up a shingle as a mindfulness teacher. There’s no professional training required. A person with great marketing skills can start a successful practice with very little experience in mindfulness.”
Susan Woods, who helped develop and set up the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy certification training curriculum for the Mindfulness-Based Professional Training Institute at the University of California, San Diego, agrees. “These days there are apps for learning mindfulness. There are mindfulness programs that are just a couple of hours long. I see and hear of teachers who are doing things that are a very long way from what I would recognize as a mindfulness-based stress reduction program.”
The challenge, many leaders agree, teachers that maintain the highest quality of mindfulness instruction.
