Organizing the Intentions of Teaching

Abstract

In learning to teach mindfulness as a professional, the questions about what gets taught and when are of equal weight with the questions of how the teaching happens. Within the mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs), particularly those that explicitly include meditation practices, many of the answers to what and when (as well as how) have been based on the template curriculum of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR). As described in Chapter 1, many of the MBIs, such as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), mindfulness-based art therapy (MBAT), mindfulness-based relationship enhancement (MBRE), and mindfulness-based relapse prevention (MBRP), assume the basic MBSR curriculum of formal mindfulness practices as an armature for specific didactic material and specially elaborated meditations and experiential explorations for their own target populations. In this way, the pedagogy of mindfulness unfolds relatively consistently from intervention to intervention. The measured success and exciting possibilities of the MBIs, we believe, are attributable in no small part to the MBSR armature — a metastructure of the what and when of teaching mindfulness.