Essential Resources for Mindfulness Teachers

Rebecca S. Crane, Karunavira, Gemma M. Griffith, Rebecca S. Crane, Karunavira, Gemma M. Griffith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367330798
• eBook ISBN: 9781000385519
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Professional Development

Essential Resources for Mindfulness Teachers offers the reader a wealth of knowledge about the explicit and implicit aspects of mindfulness-based teaching.

The book focuses on how to develop the craft of teaching mindfulness-based courses and is divided into three parts. Part I addresses the explicit elements of mindfulness-based courses, such as how to offer meditation practices and inquiry. Part II investigates the subtle but powerful implicit qualities needed within the teacher to convey the essence of mindfulness. Part III is a series of chapters on the underpinnings, considerations, and theories surrounding the teaching of mindfulness-based courses, and includes a new framework for reflective practice – the Mindfulness-Based Interventions: Teaching and Learning Companion (the TLC).

The book is a core companion text for both trainees and established mindfulness-based teachers, and is a resource you will return to again and again.

Part I The explicit curriculum

INTRODUCTION

What is the explicit curriculum and how does it fit with the implicit curriculum?

In Part I we outline the underpinning intentions and teaching methodologies of the explicit curriculum (i.e. the actual content of what is taught session by session, such as the formal meditation practices, inquiry etc.). Afterwards, in Part II we unpack the importance of the implicit curriculum (i.e. the qualities and values that are communicated through process rather than content, such as the embodiment of the teacher). This section offers an overview of curriculum issues, clarifies the role of each part of the curriculum, and offers a perspective on how they work together.

There is a lot more going on in the teaching space than the actual content of the curriculum – what is immediately seen and heard. The phrase ‘mindfulness is caught rather than taught’ captures the sense that it is both through what we are taught, and through how we are taught that learning happens. In educational circles the implicit aspects of the teaching process are often called the ‘implicit or hidden curriculum’: the parts of the learning process that are often unacknowledged by students or educators yet are vital to learning. This implicit part of the curriculum tends to be conveyed through non-verbal messages: tone, prosody, affect, body language, and eye contact. It is the aspect of the pedagogy that communicates ethics, values, authenticity, congruence, and trustworthiness (or lack of these). It is through the implicit curriculum that we communicate an attuned capacity to embrace diversity and teach inclusively (Chapter 24). To enable a connected meaningful learning experience the hidden and the visible curriculum need to be congruent with each other.

In our teacher training programmes at CMRP, we intentionally give a strong emphasis on both the explicit and implicit curriculum. We recognise the truth of Maya Angelou’s words: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”. We recognise that people who have completed an Mindfulness-Based Programme (MBP) course leave with a toolbox of practices (the explicit elements), and they will take away memories of mindful connection, of living in alignment with values, and of caring about themselves, others, and the wider world (the implicit elements). Clearly, these rest and rely on each other. If one is weaker, the whole learning process is weaker. Mindfulness, both as a quality of being and as a practice, is essentially an open and responsive stance towards internal and external experience. It follows therefore that an MBP curriculum is designed to enable this essential stance to be communicated. This is mirrored in the frameworks offered by the Mindfulness-Based Interventions: Teaching Assessment Criteria (MBI:TAC: Crane et al., 2018) and the Mindfulness-Based Interventions: Teaching and Learning Companion (the TLC: Chapter 19) which enable trainees to reflect upon and develop both explicit and implicit teaching skills.

In the first section of Part I, Saki Santorelli offers a piece that was originally written as the opening canto of the 2017 Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) curriculum guide. Note that because Saki is reflecting specifically on the role of the MBSR curriculum guide, there are some references to MBSR, but the spirit of the text applies to any MBP. He reminds us both of the importance of understanding the explicit elements of MBP curriculums, and the pitfalls of overemphasising them. The following chapters in Part I are all written by the editors.

1 The essential spirit of mindfulness-based teaching

Saki F. Santorelli

Eight centuries ago, during the last twelve years of his life, the great Sufi teacher and poet, Jelaluddin Rumi, recited and wrote the Masnavi – six oceanic volumes about the human condition and the unfolding of the soul (consciousness) comprising 62,000 lines of poetry. Among the topics Rumi speaks about in this great work is what he calls the ‘variety of intelligences’ and, as well, about ‘Universal Intelligence’, what he refers to as ‘The Mind of the Whole’. Among this ‘variety of intelligences’ he comments on ‘personal intelligence’:

Personal intelligence is not capable of doing
work. It can learn, but it cannot create.
That must come from non-time, non-space.
Real work begins there.

(Rumi, 1994)

He speaks, too, about what he calls ‘two kinds of intelligence’:

One that is acquired ... one already completed
and preserved inside you.

(Rumi, 1988)

In the context of reflecting on the spirit that informs the pedagogy of MBPs these ‘two kinds of intelligence’ are essential to explore and understand.

ACQUIRED INTELLIGENCE: THE INSTRUMENTAL DIMENSION OF MBP TEACHING

Often enough people learning to teach MBSR ask me the question, “Has the MBSR curriculum changed much in 38 years?” I am keenly attentive to the silence that usually ensues between us when this question arises. What is the answer? Yes? No? Yes and No? Neither yes nor no seems to me to be about as close to reality as I can land because any of these possible answers depends upon the perspectives of the person asking and the person responding to the question. At heart, the MBSR curriculum has remained absolutely true to the form that it entered the world with in 1979. For now, the basic structure of the program, the sequencing of meditation practices and underlying session themes permeating the program remain robust and intact. In aggregate, these curricular components constitute the ‘instrumental’ domain of the MBSR curriculum. This instrumental domain is what Rumi is referring to as ‘acquired’ intelligence. Acquired intelligence comes through practicing, through repetition, attainment of goals and the development of skills and competencies learned, understood, and experientially refined over time. Surely, the instrumental is of great value, comprising one domain of learning. Seen through the perspective of the instrumental, this curriculum guide is akin to an operating manual – a session-by-session handbook. Understandably, when someone is first learning to become an MBP teacher, the curriculum is often approached in this way. When viewed through the lens of the instrumental – the world of doing and becoming – then the answer to the question of whether the curriculum has changed leans towards “no”; the curriculum has not changed much at all since 1979.

Of course, herein lies one of the inherent dangers of publishing an authorized curriculum guide. Soon enough, it will be mistaken for a ‘manualized protocol’. Soon enough, people will become fastened to the form, bound tightly to the instrumental, because it provides a structure, a trajectory, and a map that is easily mistaken for the territory. While valuable and oftentimes comforting, this is also problematic because it is limiting. Much of the time, we want the map to be the territory because we desperately want constancy. Observation would suggest that often enough it is easier for us to hold firmly to and be comforted by the instrumental, by the form. Having established some sense of the instrumental dimension of intelligence as it expresses itself in the MBSR curriculum, let’s now turn our attention to another intelligence.

'ALREADY COMPLETED' INTELLIGENCE: THE NON-INSTRUMENTAL DIMENSION OF MBP TEACHING

At heart, the MBSR curriculum has remained true to the formlessness it entered the world with in 1979. At the most basic level, you need a room to teach MBPs, a gathering place for people. Of course, you already inhabit a room that is always with you. This is the room of your heart. Rumi calls this placeless place:

A freshness in the center of your chest.

Two centuries later Hafiz described it as:

The city inside your chest.

This ‘freshness’ or ‘city’ is outside of space and time, outside of personal intelligence, outside of needing to get anything, outside of transforming yourself or anyone or anything – no attaining, no non-attaining, no completeness or incompleteness – simply being. This is the non-instrumental actuality of meditation and MBPs, the intelligence that is already complete within you, and within those with whom you work. This intelligence does not need to be acquired but rather, remembered. This is the real curriculum, the real guide; the deep spring from which MBP teaching flows out of you and makes its way into the world. You might consider returning to this water whenever you need a reminder of who and what you are behind all the words and forms described in any MBP curriculum guide. This ‘freshness’ that is available to you whenever you become lost or tired, overextended or discouraged or simply in need of rest and ease; the refreshment of not needing to pursue any aim at all. I suspect that if you allow yourself the space, you’ll discover for yourself that holding too firmly to the instrumental inevitably blinds you to the non-instrumental

Like Russian Matryoshka dolls, the instrumental is nested within the non-instrumental. If this were not the case, how could you learn anything? How could you love anyone, if love were not an innate attribute of your being? How could you ache and feel tenderness in the orbit of another’s pain, if empathy wasn’t inherent? Surely, we can learn to become increasingly familiar with these attributes through deliberateness and practice. However, if they were not already part and parcel of who and what you are, occluded as they may be in most of us, you would have no reference point for loving, compassionating, (as Walt Whitman says) or assuming your measure of universal responsibility for the wellbeing of the world.

Look at MBP teaching as a ‘thing’ and you’ll miss it. See it as a pattern of relationships – a pulsating, ever-changing expression of life unfolding and you’ll discover it. If MBPs are worth anything, their worth lies in their aliveness. Their aliveness rests in the basic ungraspability of the curriculum. Seen from this vantage point, the vantage point of the non-instrumental, then the answer to the question, “has the curriculum changed?” is “yes”. The curriculum has changed because, like everything else in the world, it is constantly changing. Likewise, who and whatever you think of as ‘you’ is also continually changing. This dynamic flux is none other than the creative nature of Rumi’s ‘universal intelligence’ reflected through you and embodied as you. And, of course, as you grow and deepen and surrender more fully into what you are behind the occlusions, the curriculum changes quite naturally, deepening and expanding into new expressions, endlessly ....

Ultimately, and in a very palpable way, the ‘curriculum’ of MBPs are none other than your life intersecting and comingling with the lives of the people you will have the privilege of sharing in and engaging with week by week in the teaching space. The suffering, the inconstancy, the lack of a solid, concrete ‘self’ – the wish for relief of suffering and the longing for wellbeing that you carry within you, and all the people you will ever work with carry within them – is the curriculum, the vital life of MBP teaching.

Now, as you enter into the stream of learning and teaching MBPs, my invitation to you is to realize that the real guide for teaching any MBP curriculum is always available inside of you, always awaiting your attention, always resting in your completeness outside of any notions of here and now, past and future, time and space.

2 Curriculum considerations

Before exploring the explicit curriculum elements, we offer some perspectives on the evolving context of MBP curriculums and the question of which MBP curriculum you choose to anchor your learning into. This is an important prelude before moving on to ‘how’ to teach the explicit curriculum, as it balances Saki’s section by underlining the importance of curriculum adherence, and clarity about what you are teaching. The issue of curriculum adaptation for particular contexts or populations is briefly introduced below with pointers to helpful resources

As Saki so eloquently communicated, any MBP curriculum is a ‘principle-led’ curriculum – as opposed to a fixed treatise or a list of edicts, whether these are based in historical sources of authority, contemporary science and thinking, or our collective wisdom and experience as MBP teachers and trainers. A ‘principle-led’ curriculum relies on the teacher cultivating a clear and deep understanding of the principles themselves. Embodying the underlying principles of an MBP curriculum draws from our lived experience of mindfulness practice, from our teaching experience, and from our study and understanding of theory and research. This means we make any changes to the curriculums we have inherited with great care and humility!

When we first started training teachers at Bangor University in the early 2000s, curriculum choices were simple. MBSR was the original MBP, and MBCT was a tailored adaptation for a specific popu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of editors and contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I The explicit curriculum
• Part II The implicit curriculum
• Part III Resourcing ourselves as mindfulness teachers
• References
• Appendix 1: Further resources
• Index