The training will combine time for engagement in personal mindfulness practice in a supportive context with the opportunity to link the learnings from this with a focused engagement in building the particular skills needed to skilfully offer mindfulness-based courses. We will use the Mindfulness-Based Interventions: Teaching Assessment Criteria (MBI:TAC) as a supportive ‘lens’ through which we can explore the teaching process. The work will not involve assessing each others practice, but rather coming alongside each other to reflect on our strengths and learning needs as teachers and to build our skills with the support of peers and the facilitators.
Our time will be spent together in silence as we practice and in small and large group reflection and investigation as we learn through our individual and collective experience. Participants will have opportunities to lead practices and investigate personal and co-participant’s experiences of these.
The seven day programme will commence with time for orientation and welcome, followed by 1.5 days of guided silent practice. The intention of this is to facilitate the transition into and access to a deeper and wider spaciousness of mindful awareness which will inform the developmental processes that will follow. We will then journey together in small groups through the 8-week programme being teachers and participants for each other, and taking time to pause, step back, reflect and offer supportive feedback on the various domains of the MBI:TAC. The programme will offer an integration of interactive training and development processes within the context of periods of silent formal and informal meditation practice.
We will use the Mindfulness-Based Interventions: Teaching Assessment Criteria within the training as a support to developing teaching skills. Through the programme participants will become increasingly familiar with the criteria as a tool for reflective development. We will use the criteria as a support to offering feedback on teaching practice to each other and to ourselves. Throughout this we will keep in mind the importance of developing our teaching towards expected norms whilst supporting ourselves to discover our own authentic expression as a teacher.