Stewardship of the Mindfulness Field

1. The mindfulness field in the UK has developed well in the UK with a number of organisations offering teacher training, and an organisation BAMBA that promotes professional standards and publishes a list of over 400 mindfulness teachers that  adhere to their guidelines. Yet there is a general issue among teachers that demand has largely fallen off, and the teacher training organisations are seeing a steep fall in applicants. This is in the face of a growing public awareness of mindfulness and its value, and significant uptake of mindfulness apps.

In this post I shall explore why the field needs to reexamine its stewardship to widen the adoption of mindfulness, making it more accessible while ensuring safety. 

Stewardship

Stewardship of a field often falls to many organisations in the field. In the post Mindfulness  – The Infinite Game, I explore a perspective on mindfulness that considers how contemporary secular mindfulness has emerged and entered the public consciousness, and suggests some changes that perspective may invite. How such changes (or similar) may arise depends very much on how the stewardship of the field develops.

The current stewardship rests with a small number of universities that offer education and training, a small number of organisations (mainly charities) that offer mindfulness teacher training, and the British Association of Mindfulness Based Approaches. The success of mindfulness in the UK is due in the most part to the considerable skills and dedication to the research and development of mindfulness based approaches.

The focus of that stewardship has largely been around high quality teacher training, research into the effectiveness of mindfulness, and establishment of standards and training pathways. The field, however, seems to have hit a natural limit to growth with its current approach. Arguably there needs to be a development of the current stewardship to widen access to mindfulness.

Below I propose a number of areas for consideration:

1. The developing of a funding model for the application of mindfulness.
2. A move from intervention-centric approaches to a continuing-practice perspective.
3. Training teachers to meaningfully adapt mindfulness courses to particular contexts.
4. Seeding the development of communities of practice. 
5. Embracing other approaches to mindfulness and meditation.
6. Greater democracy in the ongoing stewardship of the field.

Funding models