Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Teacher Training Course Reflections – Volume 1, by Lucy Edwards

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Teacher Training pathway

The MindfulnessUK Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course is a comprehensive 12-month training pathway designed to enable you to gain all the knowledge, skills and materials you need to deliver the 8-week MBSR course to your own clients or workplace colleagues.

It’s a very popular course and MindfulnessUK is a Member Organisation of the British Association of Mindfulness-Based Approaches, a charity that regulates teaching and training of mindfulness in the UK and internationally. The MBSR teacher training gives you a background to secular mindfulness, and all the notes, session plans, practices and tools, allowing you to develop an understanding of how to work with those that are experiencing physical, psychological and emotional difficulties. 

At this time of fear and uncertainty in our society, supporting others to feel more connected to themselves and others by teaching mindful and kindness practices, offers ways to live more healthily in the present.  These skills to manage stress and build resilience, have never been needed more.

We have recently started teaching our latest cohort and we asked one of our students, Lucy Edwards, whether she would be happy to document her experience.  She said yes!

Her Experience So Far:

I was first introduced to mindfulness when I was a teenager and my sister talked me through how to do a body scan. I remember liking how my body and mind felt. Later when pregnant with my first child I started doing mindfulness practices but I never really kept it going in a consistent way until the start of the COVID 19 pandemic two years ago. I found that the practices helped me to cope better with the stress and uncertainty of the pandemic and lockdowns.

I then signed up to the 8-week MBSR course and found it life changing. About half way through the course something just clicked and I realised that this was something that I needed in my life. I was reaping so many benefits to my general well-being that I wanted to continue and explore further, so I decided to sign up for the MBSR teacher training course with MindfulnessUK.

This course teaches you how to teach the 8-week course, based on the original MBSR course developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979 at the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic at University of Massachusetts Medical School. I felt excited to get started on the pathway of strengthening my mindfulness practice and helping others feel the benefits of the MBSR.

After the initial excitement, some niggles of self doubt started to creep up in my mind.

  • Would I be able to lead mindfulness meditations? 
  • How would I manage a group of people, with all their own personal agendas and reasons for being there, through this course? 
  • What if my mindfulness practice experience wasn’t sufficient? 

I then recalled the 8 attitudes of mindfulness and how self-compassion, non judgement, patience and trust were integral facets of cultivating mindfulness. I needed to be kinder to myself and definitely less judgmental.

After some pre-course reading, the day of the first lesson arrived and I connected on Zoom with the other course attendees and our wonderful teacher, Karen Atkinson. I was a bit nervous about what the course would entail and whether we would be thrown in at the deep end and asked to lead a practice straight away. 

Karen allayed any of our first day jitters and that morning on Zoom, building a new heart-felt community with like-minded people, made me realise that I’d done the right thing by signing up. 

I’m really excited and looking forward to the rest of the course and my journey in mindfulness.

Watch out for volume 2 of Lucy’s experience on the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Teacher Training course and if you are interested in finding out more about our next course, which starts on the 30th of September 2022, then click here

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