Integrated Mindfulness Training offers a thorough, experiential training in mindfulness-based approaches, enabling you to safely and ethically integrate mindfulness into your existing professional work.

Our particular focus is on how mindfulness can enable us to engage with the roles we play and the tasks and activities of our lives more resourcefully, compassionately and creatively. This course offers training in integrating mindfulness into the midst of your professional work – including being mindful while teaching others to be mindful.

The practice of mindfulness involves consciously bringing awareness to your here-and-now experience with a particular quality of warm, spacious curiosity. Mindfulness practice cultivates a kind resourcefulness. It fundamentally invites us to move toward and abide in a ‘being mode’ and the choices that emerge from this mode. Clinically, mindfulness-based approaches (MBAs) have been demonstrated to be effective as part of the management of many conditions and life situations such as depression, pain, anxiety and addictions.

Perhaps of equal importance to a professional considering training in MBAs is that the integration of mindfulness into your own life can have a profoundly transformative effect. It can radically change your approach to what you are experiencing in both personal and professional contexts, enabling you to be more engaged with what is present, whether pleasant or unpleasant, and yet feel less overwhelmed by challenging situations.

Mindfulness-based approaches (MBAs) have been expanding rapidly in many contexts including:

• Health and Social Care: across the sector
• Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy
• Stress Management: corporate, local government, service sector
• Education and Training: child to adult
• Occupational Health and Human Resources
• Penal Services
• Leisure and Sport
• Life Coaching and Personal Development

A brief scan through professional and research journals in many of these fields shows a rapidly increasing mindfulness-related literature with a corresponding increasing evidence base supporting its use in a range of contexts. MBAs may be being explored within so many disciplines because they occupy the common ground of how we relate as human beings to what we are experiencing. In almost every field of human endeavour if we can bring more attention to what we are doing and be less swayed by aversive feelings arising as we do what we need to do, we will tend to feel more fulfilled and be more effective. Mindfulness opens up ways to lightly hold the activities of our life compassionately, creatively and with presence.

There is currently no professional registration nor accrediting organisation for mindfulness teachers in the UK. The UK Mindfulness Trainers’ Network was formed by organisations delivering mindfulness teacher training and the members of this network have agreed voluntary Good Practice Guidelines regarding the training and continual professional development (CPD) a mindfulness teacher could be expected to undertake in order to be competent.

If you are intending to integrate MBAs into your existing professional work (whether therapeutic, educational, managerial or in other fields), successful completion of the Integrated Mindfulness Training programme will enable you to satisfy these voluntary UK guidelines.

If you are intending to use MBAs in contexts quite different to your current work environment, it is important to discuss with us whether or not the course will enable you to safely bring MBAs into this specific situation and satisfy these guidelines.

The course structure is set out overleaf. Note that you can complete the different parts of the course at a pace that fits your circumstances and that Part 1 can be taken as a stand-alone introduction to MBAs, given its focus on personal mindfulness practice in a professional context.

Finally, it is important to highlight that some professionals undertake this training with the intention of learning to teach others to be mindful, while others undertake the training so they can learn to be mindful in their work, having no intention to formally teach mindfulness practices. Hence the details of the course do not assume you will be intending to teach mindfulness approaches to others.

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