Teaching mindfulness-based groups

The teaching will enable MBP trainees to add value to their group work teaching through understanding, experiencing and practicing the skills and approaches that are needed to enable their group members to learn in a safe and connected practice community.

Learning goals Teaching mindfulness-based groups

The training is broadly based on the ‘Inside Out Group’ model (Griffith et al. 2019) and the recent ‘Teaching mindfulness-based groups’ (Bartley and Griffith, 2022) which focus on learning outcomes across four key areas:

• Inside out embodying – a crucial aspect of mindfulness teaching involves the capacity to be present and aware as we actually teach. This includes sustained awareness of inner body sensations, and outer attention that takes in what is happening in the group at the same time. Embodying mindfulness requires the MBP teacher to incorporate values and understandings that underpin the learning of the sessions and courses that they are teaching – such as the universal tendency to move into automatic and habitual habits of mind, that are influenced by prevailing moods and recent events – and as teacher, learning to come back to present moment awareness and to bring the group back with them.
• Reading the group – this involves the MF professional in learning how to incorporate some threads of groupwork theory and learning around body language in order to maintain a sense of how the group is developing and what it needs to reach its potential to learn as richly as possible.
• Holding the group – this involves the MF professional in offering some safe and appropriate containing of the group as a whole, relevant to the stage and character of each group, and what it needs in the moment.
• Befriending the group – this involves the MF professional in learning to embed a warm relational way of working – that is grounded and has integrity – but that is modelling a way of relating to others and to experience that is essentially kind, compassionate and appreciative.

Conclusion

Trainees will learn to widen awareness to include and teach the group as an entity in its own right, including the needs of individual participants, but involving the potential of the group to empower and enrich the personal learning of mindfulness for each participant.

At the end of the two days, participants will have learned a good deal about working with groups through:

• their own experience of being taught in a mindfulness-based group during the training itself.
• practicing skills and understandings based on experiential exercises, including numerous small group processes.
• discussions and didactic input in the large group.