A Clinician's Guide to Teaching Mindfulness: The Comprehensive Session-by-Session Program for Mental Health Professionals and Health Care Providers

Inquiry is the practice of midwifing a student’s learning and deepening the understanding of the underlying principles of mindfulness.

“Start training your tolerance muscles in small ways to be willing to be with something mildly unpleasant.

How can you approach this? Initially you would empathize with DaRa. “Yes, that is painful.” All the dog and pet lovers in the class will relate. Then from a mindfulness teacher perspective you would also see at least two other bigger-perspective topics, or marks of existence (see “Dharma Teacher Perspective” earlier in this chapter) at work. First:

We have provided a partial list of useful research in chapter

When it comes to poems, try to step it up: Learn to recite your favorite ones by heart. Practice until they live inside you.

Being on the lookout for a wide range of felt experiences will help all participants to feel safe and included with whatever they are experiencing.

This is a good opportunity to introduce the concept of “wise discernment.”

Teaching Tip: There is no requirement that participants share their life story or hardest struggles. That is actually often contraindicated. We want to encourage participants to stay with the present-moment experience and keep their comments focused on the practice.

“I just wanted to turn it all off,” an appropriate response from a facilitator might be simply, “Ah…a judgment?” The advanced participant would immediately recognize the judgment, the trying to change things, the lack of acceptance of the present moment, and know how wanting things to be different is itself the mind’s manifestation of a struggle no