“These days there are apps for learning mindfulness. There are mindfulness programs that are just a couple of hours long. I see and hear of teachers who are doing things that are a very long way from what I would recognize as a mindfulness-based stress reduction program,” says Susan Woods, who helped develop and set up the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy certification training curriculum for the Mindfulness-Based Professional Training Institute at the University of California, San Diego. The challenge, many leaders agree, is to set standards for teaching teachers that maintain the highest quality of mindfulness instruction. To do just that, Winston, Dawa Phillips, and a small group of experienced teachers recently launched the International Mindfulness Teachers Association (IMTA). At first glance, its mission sounds fairly uncontroversial—“to oversee national and international mindfulness teacher education and training standards to ensure teaching and education programs continue to meet a level of depth and rigor needed to serve students and clients at the highest level and standardize the mindfulness teaching profession.” But almost as soon as its website went live last year, the fledgling association sparked a furor within the normally calm and collegial mindfulness community. Instead of bringing clarity to the field, Lynette Monteiro, a cofounder of the Ottawa Mindfulness Clinic in Canada, charged in an opinion piece in the magazine Tricycle, “IMTA has muddied the waters of existing professional certification processes.” In an open letter to the IMTA signed by 10 leading experts from around the world, members of the International Integrity Network worried that the new association “will lead to added confusion in the field.” The writers accused the IMTA of ignoring the efforts of many other groups around the world, already well underway, to establish standards for mindfulness teachers. They also faulted the association for preemptively declaring itself to be an international association even when almost all of its members were US-based mindfulness practitioners. The worries go deeper. In an effort to regulate mindfulness teacher training, some critics have said, the movement is in danger of ignoring the essential quality of a good teacher—wisdom—in favor of a set number of prerequisites and course hours. In an article in The Huffington Post not directly addressing the IMTA but rather the larger issues facing the mindfulness community, Ron Purser, a Zen teacher and professor of business at San Francisco State University, wrote: “This amounts to the professionalization of the role of the mindfulness teacher in conjunction with the student-as-consumer… Students are no longer learners seeking knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but have taken on the identity of the customer. Similarly, the professionalization of the role of mindfulness teachers has colonized not only the teacher–student relationship, but it introduces market logic with its demands for competition, savvy marketing, and entrepreneurialism.” The intensity of the criticisms took the founders of the IMTA by surprise. “It was a shock at first,” Winston says. “We saw this as an altruistic effort, something that would help everyone in the field and everyone interested in learning to practice mindfulness.” But perhaps it shouldn’t have been so surprising. In many ways, the uproar has exposed rifts in the mindfulness community that have been around for years—among them, the challenge inherent in creating a formal teacher training program for a practice that proponents agree is available to anyone. Of course, any field growing as rapidly as mindfulness is today will experience growing pains. Still, many leaders see this as a pivotal moment. How the debate over international standards and formal credentialing for mindfulness teachers plays out, they say, will shape the future of mindfulness as a practice and a profession.
Protecting the integrity of research-backed mindfulness practice
Protecting the integrity of research-backed mindfulness practice
Almost everyone agrees that there’s a need for formal and widely accepted standards for teachers. “At the moment, the field is very much in flux, which is indicative of the nascent stage we’re in,” says Lynn Koerbel, director of mindfulness-based stress reduction teacher education and curriculum development at the University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Center for Mindfulness in Medicine. “The field of mindfulness has broadened and deepened, and the question is, now what?” Rebecca Crane, who directs the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice at the School of Psychology at Bangor University in Wales, agrees. “The field is moving along quite swiftly now,” she wrote in an email. “There is a strong recognition that in order to protect the integrity of this work, there needs to be transparent systems for the general public to discriminate between those who have undertaken in-depth training and those who have not.” The same goes for educational institutions, medical centers, corporations, and other establishments that want to launch in-house mindfulness programs. “The problem at the moment is that it’s less and less clear who the qualified teachers are,” says Phillips, who is serving as the IMTA’s executive director. “Institutions should be able to feel confident that they are hiring the best mindfulness teachers, and that’s very difficult today.” With an internationally accepted standard for credentialing mindfulness teachers in place, experts say, there’s better likelihood that health insurers will be persuaded to provide coverage for mindfulness as an intervention in health care. “Because there has been so much evidence showing the efficacy of mindfulness, if we can establish rigor around the teaching, then it might get coverage by insurance companies down the road,” says Winston. That would benefit patients and mindfulness practitioners alike. A formal certification process for teachers would also be helpful to support the advance of research into the benefits of mindfulness. To conduct any carefully controlled study, researchers need to make sure every participant receives the same treatment. In the case of an experimental drug, that’s easy. But when the treatment is mindfulness training, it’s much more difficult. For now, there is no way to measure mindfulness as a state. Instead, researchers try to make sure that study participants receive essentially the same mindfulness training—and that the training is generally accepted as the right approach by others in the field. “Certainly in terms of research, having a consistent standard is paramount,” says Koerbel. “It’s critically important that the delivery of all those classes be at the same level.” Finally, an agreed-upon set of professional standards for training mindfulness teachers would benefit people who want to become teachers, by clearly indicating what will be expected of them, and the core competencies that need to be mastered. “If we create standards and requirements that everyone agrees on, mindfulness teachers will have more depth for themselves, and serve their clients better,” says Winston. The fact is, efforts to establish teaching standards have been under way for almost a decade. UMass’s Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, for instance, has created its own curriculum, which includes very specific criteria to assess the competence of teachers of mindfulness. In 2013, Susan Woods helped create a similar curriculum for UC San Diego’s Mindfulness-Based Professional Training Institute. In the UK, meanwhile, experts in mindfulness have created their own standards for certification. The development process started around 2009, says Crane, “when Bangor University, Oxford University, and Exeter University, all of which were interested in assessing teaching as part of their respective master’s and research programs, came together to collaborate by pooling expertise and experience.” Trainers from the three universities painstakingly refined the standards and created what they called the Mindfulness-Based Interventions Teaching Assessment Criteria, or MBI:TAC. “The MBI:TAC provides an agreed national benchmark for teaching competence—students graduating from these programs have all been assessed against the same criteria and judged to be competent or above,” according to Crane. Today MBI:TAC is widely used by many teaching programs in the UK, the US, and other parts of the world. “Between the criteria we’ve been using, and the MBI:TAC, we feel pretty clear that this process is rigorous and deep and affords the teacher and us a moment in time that says, yes, you’ve done this training, you’ve done this work, we see competence, we see a conveyance of the essence of the program,” Koerbel says. In order to help consumers connect with qualified instructors, several online registries of vetted mindfulness teachers and mindfulness programs have been launched. The UK Network for Mindfulness-Based Teachers, for example, a collaboration between 23 training organizations, offers a listing of teachers who meet good practice guidelines. A website called “Your Guide To Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy,” at mbct.com—created by Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, and John Teasdale—provides a variety of resources for people interested in MBCT, including qualified programs and teachers.
The real hurdle to creating mindfulness certification standards
The real hurdle to creating mindfulness certification standards
Why, if most experts agree on the need for widely accepted standards for teachers and many groups are already drafting them, did the launch of the IMTA met such fierce criticism? Part of the answer is that there are so many individuals and organizations already doing the hard work of testing requirements for teachers. Woods, one of the experts who signed the open letter criticizing the IMTA, explains, “The field of mindfulness-based interventions has been looking and struggling with how to come to an understanding about standardization for years. The IMTA didn’t take time to talk to people who were actively involved in mindfulness-based programs. They reached out to some people, but then they didn’t actively involve many of them. That was a mistake. They didn’t acknowledge that the field of MBI programs was already deeply involved in conversation about standardizing the field.” To make matters worse, critics say, the IMTA’s mission and mandate were unclear, at least at the beginning, creating confusion rather than clarifying the issues of credentialing teachers and accrediting mindfulness programs. “Were they setting themselves up as a training body, or a clearinghouse, or an adjudicating body?” says Monteiro. “It wasn’t at all clear, and those three roles are very different.” In their defense, the founders of the IMTA acknowledge that the organization is evolving to meet the needs of the profession. “Obviously, this is a work in progress,” says Phillips. “It’s collaborative. We recognize that there are different credentialing programs out there based on specific curriculums or specific institutions. We want to go beyond that, to create an independent and collaborative organization that can provide standards that aren’t based on a single curriculum or institution. We’re still learning a lot. But I’m convinced that the IMTA can act as an aggregator of the knowledge, because we’re not committed to a particular curriculum or institution.” As the uproar over the IMTA reveals, the effort to craft universally accepted standards and a single certification for mindfulness teacher training is likely to take time, hard work, and considerable cooperation. Interviews with leaders from around the world highlighted some of the most pressing challenges that lie ahead:
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Peter Jaret November 5, 2018
