While not everyone is comfortable with the commercial and clinical connotations of mindfulness teaching as a profession, almost all teachers and leaders acknowledge the need for reliable standards, since counseling people about the mind carries the greatest possible level of responsibility.
“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.
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.
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
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.”
“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 hea