A Clinician's Guide to Teaching Mindfulness

Mindfulness―once an ancient practice honed in Buddhist monasteries―is now a mainstream, evidence based, secular intervention employed by trained health and mental health professionals worldwide. The rapid spread of mindfulness increasingly involves psychologists, physicians, social workers, therapists, counselors, spiritual advisers, life coaches, and education professionals trained in their respective disciplines. Additionally, research continues to show that mindfulness is an effective treatment for anxiety, depression, stress, pain relief, and many other illnesses.

If you are a professional interested in teaching mindfulness, this book will provide you with everything you need to get started right away. The introductory, six-week protocol outlined in this book is easy-to-use, and can be implemented in a variety of settings, ranging from an outpatient mental health clinic to an inpatient oncology clinic, from a substance abuse recovery program to educational settings.

In addition, this book will tell you what to bring to each class; provides outlines for each session; offers scripts to help you differentiate the weekly meditative practices; and provides invaluable resources for further study and professional development. If you’re looking to integrate mindfulness into your professional work, this is your go-to guide.

Christiane Wolf, MD, PhD, is a mindfulness teacher and teacher’s trainer. Her mindfulness practice started in the late 1980s. Before becoming a full-time mindfulness teacher, she was a board certified OB/GYN at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. She also holds a PhD in psychosomatic medicine from Humboldt University, and is a certified senior mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) teacher and supervisor for the Center for Mindfulness at UMASS Medical School. She is also the director of MBSR programs at InsightLA, a Los Angeles-based non-profit, and the director of the VA CALM program at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, training staff and clinicians in mindfulness and how to teach it. Wolf received Dharma transmission from Trudy Goodman in 2011, and is part of the current master Insight meditation teacher training under Jack Kornfield (Spirit Rock Meditation Center, CA) and Joseph Goldstein (Insight Mediation Society, MA). She is also on the advisory board of the Center of Mindfulness, Mindfulness-Based Professional Training Institute at the University of California, San Diego.

J. Greg Serpa, PhD, is a clinical psychologist for the Department of Veterans Affairs at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System. He is honored to teach mindfulness to America’s veterans and is the first full-time mindfulness teacher and trainer in the federal system. Serpa is an assistant clinical professor at the University of California, Los Angeles psychology department. He teaches the intensive mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), as well as introductory level mindfulness classes at four area hospitals, and serves as a trainer, supervisor, and consultant to clinicians at the VA and UCLA. He is currently the director of inter-professional mental health education at the West Los Angeles VA, where he trains psychology postdoctoral fellows, psychiatry residents, social work interns, and nurses in mindfulness and integrative modalities of health and well-being. Serpa is a national mindfulness content expert for the VA’s Office of Patient Centered Care and Healthcare Transformation where he and Wolf are preparing mindfulness toolkits for national use. He is also an active researcher with a number of projects expanding on the evidence basis of mindfulness interventions. This includes a National Institutes of Health-funded biomarker study examining the impact of meditation on brain structure in combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan who have traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic headache.