In this episode, Rebecca Crane, Ph. D., speaks with Vita Pires, Ph. D., the Prison Mindfulness Institute executive director, about the challenges of integrating mindfulness into mainstream institutions with considerations for diverse populations and the need for structured yet flexible teaching approaches.
Navigating tensions in bringing mindfulness into academia and mainstream institutions.
Teaching mindfulness and inquiry in a structured yet flexible way.
Criteria for mindfulness-based teaching.
Adapting mindfulness programs for diverse populations.
SUBSCRIBE to our weekly podcast - available on Podbean OR:
Professor Rebecca Crane, Ph.D., is the former director of the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice at Bangor University and a trustee for The Mindfulness Network. She has written numerous peer-reviewed articles on how mindfulness-based programs can be implemented with integrity into mainstream practice settings and how they can support inner change that contributes to collective and systemic societal shifts towards a more equitable and sustainable world. She has written Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy Distinctive Features, co-authored Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy with People at Risk of Suicide, co-edited Essential Resources for Mindfulness Teachers, and is a Principal Fellow with the Higher Education Academy. https://training.mindfulness-network.org/our-trainers/rebecca-crane/
Podcast Transcript
Vita Pires 0:03
Welcome, everyone; this is Vita. I'm happy to be here today with Professor Rebecca Crane. Rebecca is a former director of the Center for Mindfulness Research and Practice at Bangor University and a trustee for the Mindfulness Network. Welcome, Rebecca. What has been the central mission of your work for the last twenty years?
Rebecca Crane 0:28
Thank you, Vita. Thank you for inviting me. I've been engaged at Bangor University, where we have a center for Mindfulness. Our central mission has been to enable the mainstream uptake of mindfulness. Of course, a big part of that is training teachers. But a lot goes around that, creating a context for the work and developing an evidence base around the practicalities of training teachers.
Vita Pires 1:02
Okay, great. I love your books and the articles that you've written. I think they are essential resources for mindfulness teachers, and I'm going to make them the required text!
Rebecca Crane 1:12
It was such a delight to write that book because, essentially, over the 20 years that we've been training teachers, we developed lots of handouts, resources, and materials that we were making available to our trainees, and it was a way of gathering all that in and making it more widely available.
Vita Pires 1:35
Fabulous work, thank you. So, what tensions have you had to navigate when bringing Mindfulness into academia and more mainstream institutions?
Rebecca Crane 1:47
Well, plenty. So, we instituted the first master's program in Mindfulness worldwide. The process of developing that master's program is an example of a lot of the tensions that we encountered in other aspects of our work. So, it was tough to convince our academic colleagues in other disciplines at that time that this was a subject worthy of academic study in the context of, say, a master's program.
Building credibility for the work has been a key challenge. In a way, we're in a very different place now than in the early 2000s when the evidence base was very emergent. It's still emergent, I would say, but it's a long way on. Certainly, the case for implementing it in our mainstream is really solid. There's a definite green light to make this available in our mainstream.
So that's been one challenge. Then, I think the other big challenge is how mindfulness comes from a paradigm that is very different from our mainstream institutions. So, our education institutions and our health contexts are very outcome-orientated and target-driven. Very much focused on effectiveness, productivity, and efficiency. Those are all laudable goals with the interest of providing the best possible services to those using them, but they do have shadow sides.
Mindfulness comes from a very different paradigm. It's much more process-oriented, focusing on how things show up in the moment with a sense of openness to how things will emerge when we engage with the practice. There's a way in which we're opening to the mystery of life without pinning down what that might be.
So, bringing the best of both of those worlds together—sometimes, that's a very beautiful and easy thing to do, and sometimes, it feels like they're moving in different directions.
Vita Pires 4:48
What about some of the misconceptions about people wanting relaxation only or stress reduction, and being surprised that things are coming up and they're not just getting completely relaxed?
Rebecca Crane 5:08
Those sorts of things are examples of people coming to Mindfulness with a paradigm of trying to fix. Meanwhile, Mindfulness comes from a paradigm of, ‘Let's explore and inquire and discover and see how we might engage in new and creative ways.’
But yes, wanting to get somewhere with the practice or having a particular fixed idea of where it's going to take us is one of the key challenges both in terms of participants arriving into the courses but also in terms of what the service managers or people who are paying for the delivery are asking for. And this is always the tension that a mindfulness teacher is navigating. So, Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy has a really strong evidence base for depression prevention. So inevitably, that outcome tends to get measured, and very appropriately so.
And that's why people come because they want to protect themselves from depression in the future. But in a way, what we then ask the teachers and the participants to do is almost to park that aspiration while you're doing the course, and put your attention much more on this exploration of the process of your experience and how the habit patterns that you have, have a tendency to lead you in certain directions, and how you might open to other ways of encountering your experience, and experiment with that and see where that might take you.
So it's not that you're dismissing depression prevention as an outcome, but you're not putting that front and center when you're teaching the course. So this is the dance.
Vita Pires 7:09
How do you teach people this concept if they want to 'fix' something? Mindfulness is more about learning to be with or allow rather than that 'fix-it' construct.
Rebecca Crane 7:34
So, this is a key part of teacher training. It is one of the subtleties and nuances that teachers of Mindfulness continually explore. I've been teaching Mindfulness for many years, and I still genuinely wish to tell my participants how they can make their lives better, which is completely the antithesis of what we're doing.
So it's a continual practice. And this is why practice isn't something we can do and leave behind. As teachers and practitioners, we continually go through our lives engaging with this and discovering how we can keep it alive at this moment. But as people enter a mindfulness course, we often ask them, Why are you here? What brings you and ask them to tell their story, which is often around, 'I want to be less stressed, I want to protect myself from depression, I want to speak more nicely to my kids. So, I want to build relationships with my colleagues so that they have clear ideas. And these are received and honored because they're important.
And then we say to people, okay, let's revisit those at the end of eight weeks and see where you are with those aspirations. Meanwhile, give yourself over to this eight-week experiment. Just engage with it as an exploration at the moment without pre-determining where it might take you because those aspirations might come about or might not. Still, something else might come about that also equally reveals something vital in your life, and it may not be predictable.
We also say that the research tells us that people who engage wholeheartedly do get benefits. So it's like building that motivational energy to go for it for those eight weeks.
Vita Pires 9:52
So there's a balance of offering, perhaps talking about the benefits, but it seems like you were stressing the inquiry more to get the participant to open up about why they are here and connect with their intentions.
Rebecca Crane 10:08
Yeah, very much. Because Mindfulness is this in-the-moment exploration, but it needs direction. So, the intentionality you've just spoken about is a vital force to build momentum to support that practice movement in the directions we hoped for.
Vita Pires 10:37
Students training to be mindfulness teachers have difficulty figuring out how to navigate inquiry. They're excited; they are enthusiastic about downloading information to people or giving the right answer when somebody says this, etc. But it isn't about endless inquiry, either, because then they get stuck endlessly asking questions. And then the person's like, wait a minute. I just want you to tell me, should I meditate for five or ten minutes? When do you employ that, and how do you teach that inquiry skill?
Rebecca Crane 11:24
So this is our experience, too, that this is the sort of realm within teaching that trainee teachers find the most challenging. It is a skill that develops over time. And I think it's a balance; there is a structure and a form that is helpful as we inquire. As you say, it's not directionless; we're not just randomly asking many questions. And there is an intention; there's a clear purpose. But at the same time, we're not kind of target-driven. Where there is this sense of, let's look at this together and see what we might co-discover.
Vita Pires 12:23
I've seen the TAC and the Teaching Assessment Criteria you co-developed. The TLC, Teaching Learning Criteria, also has many self-reflective questions; people could begin to learn a lot by making an active practice of self in this structured way, by learning how to ask themselves these questions.
Rebecca Crane 12:52
It's beautiful. So, it gives the people listening some sense of context here. The Mindfulness-based interventions, teaching assessment criteria, and MBI TAC we developed quite some years ago were really for our master's program to assess the teacher's skills. We linked up with Oxford and Exeter universities with master's programs. We researched the reliability of how consistently people use that assessment tool in judging the teacher's skills. We found out that well-trained people in the tool are very consistent.
But then, what we discovered was that as the MBI TAC was put into practice internationally, it became used by lots of centers across the world because I think it helped to create a unified voice around the teacher's skills. What are we training here? For trainees to get clearer about the skills that they were developing, I think that was a really helpful ground to stand on.
But we discovered that people were using it not as an assessment tool but as a creative learning tool, just as you said. So, we developed the TLC, the Teaching, Learning Companion, to remove all the stuff around assessment and use it as a tool to support personal self-reflection and inquiry.
And I think you're right. So it's so much easier to facilitate others in inquiry if that's part of our practice. If we're engaging in our meditative practice with that sense of what's happening here, where's this taking me, and how am I engaging with my practice? And how's that serving me? And how's that translating into my practice as a teacher?
So, having some live engagement with this whole process of learning and the linkage between that and my teaching of this work to others is a beautiful and important bridge.
Vita Pires 15:18
I will assume here that people in the US get a little distressed about the word 'assessment.' People may feel like they are back in school and failing math. But when I read through the TLC, I thought, wow, this is like a lifelong learning guide for teachers. So maybe you could talk about the six domains covered in that.
Rebecca Crane 15:44
While developing the criteria, some trainee teachers showed them practicing teaching together. So we, as a group of trainers from our center in Bangor and colleagues from Oxford and Exeter, gathered together and looked at those videos. And we started to make notes of, you know, what are we seeing here? What's happening in the teaching space? What skills are going on? We brainstormed those and ended up with 30+ processes.
Then, we looked at how those overlapped with each other. And how might we bring those together? So, over time, we clustered them down to six areas, six domains of the teaching process within the Mindfulness-based teaching space. So those domains are the criteria now. So, the first one is the curriculum's organization and content. So, in a way, it's the most tangible: what's happening, what's being taught, body scan inquiry, the actual content elements, and how well the teacher is pacing, organizing, and structuring those. So that's the first one.
The second one is the relational skills. This is very much intended to capture the way in which the teacher is relationally connecting with the participants, the sense of warmth, the sense of honoring the sense of care that they have for participants, and also the sense of mutuality. So the teachers are not kind of putting themselves over there as experts but sitting alongside participants as co-explorers
.
And then the third one is guiding. So, this one is the only content piece; all the others are processes that always happen in the teaching. However, guiding mindfulness practices was such a distinctive skill. And each practice has its characteristics. So, it's slightly different from the other domains in that there are criteria and descriptors for each of the different practices that are generally included in a Mindfulness course. They are an exploration of the things you need to consider when guiding a body scan or mindful movement. And what the main intentionality behind each practice is.
And then the fourth one is embodying. So this is the capacity of the teacher. This one marks mindfulness-based approaches as being distinctive from other methods. So this is the capacity of the teacher to be the teaching, to have the teaching inside them in a way that enables them to convey the practice and the essence of Mindfulness just through how they carry themselves, through the way that they have conversation, through the way that they inhabit their body, through the way that they behave in the process, so it's very much on the premise of Mindfulness is caught rather than taught.
This is quite interesting; sometimes, when we look at teaching by a teacher whose language we don't understand, Sometimes that happens, we assess the teachers. They send a transcript, but it's interesting not to look at it first but to see what you take from it when you can't understand what's being spoken. Still, you're just there in the space, and you get a feel for what's happening, and that's very revealing of how that teacher is communicating something.
The next one is inquiry. This is the process of conveying the teaching and themes through inquiry, but also through other teaching processes. So, at times, through didactic teaching, yeah, times to group exercises. So, all of the different sorts of teaching styles that we have within mindfulness-based courses. So, how are the themes conveyed? So that's a substantial domain.
Then, the final one is the holding of the group environment. So this, again, is why we have a sense that there's a particular way in which the group processes are used in mindfulness. In the sense we are drawing a particular theme from a participant and helping them to unpack that and look at that, but we're doing it in the way in the service of everybody and helping to draw from that personal experience, some universal themes that you can then connect in with the whole group. And how that movement from the personal to the universal is held, how the group's safety is created, and what the group's boundaries are. So that's all contained within that last domain to the six domains.
Vita Pires 21:39
As you were talking about that, it ties into another question about mainstreaming Mindfulness and its adaptation. So, for example, in your curriculum, you said it is essential to follow a specific structured curriculum. But when I teach in prisons, that's nearly impossible. For example, when working in a more mainstream setting, our institute tries to train people who want to teach in underserved populations. People who don't have a lot of exposure it could be anyone in any walk of life who doesn't have exposure to the mindfulness world. Therefore, there must be many adaptations.
I think the embodiment thing is really important. You know, for example, at one time in a prison, I was teaching, and there was a woman who came, and she came for three years, and she never spoke a word of English. And I would ask her, why do you keep coming in? She said she just liked the vibes in the room. So yeah, it gave her a lot of peace. I was like, okay, cool.
What about adaptation? And what about mainstreaming it? What gets lost? How can you be aware of its dangers?
Rebecca Crane 23:06
Yeah, these are good questions. And the answers are complex in many ways. So, take the adaptation piece first. So, I'm with you that I think there's a lot of merit in the program forms that we have already established, and they've got evidence behind them. And it's something that you can rely on, as a teacher, you kind of lean back into; it's trustworthy, well-developed, well thought through.
I'm completely with you that, at times, that form doesn't meet the particular context or the particular participants in front of you, and then it is necessary to adapt. It's also worth checking before you adjust because lots of other people have done adaptations for different contexts. And there are a lot of really well-thought-through programs out there that aren't the kind of most well-known ones, but they have had some good thinking in, you know, done. This is particularly important in terms of the linkage to the evidence base because people often research one-off interventions, making it difficult to have meaning in building the evidence for the approach as a whole.
Rebecca Crane 25:04
So, if you are adapting, and we've got a paper on this that describes a recommended process, I can send this link to you. It's quite concise, but in a way, it recommends a process that you go through. Part of that process is co-production. So, you include some participants who will likely receive this as part of the team. And you bring in a team of people with different expertise and perspectives to look at the target vulnerability we're looking at here.
What are the particular elements of the mindfulness-based course that will meet that? What are the particular skills that the teacher is going to need for this context?
So you look at it from all angles, develop a first iteration, implement it, and get feedback. Ideally, some service evaluation should be done, and then iteration should be repeated. And so it's a process of iterating, ideally publishing it. Then you can share it, and other people don't have to go through that process again, so we're building practice and sharing the best practice. So, I think how we adapt and evolve Mindfulness-based programs should be a collective endeavor where we've built on each other's experience over time.
Yeah, so that's one piece around adaptation. Also, the MBI TAC can be beneficial when considering adaptation because it's not anchored to any particular curriculum. It's anchored to the processes that happen in all mindfulness-based courses. So it can help you to be thinking about all the elements that are needed in the course. And then if you're using the MBI TAC, domain, one, the curriculum domain to get clear on the elements in this course that we want teachers to adhere to. So that, then, you've got the consistency in the future. Could you please repeat your last question?
Vita Pires 27:31
I asked about when you're attempting to teach in the mainstream, in really diverse cultures, populations, mindsets, and perspectives. They could all be in this room simultaneously, at different levels; for example, we're working with public safety officials. There are the bosses, the line staff, the police, and the firefighters. You know, they all come from different cultures.
Rebecca Crane 28:01
Complex. This is a wonderful theme. And it's one that I feel like we're, you know, post-pandemic; I feel like there's been an acceleration of recognition of the need for us to be much more context-sensitive and population-sensitive, as well.
I think that in the earliest stages of developing mindfulness and mainstreaming mindfulness, there was more of an emphasis on building some forms that could be replicated. And I think that was probably a vital developmental stage. And I don't think that's behind us. So, it does link to this question about adaptation. But I do think we're at a stage where there is much more need for flexibility, which puts more demand on the teachers because it really asks them to know the context they're moving into and to build their nuanced understanding of some of the social issues, the inclusion-exclusion issues, the diversity issues.
Often, it's in organizations or workplace settings, which have their own dynamics and sensitivities. So, the teacher has to know that context or be teaching alongside someone who knows it. Otherwise, they're kind of parachuting in and will be blind to a lot of the key dynamics that will then make the learning just not land with people.
So there's another paper that we've just written recently with a group of colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic, who are engaged in training teachers from underserved populations, and we were looking particularly at the MBSR program, and the sense of, like, how could you keep with the wisdom of the MBSR program, but make it translated into a range of different contexts, what would be needed to flex that program. We wanted to take a fresh look at what it means to have fidelity. In the sense of fidelity, fidelity means adaptation in and of itself, that you're always flexing and tailoring the program, and it will always be different. And yet, there's always going to be a recognizable thread, which is still MBSR.
So it's this combination of really knowing the essence that you're not deviating from, but also knowing how you teach in socially sensitive ways, in ways that bring in the margins that help people who don't have a sense of belonging, naturally, to this space to feel like this is a place where they can settle and engage and learn in. And we've developed a pervasive resource of materials that teachers can draw on that's freely available. So, I'll send you those resources afterward.
Vita Pires 31:36
Thank you very much. That'd be great. I have another question for you.
So, some teachers come in, and they have an aversion to Buddhism. And they think on some level that this is just teaching people Buddhism. They want to deny that many of these practices originated from Buddhism. There's always some balance, and then you'll have people in the room who are Buddhists. And they go, 'Wait a minute, I don't want to have 'McMindfulness,' there's a whole level that gets a little stirred up sometimes in the groups.
Rebecca Crane 32:30
This is a powerful dynamic. And I think we can sometimes feel like, from one side, we're being told we are too Buddhist, and from the other side, it's not Buddhist enough. So, I think it is challenging. But we've moved to the place where, in our master's program, we do have a Buddhist psychology module. We also have modules that talk about contemporary theories. And I think it's important to know it's not the Buddhist piece that's significant here. However, there are some frameworks on which mindfulness-based courses rest that have been tested over 1000s of years in terms of how we build the skill of mindfulness in a human being. So, the four ways of developing mindfulness, the four foundations of mindfulness articulated more than two and a half thousand years ago, have evolved and developed and have been shaped by all sorts of different contexts. Now, we're shaping them into this new context.
So, it's a recontextualization of old wisdom. And I think there's a way in which we're not teaching Buddhism, but we are drawing on frameworks that arose in that context. They arose in other content; they evolved from something else. So it's like a long stream of human learning that we're drawing on here. And we're linking that to contemporary theories about physiology and cognition, etc.
There's a delicate balance in communicating to trainee teachers and established teachers that there's no need to be Buddhist to teach them, so this isn't about being an 'anything-ist.' But you need to find a way to anchor your practice into teachings that have meaning to you and are consistent with this stream of learning, and you don't need to do that; there are lots of ways of doing that.
You can draw on many teachers who are not situated in a religious Buddhist context. So I think it's not black and white; there's no clear answer. But I think there are ways of understanding this that can help people to feel like they've got a place in it, whether they come from a Buddhist background, another faith tradition, or no faith tradition, which is the same as our participants. They are going to come from all sorts of diversity. This is why the recontextualization of these practices into ways, into the mainstream, and one of the ethos of our mainstream institutions, is that we make things accessible to the broad breadth of people in society. In a way, this contemporary presentation of it is vital. And it isn't Buddhism by the back door; it's very pragmatic skills development that are well researched and evidence-based.
Vita Pires 36:21
Thank you. So, what do you see going forward in this? What are the key challenges people are navigating now? Do you have any predictions?
Rebecca Crane 36:35
The post-pandemic context for this work is very different. I think that's the case of speaking to colleagues in America, Europe, and other places. So, you know, teaching Mindfulness online has taken off and, in many ways, has enabled broad accessibility. And something is being lost in that encouraging people to do some of their learning in person would deepen and enrich their learning. We are noticing that people's habits around where they do their learning have shifted. And we'd love that to evolve so that we can sit in human circles again.
I think that's one area; the other area is that it's becoming harder for individual mindfulness teachers to make a living from a freelance model of, you know, putting your teaching out there and having people come to you. Ten years ago, that was a viable way to make a livelihood. And some people still can do that. But it's unrealistic to say to many people engaging in training that that will be possible. So what we're tending to encourage is that people already have a professional context within which to situate their work, whether they're teachers in a health context or in a workplace context.
What we're seeing, and maybe this is another phase of mainstreaming, is that people are encountering the practice much more in their daily lives, as schoolchildren, in workplaces, or in hospitals. So they're being offered Mindfulness as part of their healthcare, education, and community engagement.
In many ways, it is what we aspired to back in the day, this sense that this would become a common-sense thing that was integrated into everyday life. And I think there's also a challenge with that: It could quickly lose its depth; it just becomes scattered across and doesn't have the depths of engagement.
This links to another piece, which is that it's harder to get people to do the longer practices than it was ten years ago. And maybe that's a societal shift, too, that we've become quite scattered, and people are very connected to their phones. It's harder but even more vital that we keep opening this potential because there's a huge shift in society that is very unhealthy.
So, although people are finding it harder to fill their courses, what's also really clear is that we need to reach the full demographic of society. Even when, for example, Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is available in the health service in the UK, free at the point of access, we still need to see the full demographic of our society accessing the courses. So it's not always just money that's the barrier.
I think there's a lot to learn about culture and context and what we need to learn to make this approach accessible to people in a way that meets them where they are. So, there's a lot for us to explore, and we probably need to be humble. It's not that we've got some amazing thing that people need to engage with. It's more about bringing in people who haven't been habitually at the table. It is still very white middle-class predominantly, who are the teachers, so there are a lot of people who are not at the table, helping to inform how we need to evolve. And if we don't have that diversity at that level, then we'll never reach people who are not engaging.
There are some big challenges, too. All of that is coming at a time when, on a societal level, with the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, and political polarization, there are a lot of big societal challenges that really could use some wisdom and awareness. So, these approaches have huge relevance both at a personal level. Still, they're really important to the wider systemic level as part of the transition we need to make as a species to meet the challenges facing us. We need more compassionate awareness.
And so, is there something vital about us stepping up and meeting the challenges of broadening and making this more widely reachable? And to be thinking beyond this being about personal gain about my well-being, my stress, my depression, into how does this also support us to think about interconnection and care and compassion for people we don't necessarily always include in our circle of care. So, moving beyond the personal to interpersonal and community. These practices have something to offer in that realm.
Vita Pires 43:27
That was beautiful. Rebecca, thank you for summarizing all the challenges we face. I appreciate you taking the time to speak with us today.
Rebecca Crane 43:36
You are welcome; it's been a pleasure.