In this episode, Gemma Griffith Ph.D., speaks with Prison Mindfulness Institute's Executive Director, Vita Pires Ph.D., about the importance of innovation and assessment tools in teaching mindfulness.
Group dynamics and teaching mindfulness.
Mindfulness teaching and assessment tools.
Mindfulness self-assessment tool for teachers.
Innovation in curriculum development.
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Gemma Griffith Ph.D., is the Director of the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice Postgraduate Programmes at Bangor University. Co-Author Teaching Mindfulness-Based Groups: The Inside Out Group Model. https://training.mindfulness-network.org/our-trainers/gemma-griffith/
Podcast Transcript
Vita Pires 0:00
Hello, Everyone. This is Vita Pires, and I'm here today with Gemma Griffith. Dr. Griffith is a senior lecturer and researcher at Bangor University and the director of postgraduate programs at the Center for Mindfulness Research and Practice. Welcome, Gemma.
Gemma Griffith 0:17
Thank you. It's good to be here.
Vita Pires 0:19
You have co-authored great books, one called Essential Resources for Mindfulness Teachers and another called Teaching Mindfulness-Based Groups, the Inside Out Model. I'd like to ask you to talk today a little bit about group dynamics and group processes, taking a closer look at how we might work with that as teachers.
In your book, you said that Mindfulness-Based Program participants often talk about the group's impact on them and how important that is. You also said that sometimes Mindfulness-Based teachers underestimate the importance of group processes, focusing more on safety or the curriculum. Do you have any other comments about that?
Gemma Griffith 1:21
That came from my experience as a qualitative researcher. I love conducting research where I interview people about their experiences. One of my favorite things to do is read because you get real insight into how people found a particular exercise. So, what I noticed when I was looking at the group process is that there are many studies about how people found an MBP course. The researchers wouldn't often have specific questions about the group, but they would come out in what participants said.
What people spontaneously came up with without being asked was this sense of ‘Well, I was learning mindfulness, but actually, it helped me to learn that someone else was going through something similar to myself, that I'm not the only one who feels this way, or struggles with mindfulness’.
This idea of common humanity comes across in a mindfulness group that can help people realize they're not the only ones with a busy, at times uncontrolled mind. That struck me about the research.
I had a colleague on the Master's course at the time, Trish Bartley, who was very interested in the group, and we were looking at all these theories from the psychotherapy literature. We translated them and used them to support our understanding of what was happening in a mindfulness-based program. But it didn't quite fit. You had to draw a little bit from over here and a little bit from over there. So we wondered how we could bring this together in a coherent and simple model to support mindfulness teachers, to support forming and paying more attention to the group aspect of teaching mindfulness-based courses.
Vita Pires 3:51
Did you develop the four stages of Tuckman's model?
Gemma Griffith 3:58
Yeah, so it's called the Inside Out group model. There's a teacher at the center of what's called 'Inside Out Embodying.’ So, as teachers, we try to show up as ourselves in the room and embody mindfulness. We try to be deliberately and intentionally aware of what's happening within ourselves. So that's the inside part of Inside Out embodiment and awareness of what is happening outside.
So you've got this flux with Inside-out Modeling and Embodiment, and it's one of these things. Embodiment is a challenging thing to define. When I practice being embodied as I teach, I notice that I can't just have an intention to be embodied, which then carries me through the next two hours.
It's a more dynamic process, a bit akin to meditating. So when I meditate, I notice my mind wander, catch it, and gently bring it back. And it's the same thing when I'm teaching. I might be teaching and noticing that I'm getting caught up in what that participant is thinking or my own process of, okay, what am I going to do next? And so the idea is to notice when that's happening and to try and come back and reconnect with our bodies and the group around us to support that present moment, experiential learning that we're trying to facilitate in participants.
The teacher is at the core of it. Around that, you may have noticed there are three capacities of supporting teaching. We struggled to think about how to bring these theories into MBP teaching. And that's encapsulating what we call reading the group, the capacity to read the group. Reading in a group allows us to understand and interpret what's happening in the room whenever we teach.
This process is supported by knowledge of various theories. So you've got Tuckman's theory about the stages of groups. So you know that when people are forming, for example, they often look to the teacher for what to do when they come together and start forming. Sometimes storming can happen, and then you've got forming and norming, and performing norming and performing. And it's nice as a teacher to go 'OK, we are at a forming stage'. This behavior, this kind of pattern is expected. And then, at the beginning, you're, I guess, steering the ship a little bit more on your week one; you're often really holding the group. And by the time you get to the case, if you've done your job well as a teacher, you can always step back and watch the group performance, speak about their course experience, and share what they've learned.
Reading the group involves applying those theories to what's happening. Now, when I say that, it's with an intention not to let the theory overtake your inside-out embodiments. And it takes practice to do that. So it's learning them enough. So you can let them go. And it's part of how you naturally work with and understand groups. And it's always conscious at first, with the idea that you eventually hold those theories quite lightly as a support rather than at the foreground of your mind, dictating how you teach or influencing how you teach; it's more of a light touch connection with theory. You can try to make sense of what's happening in the group.
Vita Pires 8:13
When dealing with humans, you're dealing with many nuances: what their causes and conditions are, etc. Some people are going to land in different places.
Gemma Griffith 8:29
It's nice having that language, isn't it? So people are feeling a bit uncertain in week one, it almost depersonalizes the process a little bit away from you, as the teacher. It's like, of course, people are uncertain and feeling a bit nervous; I'm feeling a bit nervous as a teacher in week one, so, of course, that's happening. Just knowing that can be a very understandable and natural progress of groups or process of groups. It can support us knowing that mindfulness teaching is challenging and brings up these difficult moments for people and ourselves.
So, how do we work with that when we're in the midst of difficulty? I won't go on to the other two elements, but those two other elements are befriending and holding.
Vita Pires 9:32
I like how Cormack's model calls it Charting the Course the Spectrum Stage instead of Storming 1 and Knowing the Ropes. So it's a slightly different language, but it's less steering the mind into it. It's going to be horrible, like the Stormy.
Gemma Griffith 9:53
She uses a lovely metaphor of the ship, doesn't she?
Gemma Griffith 9:58
It can feel like that often. I used it this morning with a colleague; when we talk about a group, it can feel like you're going on a ship. And when you're all going on it, let's say it's a small boat, it's wobbly because you are all just getting on it, trying to set sail. Once you are on the boat, which parallels Tuckman's work with the forming norming, storming, and performing, So, these things often point to very similar processes in groups.
Vita Pires 10:34
Those are happening for the individual, too, in their subjective experience and the group's objective experience. So, do you want to talk about the other two aspects of the model?
Gemma Griffith 10:46
So you've got the Insider Embodiment of the teacher in touch with these three things. So, one of which I was reading that I've already touched on. There's also what we called Holding the Group, and how the teacher does this. So this has two elements to it. One is establishing a sense of safety in the group. In such a way that you can enable learning to take place, it's very difficult to take risks if people feel unsafe or uncomfortable in a space. For example, even a risk of saying, 'Oh, actually, I fell asleep during that body scan'. Often, that can be hard to say at the beginning because people think that meditation should be a particular way. And they find immediately they're falling asleep, or getting frustrated, or they're getting annoyed. So even that ability to honestly say this was my practice experience, and it was different from the person across the room.
A lot of it creates a space in which people can relate honestly to what they were feeling and, mainly, when it contradicts or is different from someone else's experience. Often, one of the things that is helpful to say is after hearing someone during an inquiry to circle, does anyone have a different experience, so you're actively inviting that difference in, 'Did anyone find it challenging?' If many people say how wonderful their meditation was, you know that someone probably found it quite challenging. So it's inviting that in.
So there's that establishing the sense of safety in the group. So by offering group rules, which can be helpful around confidentiality and respect. We often do this in week one, there are the group rules.
Also, this is equally important; I don't know if it's more important for online groups than in-person groups, but it allows people to get to know each other. Facilitating small groups and mixing up them so they're not just turning to the person next to them and talking to them all the time, but they're getting out and moving around the room and talking to a new person.
And then open up to the broader group. You're facilitating people getting to know each other to create that safety. So it's not just that person over there that you've briefly spoken to, who you might assume to know. But when you take time to speak to them, they may be a very different person to who you thought they might be.
That mixing is so important in creating safety. And this idea allows people to connect with their own experience with their sense of learning and being able to take risks. This is how it was for me, even if that was different from the rest of the group.
So that's holding in a nutshell. And then the final one is around befriending. So this friendliness, this connection has a two-way process. One is befriending ourselves. So carrying yourself as a mindfulness teacher, knowing that teaching mindfulness-based programs is inherently challenging and does throw up things for people in your group or yourself, or you'll come across different dynamics in the group that are challenging. So, the sense of knowing that the territory of teaching is inherently challenging can be a helpful thing to notice. This shouldn't be, and it's not necessarily easy.
Knowing that normalizes and perhaps depersonalizes the process when you think it's just you getting things wrong. It also helps us recognize our own habitual patterns of reactivity. It's very easy to ignore or back them away when we're teaching and tending towards those. But there's something about bringing all of that into teaching, which includes befriending those parts of ourselves that maybe we wish weren't there or were different.
Befriending is also about befriending participants. It's about holding a space that's friendly and supportive. And you're coming alongside participants' experience without fixing or changing or fixing but rather meeting people where they are and at the same time, directing people into their experiential experience, whatever they're experiencing. So you're directing people into experience rather than more cognitive appraisals of what's going on. So befriending does involve directing, it's more complex then it may seem.
Vita Pires 16:28
I liked that interview in the book, with the example of a participant who began thinking in the middle of teaching, 'Oh my gosh, I said this wrong, I'm a terrible teacher,' and things like that. She became reactive in that moment, like, 'Now, what am I going to do?!' And then suddenly, she realized, 'Oh, this is the part of the practice, this is important, too.'
Gemma Griffith 16:53
We all do that. I certainly say things sometimes, then immediately regret saying them, and then I can get caught up, and when that happens, I miss the next five minutes of what's happened in the group; I'm not present. So there's something about noticing and not ignoring it, but rather understanding this comes with the territory, and I have a chance to reconnect with my own Inside Out Embodiment and continue as best I can, being human, in a very human way, just being with what's emerging in the class.
Vita Pires 17:32
So, we have an institute that trains people to be certified mindfulness teachers, and it's certified in the US by the IMTA, International Mindfulness Teachers Association. So, they sent us this rubric. Were you part of creating that?
Gemma Griffith 17:53
The MBI TAC was developed by my colleague, Professor Rebecca Crane. So it came out around 2013, so it's been around for over a decade.
Vita Pires 18:07
They have just sent it to us and the students were like, 'Whoa, this is a high bar, are we gonna learn all this in a year?' It seems like lifelong learning. Then, when I read your reflective Assessment Worksheets, I thought, Oh, this is a better point to start people with the TLC.
Gemma Griffith 18:30
Yeah, it's funny you should say that because that was part of the intention of it. The MBI TAC is an assessment tool, for people that might not be familiar with it. The MBI TAC was developed by Bangor, Oxford and Exeter universities to address a practical problem which was how do we assess our students in their mindfulness teaching. This tool has become an internationally used tool for establishing teacher competence in mindfulness. And it's split into six domains.
So one is relational, one is embodiment, one is group, one is curriculum, and two others will occur to me after this interview is finished! And so we heard that that tool is necessarily long because it's an assessment tool, it's around 40 to 50 pages. And so what we wanted to do with the TLC, which is completely based on the MBI TAC, is support people reflecting on their teaching skills. It's deliberately shorter and simpler to make it that first stepping stone when people are thinking strategically about the type of skills that they need to develop as mindfulness teachers. This is a way of easing into it. So, you get familiar with the six domains and where you sit with them. In terms of your practice, it's a reflective tool. So that's what it does, with the idea that when you do open the MBI TAC, it's much more user-friendly. You can get it on our Bangor website; if you Google Bangor and MBI TAC, it will appear there. As well as the TLC.
Vita Pires 20:36
It's a more accessible self-reflective tool for people to use and support their learning.
Gemma Griffith 20:55
The MBI TAC is an assessment tool. There's a bit of threat of assessments that people get that feeling like, Oh, I'm being assessed. But, if you strip it of that, and you allow it to be a tool that people use themselves, they don't have to share what they do in a group or anything, it can just be at home reflecting on 'Ah, okay, yeah, so I have some work to do here, or Yeah, I know this fits, I've never even thought about group processes before might be a thing. And the tool allows that; it goes from Yes, I am good at this skill to, Oh, I never knew that was a skill that I needed as a mindfulness teacher.
So it's designed for people who are perhaps at the beginning or middle of their mindfulness training, although some of our students who have taught quite a few courses find it useful too. It highlights where you might self-criticize because it invites you to look at your strengths as well as learning opportunities.
Vita Pires 22:24
Mindfulness is itself a self-awareness practice, so this is helping to develop that. It almost sounds like a journaling exercise that you would go through and keep track of where you're at. It could develop your capacity for self-awareness.
Gemma Griffith 22:44
Yes, self-awareness. And there's lots of other things you can do. At the end of the TLC, I've pulled together a tool based on an Atkins and Murphy model about when we have these challenging teaching experiences that we take with us into the next day, the ones that stay with us, there's a helpful reflective exercise at the end. It reflects upon what happened. How was I feeling? What was going on in my body, my mind, and my emotions when that happened? What did other people go through? And so it can help turn towards a challenge and look at it in a bit more detail. And that can be enormously helpful for processing those things that stay with us for a few days or weeks.
Vita Pires 23:50
And all of those resources are available on your website?
Gemma Griffith 23:56
The best way to find the TLC is in the book. Then, if you go to the book's website, the Routledge website, there's a drop-down menu; I think it's listed under additional tools.
Gemma Griffith 24:17
There's an online free resource and a standalone MBI TLC that you can download, print out, and use as many times as you want.
Vita Pires 24:37
And people can download those and use them free of charge?
Gemma Griffith 24:42
I was part of the editing and thought it would also be great to make this a chapter. So, it's a chapter in the book, but the original intention was to have it as a free tool that people can use.
Vita Pires 25:05
Thank you.
Gemma Griffith 25:06
It's been translated into four languages and is currently being translated into Japanese. People have embraced it in a way I didn't expect when working on it. Yeah, it's lovely to see how people use it in the world now.
Vita Pires 25:31
Thank you for making that available. Tell me about the conference coming up. What's the focus of the conference? And tell us about what's going to happen there?
Gemma Griffith 25:39
Yes. There's an international conference for mindfulness, which different institutions host. I can't remember if it's every year or every two years. But anyway, people might have heard of it. This year, it will be held from August 2 to 6 in Bangor, North Wales, at the university. The overall theme is Mindfulness in a Changing World.
So it's a conference where a big aim is to have voices that have historically not been heard at conferences, be heard. Our objective is to support a gathering of researchers and practitioners, teachers, and anyone else who might be interested in mindfulness. The conference is based on five different strands. There's a website, it's International Mindfulness Conference. So if you Google International Conference Bangor, you'll come across this. And yes we're doing a lot of work on that now. And yeah, we have some exciting keynotes announced.
Vita Pires 27:02
Are you going to include the new technological AI meditation instructors?
Gemma Griffith 27:08
That's an excellent point. One of the things we've looked at is AI, although we're still putting together some parts of the conference program. So I can't speak to that exactly. But yeah, that's something we've been looking at, and what it means for mindfulness and for the world in general.
Vita Pires 27:40
I was reading a quote from Mark Williams; this is a question on innovation and how people want to come in and innovate curriculums immediately; it is as though they want to bring whatever they're doing and apply it to another whole thing. This quote was like, 'Run the thing nine times before you attempt innovation'; his point was to illustrate the importance of fully understanding the original curriculum before you attempt to innovate it and bring in other things. What do you think of that?
Gemma Griffith 28:26
Yeah, it's really interesting. There's a really good paper on this by Sona Dimidjian that came out a while ago. In it, she mapped mindfulness and found that there are lots of what they ended up calling orphan interventions, where someone would have a good idea, maybe pilot it once, and then it would disappear.
What you end up with is lots of intervention. Sometimes, it is targeted at a demographic of people with an underlying vulnerability. A lot of work goes into it, and then nothing else happens. So yeah, they call them orphan interventions, which I think is an interesting word.
So it touches on that because if you look at the curriculum of MBSR and MBCT, they're designed to have universal applications. And it's tempting to go oh, that doesn't work for this population, without necessarily trying it with that group of people first. So I agree with what Mark Williams said. There's something about learning the curriculum. And then it's only when you understand the threads, the curriculum, how it works, how each thing builds up on each other. Only then can you start thinking about what needs to go because you need to add something and let something go. So what's lost if you take something out? And then what's gained by putting something in?
There's something to be said for really careful and slow adaptations because those are the ones that, you know, the ones that are done slowly and carefully are the ones that tend to have more impact in the world. For example, when you have an idea, it can be tempting to go out and start fiddling with the curriculum. Straightaway, there is something to be said about understanding it first for yourself and the group of participants you're working with, adapting it slowly, and seeing what works. Often, it's trial and error because you don't know what's gonna land what's if you take something out; it might be a building block that you then need for the next part of the curriculum.
Vita Pires 31:12
Wow. Well, thank you. This has been a great conversation. I appreciated meeting you.
Gemma Griffin
Thank you!
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