A Clinician's Guide to Teaching Mindfulness: The Comprehensive Session-by-Session Program for Mental Health Professionals and Health Care Providers

Mindfulness-based interventions have exploded in popularity due to their success in treating everything from everyday stress to more serious mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).This breakthrough book provides professionals with a comprehensive, session-by-session guide to teaching mindfulness, complete with the scripts and training materials needed to teach introductory mindfulness in a wide variety of settings, despite theoretical background.

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 physician turned mindfulness teacher, teacher’s trainer, writer, and speaker. 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 of Berlin, Germany. She also holds a PhD in psychosomatic medicine from Humboldt University. Dr. Wolf is a certified senior mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) teacher and supervisor for the Center for Mindfulness at University of Massachusetts Medical School. She is the director of MBSR programs at InsightLA, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit, 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. Dr. Wolf received Dharma transmission from Trudy Goodman, her heart teacher, in 2011, and has undergone master Insight meditation teacher training under Jack Kornfield (Spirit Rock Meditation Center, CA) and Joseph Goldstein (Insight Meditation Society, MA). She teaches meditation retreats and workshops in the United States and internationally, and lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their three children. To learn more about Dr. Wolf, please visit www.christianewolf.com.
 
J. Greg Serpa, PhD, is a clinical psychologist for the US 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 associate clinical professor in the psychology department at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an associate visiting clinical scientist at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He teaches intensive mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), mindful self-compassion (MSC), and 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 interprofessional 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 Cultural Transformation, where he and Christiane Wolf are preparing mindfulness toolkits for national dissemination. 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.
 
Foreword writer Jack Kornfield, PhD, is cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA, and a founding teacher of Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, CA. He is author of many books, including A Path with Heart and The Wise Heart.
 
Foreword writer Trudy Goodman, PhD, is a senior Vipassana teacher in Los Angeles, cofounder of the Growing Spirit program, and contributing author to several books, including Compassion and Wisdom in Psychotherapy, Clinical Handbook of Mindfulness, and Mindfulness and Psychotherapy.