Integrity & Standards

Standards specific to the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program (MBSR)

Standards for the MBSR program were first formalized in 2001 by The Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Healthcare, and Society at UMass Medical School. They were updated every few years, most recently in 2014. This last document contains more detail about the actual curriculum standards.

Good Practice Guidelines for Teaching MBSR

The Mindfulness Center at Brown, now led by senior faculty in the field of MBSR, including many from the original team at the Center for Mindfulness of the University of Massachusettes, developed Good Practice Guidelines specific to teaching MBSR, last updated in June 2020.

International Mindfulness Integrity Network Guidelines

IMIN is a global network informing the ethics and standards of mindfulness training and teaching. As a response to the growth of mindfulness programs globally, a group of senior mindfulness teachers and trainers from around the world met in a series of workshops in 2015, exploring the topic of integrity in Mindfulness-based programs. This community has continued to work together and developed these guidelines, by which we at the MTTA and the Global Mindfulness Collaborative, with which we are affiliated, abide:

A Framework for the Integrity of Mindfulness-Based Programs, July 2021 (living document)

Tending the Field of Mindfulness-Based Programs: The Development of International Integrity Guidelines for Teachers and Teacher Training (2020)

Mindfulness Teacher Competencies

The MBI:TAC was first developed in 2008 in the context of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) programs in the UK, by a team of researchers at the Universities of Bangor, Exeter and Oxford. It is now being used to review competence and adherence of other MBIs, and has been broadly adopted by a number of teaching institutions, including the MTTA. The most recent version was published in 2021.