This 2-day workshop is organised for mindfulness-based teachers who wish to learn more about groups and ways of supporting the rich potential of the group process in a mindfulness context. Cultivating our skills in holding the learning environment of the group is widely considered as a vital component of mindfulness-based teaching.

Many of us have come to this work with a background in one to one work. The skills we have acquired will have many direct benefits for our mindfulness teaching. However, we may find that we continue to teach ‘one-to-one’, with a key focus on individual participants, albeit in a group.

We will explore how to bring this ‘group’ dimension into all aspects of mindfulness teaching - including the orientation and assessment process, guiding practices; leading inquiries; and facilitating exercises and group discussions. In doing this, we will learn how to be present, embodied and alive to three dimensions of the group: that of myself as teacher; that of the individual participant; and that of the group as a whole.

We will learn to understand and support the different stages of the group – namely the forming, the holding, and the ending of the group. Using a new ‘inside out’ model for teaching mindfulness-based groups, you will learn to read, hold and befriend the group – enabling the potential of the group to flow into the learning of the individual participant and connect through a sense of the common humanity and shared vulnerability within the circle.

Key Learning Objective:
to explore ways of leading, teaching and holding the process of mindfulness-based groups that enables the rich learning potential within the group to be realised by mindfulness course participants.

Other Learning Objectives
• to find ways of resolving some of the common challenges when leading groups - such as managing a dominating participant; a persistent late comer; someone who is openly skeptical; a participant who says very little.
• to consider the different approaches involved with teaching different sized groups.

This module will be facilitated in English, but we will also learn in small groups when Dutch will be spoken.

Trish Bartley has worked with groups for over 40 years. She is a senior trainer at the Centre for Mindfulness, Research and Practice at Bangor University where she teaches on the masters programme. She has taught MBCT to patients in a regional oncology unit for over 14 years and wrote Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Cancer (Bartley, 2012) and Minfulness: A Kindly Approach to Being with Cancer (Bartley, 2017). She works in South Africa when she can bringing mindfulness to rural communities affected by HIV & Aids and she runs mindfulness retreats and workshops in the UK and internationally.