Coaching Mentoring Mindfulness

Mindfulness is a burgeoning field of study and practice within mental health care and medicine. Yet ethical codes, and the philosophy of the therapist-client relationship, differ greatly between disciplines, and even more between those disciplines and mindfulness-based approaches. The potential for ethical dilemmas is therefore significant.

The book breaks new ground by taking a focused look at an ethics derived from contemporary clinical mindfulness practice itself. What does a secular ethics of mindfulness look like? Who is competent to work therapeutically with mindfulness, and how does one delimit areas and levels of competence? How do clinicians ethically understand the therapist-client relationship from the therapeutic position of mindfulness? And how do clinicians respond when the necessary restraints of their professional role and ethics code come into conflict with the mindfulness-based relationship and therapeutic position?

This book makes a vital contribution to the understanding of ethics as the cornerstone of mindfulness-based practice, and will be of interest to all those involved in delivering mindfulness-based interventions, including psychologists, counselors, spiritual directors, occupational therapists, physicians, nurses, and educators.

We will begin with a brief historical overview situating Thoreau’s way of being in the world within a contemplative tradition mixing the thought and practice of Asia with the practical demands of the new world. That tradition stretches from Colonial times through its flowerings in Transcendentalism, and at the turn of the 20th century, again in the 1950s and ‘60s, and now in the rapidly growing applications of mindfulness in medicine and mental health care. From this thoroughly American foundation, participants will explore the practice of mindfulness by focusing on the body and the four traditional postures of meditation—reclining, sitting, standing, and walking. Experiential practices (and intellectual insights) will be drawn from the lineage of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James. We will practice, share dialogue about our moment-to-moment experiences, and finally step into the new world refreshed, ready for a walk or a talk or a listen worthy of Thoreau.

Why does educational leadership need maintenance? In educational settings, leadership roles occur almost everywhere from principals to classroom teachers; and also among students and within student groups. In all of these cases, leadership roles are demonstrated in different ways. In all such cases, leadership maintenance is necessary. Leadership maintenance is a reflection of behaviour generated through leader’s psychological state of mind, sociological state of relational building, and physiological parameters of logistic adequacy. The maintenance of leadership, through Psychological, Sociological and Physiological (PSP) parameters, is an important ingredient to shape leadership competencies. The maintenance of PSP generates and offers wellness to leaders and further generates followership wellbeing, thus creating a mirror effect to followership maintenance and towards building a favourable organisational environment in educational settings.

Keywords: Leadership maintenance, leadership competencies, followership maintenance, psychological, sociological and physiological paradigm, reflexive and mirror effect, leaders’ wellness and followers’ wellbeing

"Educators working with adult students employ many types of mentoring models. One form of mentoring-in-motion, “Academic Spiritwalking” (Mulvihill, 2013) may be worth further consideration.  In simple terms, it is a mentoring conversation that occurs between an educator and a student over a series of walking meetings, rather than sitting in an office talking over a desk, or rushed exchanges in a hallway on the way to another class or meeting, or text-based communications via email, instant message or phone texts, or other types of exchanges that keep us sedentary.  This walking and talking methodology combines components of Native American traditions that use a “talking stick” ritual with psychological and physiological theories about the health benefits of embodiment/body movement, and with the emphasis on the mind-body-spirit connections within wellness theories.  “Talking stick” traditions include a ritual whereby full attention and honor is given to the person who holds the talking stick as they tell a story, share their experiences, present a dilemma, or wish to arrange their words for deeper meaning and self-understanding.  Wellness theories are predicated on the direct and inseparable mind-body-spirit connection.  “Pedagogical listening” (Mulvihill, 2010) is at the heart of this form of mentoring and requires the educator to listen for the dimensions of the student’s storytelling that need alignment with their educational goals or aspirations."  See article on p. 12.

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is an eight-week, group-based course that employs mindfulness meditation and other potentially self-reflective activities to help participants reduce stress and improve wellbeing. While acknowledging debts to various traditions of Buddhism and other “Eastern” philosophies and practices, MBSR presents itself as a secular practice and avoids any explicit statements about theories of the self.  However, the teacher’s seat in an MBSR course offers a view of the implicit conceptions of the self with which participants are engaged, often unreflectively, and presses teachers to undertake their own reflections on such conceptions, as well as on their own working theory or theories of the self.  The authors, who are highly trained and experienced MBSR teachers in two very different cultural contexts, in Philadelphia and Seoul, propose to use the privileged view from their teachers’ seats to observe and reflect on the theories of self that are at play in their MBSR classes. Through an exchange of letters describing their own practical experiences and theoretical commitments, the authors compare and contrast the conceptions of self that are at play in their classrooms and the theories underlying their pedagogical approaches. This epistolary dialogue explores in an open-ended fashion the practical utility of views of self from Buddhist traditions, with particular reference to Zen; from Hermans’s “dialogical self,” and from Gergen’s “relational being,” among others, inviting readers to their own reflections and conclusions.