Global MBSR Teachers' Meeting (MBSR-TM)
with MBSR Teacher Trainer Rebecca Eldridge

10:00AM-noon US ET, second Sunday of each month
Sessions recorded and shared with all who register.
By Donation: $10-$25/session
Next session: Sunday, July 12
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The East Coast Mindfulness Global MBSR Teachers’ Meeting (MBSR-TM) will gather monthly for learning, professional development, and community building.

The MBSR-TM is open to MBSR teachers who have taught at least one 8-week MBSR course and want to continue to learn, grow, and be in community with other MBSR Teachers and with MBSR Teacher Trainer Rebecca. No matter when you initially trained to teach MBSR, or through which organization you trained, hopefully you never want to stop learning—about teaching MBSR and about yourself as a human and as an MBSR teacher.

During sessions, we will explore topics related to MBSR and teaching MBSR. These may include assumptions about what MBSR is and what it is not; what “good teaching” of MBSR is and what it may not be; what it means to practice mindfulness and MBSR; the underpinnings of MBSR curricula; best practices of teaching MBSR; your personal and professional experience of teaching MBSR; your questions and wonderings; your own meditation practice; and more.

You will be invited to occasionally practice-teach parts of the MBSR curriculum (optional), and to receive feedback from your teaching colleagues and teacher trainers. We will also hold space for exploring what is alive for you around teaching MBSR.

As members of the MBSR-TM, we will all—

  • Participate. Your presence and participation matters. Our live interaction and in-the-moment bonding will provide the buoyancy for good learning, good community, and good care-taking of ourselves and each other. Each session will also be recorded and shared with everyone who registers for a session. The recording will stay posted for review until our next month's session.
  • Practice-teach. While you won't teach during every session, there will be opportunities for you, with "beginner's mind," to teach various aspects of the MBSR curriculum. This may require you to consider what may have become habitual (perhaps even stale) in your MBSR teaching, and explore fresh ways to take the teacher's seat.
  • Receive and offer feedback. The feedback process is grounded in deep caring and respect for something that all MBSR teachers want—to provide excellent teaching that benefits those we teach.
  • Explore MBSR curricula. We will explore various topics both during and between sessions—through our day-to-day experiences, through contemplation and practice, reading and studying, and more.
  • Inquire and speak your truth. We will all learn from each other if we all show up ready to truly wonder; to speak to what we know and don't know, and what we think and feel; and to listen deeply as our colleagues do the same.
  • Maintain a personal practice. We will each maintain a personal practice that fits our life, and consider how our own formal and informal practices of mindfulness are informing our life and our teaching.
  • Engage in exploration between sessions. We will explore various topics between sessions—through experiences of our own life, through contemplation and practice, reading and studying, occasionally planning for practice teaching, and more.
Prerequisites
  • You have trained to teach MBSR
  • You have taught at least one 8-week cycle of MBSR either online or in person
  • You want to be part of a community of MBSR teachers who are willing to be seen as human—perfectly imperfect and totally okay.
The Weekly Process:

Engaging a process at each session will provide a structured freedom to move us toward understanding, acceptance, action, further wondering, connection, and other things we can’t possibly name until they arise in our midst.

The process, with approximate times—

  • Landing & welcome: 5 min.
  • Brief check-in from each person: 10 min.
  • Mindfulness practice: 20 min.
  • Introduction of topic: 15 min.
  • Start processing around topic: 10 min.
  • PAUSE: 5 min.
  • Speaking & Listening, Small &/or Whole Group: 25 min.
  • Gathering: What do we know now? 15 min.
  • For next time: 10 min.
  • Closing: 5 min.

NOTE: Everyone (those present and those who registered but have to miss) will receive an email after each session, with a link to the recording of that session and what to focus on for next time.

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Rebecca Eldridge

Rebecca served as an MBSR Teacher Trainer at the Center for Mindfulness (CFM) at UMass Medical School until it closed in 2019, creating the training for the CFM’s own faculty to deliver their first online MBSR course in 2016, and creating and teaching the first online Fundamentals training at the Center for Mindfulness. She worked with CFM trainees at all levels, from beginning training through Certification. She is certified as a calibrated rater for assessing MBSR teaching using the MBI-TAC tool, and co-author of a subsequent tool (MBI-PAT) that has been developed and validated across multiple studies, giving voice to participants' perspective on teaching quality in an MBSR course. She is also a member of the International Mindfulness Integrity Network (IMI), a worldwide group of teacher trainers exploring ethics and standards of mindfulness training programs.

Rebecca's personal practice is guided by her teacher, Pema Chödrön, and she was featured giving meditation instruction in two courses taught by Pema Chödrön: Making Friends with Yourself and How to Live with Compassion and Courage.

Register Schedule & Topics

To register for Sunday, July 12, 2026:

1. Make your donation.

2. Receive an email from East Coast Mindfulness containing the Zoom link for the session (please check your Junk/SPAM folder in case you do not see this email).

Your donation makes it possible for us to continue this offering. Thank you!

All times shown are US Eastern:

Dates Times Topic
Jul 12
2026 		10AM-noon Beyond Self-Improvement in Teaching MBSR

MBSR students arrive with a hope: to become happier, calmer, healthier, or somehow better than they are right now. While there’s nothing wrong with this, it can shape how they relate to practice, turning it into another task to get right—another self-improvement project rather than an opportunity to relate differently to experience.

Yet MBSR points toward something different: meaningful change can arise not from fixing ourselves but from learning to meet our experience with awareness and kindness.

In this session, we'll explore the role of self-improvement in mindfulness practice (our own practice and the practices we invite students into), in our everyday lives, and in our teaching of MBSR.

Please prepare and be ready to share about the following:

  • Reflect on why you first came to mindfulness practice. What were you hoping would change or get fixed? How has your understanding of practice evolved since then? Is your current practice aligned with this understanding?

  • Reflect on your current relationship with self-improvement. In what ways does it hold you back, if it does? In what ways does it support you, if it does? What feels comfortable or uncomfortable about the notion that mindfulness may not be a self-improvement project?

  • Consider ways your teaching may reinforce a self-improvement orientation: through your language, what you emphasize, how you respond to participants, or in other ways. How do you help students discover for themselves that meaningful change can arise not from striving to become different, but from meeting experience as it is?
Jun 14
2026 		10AM-noon Dialogue in MBSR (Without Preparing Your Reply)
Apr 12
2026 		10AM-noon What MBSR Teachers Are Curious About (continued from March session)
Mar 8
2026 		10AM-noon What MBSR Teachers Are Curious About
Feb 8
2026 		10AM-noon The Why, When, and How of Poetry in Teaching MBSR
Jan 11
2026 		10AM-noon Teaching Yoga in MBSR
Dec 14
2025 		10AM-noon Open House: Meet Other MBSR Teachers
Nov 9
2025 		10AM-noon MBSR Curriculum Review

The MBSR Curriculum Review program (8 Sundays that started Oct 19) will take place during the November MBSR-TM time slot. The next MBSR-TM meeting will be on Sun, Dec 14.
Oct 12
2025 		10AM-noon Q&A with Jon Kabat-Zinn about Teaching MBSR
Sept 14
2025 		10AM-noon Teaching MBSR: “Right Livelihood” or Business as usual?
Aug 10
2025 		10AM-noon Habit Energy & Teaching MBSR
July 13
2025 		10AM-noon Trauma Sensitivity in Teaching MBSR (continued from June)
June 8
2025 		10AM-noon Trauma Sensitivity in Teaching MBSR
Apr 13
2025 		10AM-noon Diets, Neutrality, Habit: From Class 7
Mar 9
2025 		10AM-noon Mountain and Lake, Loving-Kindness: From Retreat Class/All-Day Session
Feb 9
2025 		10AM-noon Class 6: Difficult Communication
Jan 12
2025 		10AM-noon Classes 4 & 5: Stress Reactivity/Responding
Dec 8
2024 		10AM-noon MBSR: What We Don’t Know (continued from November)
Nov 10
2024 		10AM-noon MBSR: What We Don’t Know
Oct 13
2024 		10AM-noon The Stress of Teaching MBSR
Sept 8
2024 		10AM-noon What is a skillful MBSR orientation?

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