From Imposter to Impact: 8 Keys to Teaching Mindfulness

Former Buddhist monk and Mindfulness Exercises founder Sean Fargo lays out a clear, compassionate roadmap for teaching mindfulness and meditation — with confidence, credibility, and heart.

https://mindfulnessexercises.com/podcast/

Drawing from his journey (from cloistered practice to prisons, clinics, classrooms, and companies), Sean distills what actually works so you can help others be more present, resilient, and self‑compassionate—without overcomplicating the practice.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why compassion is the foundation of every effective mindfulness teaching
• A simple way to meet fear, judgment, and imposter feelings—and keep going
• How to introduce mindfulness experientially (story → teach → tool)
• Three techniques to make it practical and relevant: prepare, listen, ask
• The templates & credentials that open doors (e.g., MBI‑TAC, Search Inside Yourself)
• How to find your voice for guiding meditations (and a non‑fussy recording setup)
• Essentials of trauma‑sensitive mindfulness and the window of tolerance
• The #1 long‑term success factor: community and consistent teaching practice

Mentioned resources: A Clinician’s Guide to Teaching Mindfulness; Learn to Teach Meditation and Mindfulness; MBI‑TAC; David Treleaven’s Trauma‑Sensitive Mindfulness; Peter Levine’s Waking the Tiger; Search Inside Yourself; Insight Timer.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:31

All right. Welcome everyone. Thank you so much for coming today. Thank you for being on time. Thank you for your presence with this presentation today. Today I'm going to talk about how to teach mindfulness and meditation with confidence and credibility to support you in helping other people be more mindful, self-compassionate, and resilient. It's an honor to be here with you today. We're going to be talking about all the foundational trainings and tools that I've accumulated over the years in teaching mindfulness. And I want to share them with you here for free to support you in helping other people and so that you don't have to go through hundreds of hours on expensive training programs. Mindfulness teaching can be quite simple. Not always easy, but it is pretty simple. And so I'm here to share a lot of our practical trainings and tools with you that I've accumulated over the years. So hello and welcome. Thanks again for coming, and thank you for wanting to teach mindfulness and meditation to help other people. A lot of people are really struggling these days and could use your help. My name is Sean Fargo. I'm the founder of Mindfulness Exercises. I'm a former Buddhist monk of two years, and I'm also an instructor for the mindfulness program at Google. I specialize in helping compassionate people to teach mindfulness and meditation to help others. I've trained over thousands of people on how to teach mindfulness in business, healthcare, coaching, you name it. My mission is to make mindfulness and meditation teaching simple and effective and accessible to anyone who wants to help others so that you can integrate mindfulness teaching with your career or create a new career aligned with your values. If you're already doing work that helps other people, thank you very much. That's really our mission here is to help other people. Since the pandemic, there's an unprecedented demand for new mindfulness teachers online in local communities and in every professional industry that I've come across, from education to the military and everything in between. So I'm excited to share some practical tips and tools with you that will help you to meet that demand while increasing your impact, your influence, and even your income if that's important to you at this time of your life. To thank you for coming, I'll share 50 guided meditation scripts with you for free. So stay tuned for how to receive those. Or more professional credibility as someone who teaches mindfulness or meditation. Or more alignment between your career and your deepest values. So go ahead and write A, B, C, D, or E. But regardless, I'm going to help you with all of these here today and provide the most value that I can. So I believe anyone can teach mindfulness if they have the sincerity, the compassion, and the proper simple tools and trainings. Since 2015, I've helped more than 100,000 people to teach mindfulness and meditation online and in healthcare, business, coaching, yoga studios, wellness centers, and even the U.S. government. For example, one of our students, Jessica Allen, went from feeling stuck with her counseling practice to enhancing her courage, connecting people with their own self-compassion. Leslie Riley transformed from feeling like an imposter guiding meditations to comfortably sharing her own recorded meditations with over 10,000 people online. Scott Shepherd processed his own childhood trauma as he learned to teach mindfulness, becoming a more relatable therapist, who shares the simple practices he's learned with families around the world. Charlotte Thomas overcame a sense of corporate burnout to finding new energy, doing something she loves, scaling her new wellness business over six figures. Amelia Peterson went from feeling frustrated that she couldn't emotionally connect with her son to becoming a new author on how mindfulness brought her family back together. We have thousands of other real stories of compassionate people like you who I've helped to deepen their confidence and credibility teaching mindfulness and meditation. And I've had the honor of working with today's most respected and revered teachers, like Gabor Mate, who said, having collaborated with me, I can attest that he's a visionary who brings scope, insight, and compassion to his teaching and support of others on the path of meditation. So I felt very honored to work with Gabor Mate. And also Sharon Salzberg, who said she was grateful to work with me. I feel a little awkward reading these out loud, but I've had the honor of working with today's top teachers in sharing mindfulness and meditation with others, including my friend Rick Hanson, who vouches for our mindfulness teacher trainings, and is a dear friend of mindfulness exercises. So I can't thank these teachers enough for their support. So today we're going to explore eight key aspects of teaching mindfulness, including the underlying foundation of all effective mindfulness teachings, strategies to overcome self-doubt, fear of judgment, and imposter syndrome, essential fundamentals for introducing mindfulness to anyone. Three techniques to make mindfulness practical and relevant to other people. The top templates and credentials used by respected wellness professionals. How to lead guided meditations with authenticity and creativity, simple trauma-sensitive mindfulness methods to ensure that you keep people safe. And insights from the most successful teachers around the world on their top ingredients for success. So with that in mind, let's start with the basics. Mindfulness is just gentle awareness of our moment-to-moment experience, allowing us to notice our unfolding thoughts, emotions, and sensations without judging them to be good or bad, right or wrong. We're not trying to get anywhere or force any outcomes. We're simply being present with what is, whether it's pleasant or not. Mindfulness meditation is usually a more formal way of cultivating this same awareness. Practices include mindfulness of breathing, the body scan, mindfulness of walking, mindful eating. There's formal self-compassion practice, etc. Mindfulness helps us to develop a deeper connection to this very moment and fosters a sense of inner calm and clarity. Thousands of clinical studies show that mindfulness improves mental health, emotional health, focus and concentration, physical health, self-awareness, workplace wellness, and personal relationships. All right, so are you ready to begin this training on how to teach mindfulness and share it with others? Let's start with the first key aspect of teaching mindfulness with confidence and credibility. But here's how I learned the foundation. So from 2006 to 2009, I lived in Thailand and China, just doing business. Doing something that didn't fully align with my values. It wasn't necessarily harmful to anyone, but it wasn't something that I really resonated with. Searching for ways to find clarity and purpose, I stumbled upon an old Taoist hermit in the outskirts of Beijing who was known for teaching a few foreigners how to meditate. He barely spoke any English and his stature was small, but his peaceful face was inspiring, and his presence really radiated this strength and confidence and presence. He had a shiny face with soft, flowy clothes. His name was Wei, which means power in Mandarin. Our first meeting, he made us tea, and we sipped in silence for about an hour or so. I stared at my tea, had five refills, didn't really talk, and then I left. Again, in silence. There was not a lot of teaching through words, but there was more of a teaching through presence. And I was wondering when would I learn like meditation and some uh secrets that he's accumulated over the years being a hermit? Um so in our third meeting, we sat on the ground uh and he asked me to count my exhales from one to ten and back from ten to one, and then just keep uh cycling through. And I thought that would be simple enough. Um, and if I would lose track, I should start back at one. Um, and to my surprise, I couldn't even make it to ten. My mind was so distracted, um, I had a lot of energy in my body, and I uh I couldn't even make it from one to ten. And I thought, if this is so simple, why is it so difficult for me to do this? Um, it seems like the simplest thing in the world. On our fourth meeting, he asked me to sit on a cushion for 30 minutes and close my eyes and simply sense into my body breathing. So I began by feeling my belly rise and fall, rise and fall. Beyond that, I was resisting feeling anything else in my body since I felt scared to feel the stress I had been accumulated from working too much. So after 10 minutes, my legs were on fire. I had never sat cross-legged before on a cushion. After 15 minutes, my body wanted to burst just from all this pressure I had in my body and kind of sensing within. After 20 minutes, I began judging Wei. Like, who is this guy? And this meditation is stupid. And after 30 minutes, Wei rang a bell, making the most beautiful sound I had ever heard, because it meant that the meditation was finally over and I could move my body. I wanted to get out of there, go get a beer, meet up with a girl, hop on a bus, bound for another country, anything but sense into the physical stress and discomfort that I was trying to avoid and get rid of. Um, but then I looked into Wei's eyes, and they were the eyes of a wise grandfather who knew the difficulty of what I just went through, especially with my first time. He looked at me as if to say, I'm proud of you. It takes great courage to look within and be with yourself for a little while. And then something clicked in me. The difficulty was a part of the practice. It wasn't supposed to be easy all the time. I was supposed to be revealing. And for that meditation and all future meditations I did with him, he didn't ask me to pretend everything's okay or to get to a calm place or to find bliss. He simply asked me to sense into each moment's experience within my window of tolerance, to surrender to what's here, to breathe with it, to be mindful of it, to not judge it to be good or bad, right or wrong, to notice how it actually is, and to let go of the resistance and the fighting with what's here. And to see that discomfort isn't wrong or bad. It's just a part of our human experience that tends to dissolve when we bring this gentle, spacious, kind awareness to it. So Wei knew it was so simple, yet so difficult sometimes, which is why he treated me with a sense of compassion. I'm proud of you. It takes great courage to look within. And this compassion that he treated me with was suddenly teaching me how to be compassionate with myself, which is this underlying foundation of all good mindfulness teachers and teachings, a sense of compassion. This was something brand new to me that I didn't learn at home or at school, where there's a lot of judgment and a lot of um thought and behavior that tries to get to an outcome. It's always doing something to get something or to be someone. So practicing the sense of self-compassion with what's here, even in the difficulty, gave way his own sense of peace and his power and his sense of self-compassion. Because he knew that he could be with anything as it arose with a sense of care. And so I thought, you know, this is what I want from myself: this sense of peace, this sense of internal like self-agency and power, this confidence to be able to meet anything as it is, and this sense of compassion. And so I thought before I die, I want to have cultivated this heartfelt presence as much as I can. And whenever that day comes, hopefully it's in a you know, in a hundred years from now, I will die a happy soul. So I started wondering how I could do that. You know, I don't know how long I have to live. Every day is is a blessing, and so I thought, you know, I want to do this now, because I don't know how long I have to cultivate this practice. Wei said that I can practice this full time as a hermit or as a monk, kind of like him. So after several months of sensing into this preposterous idea, I actually thought maybe I should try it. Become a hermit or a monk. And so after a while, I gave away all my possessions, shaved off what little hair I had left, gave my parents a huge hug, found new teachers who had the same compassionate eyes as Wei, and I entered a Buddhist monastery that would take someone like me and train me for what could be the rest of my life. I had no idea how long I would be there. And so the underlying foundation of all mindfulness teachings that are effective is this sense of compassion. Now, here's how you can use it today. You can highlight and model the three ingredients of compassion and self-compassion, which are kindness versus judgment, common humanity versus isolation, and a sense of presence with the unfolding experience versus over-identifying with any one thing. You can also debunk the seven myths of mindful of compassion. Um, a lot of people have these myths of what self-compassion is and what compassion is, including compassion will undermine my motivation. It means letting myself off the hook. It's just feeling sorry for myself, it's self-indulgent, it's the same as self-esteem, it's selfish, or it will make me look weak or soft. You can also help people increase their compassion through a guided practice of listing memories that bring up feelings of frustration, sadness, fear, stress. Rate each memory on a scale of one to ten in terms of intensity, sort them into the mild, intermediate, and intense reactions, recall one of the mild memories as vividly as you possibly can. Segway into feeling the felt bodily, physical experience of that emotion in this moment. Discern between the physical sensations of the emotion and the stories and thoughts and judgments about it, noticing the judgments of good or bad, right or wrong, softening the judgments with curiosity. Breathe and try to be with a felt experience more and more. And then after that, continue with the other mild memories after having some trauma sensitivity training, which we'll review soon. But this helps to increase your ability to be with intense situations with more care and curiosity, presence, and being able to sense into how it actually feels without getting lost in the story. And this supports your own practice and your ability to teach others how to be with more and more intense situations. You can also invite people to consider how mindfulness and compassion overlap. So mindfulness is this gentle moment-to-moment awareness. Well, compassion is mindfulness plus common humanity and kindness. So, in some ways, we can talk about mindfulness and compassion or self-compassion as two separate things, but really at the heart of it there's a lot of parallels, a lot of similarities. So when we bring mindfulness to our stress or uh discomfort, um, there's inherently a sense of gentleness, uh, which is a part of self-compassion. So as mindfulness practitioners, we're practicing self-compassion, which is a simple sense of care for ourselves during the unpleasant moments of our life, whether it's in meditation or not. And as mindfulness teachers, a big part of our role is encouraging courage to meet what's here. A heartfelt effort for people to be with whatever they're actually feeling, without trying to force it to be a certain way, reminding them it's okay to feel what we feel. And that's why I think the hallmark of all good mindfulness teachers is a sense of compassion for others, because we know how scary it can be, how difficult it can be to open to this raw experience of life. Alright, so that was the first key aspect, and now let's talk about the second key aspect of teaching mindfulness. Uh, we're gonna talk about strategies to overcome self-doubt, fear of judgment, and imposter syndrome. So here's how I learned it. So I became a monk, monk life was awesome. I wore uh monk robes for quite a while, and it was the hardest thing I had ever done. I shaved my head, I wore monks' robes, slept on a hardwood floor with no pillow, walked around random rural villages and farms with my alms bowl, collecting enough food for my one meal a day. I was ordained in uh rural Thailand for a while, uh also uh Northern California for a while, long story. And I had no screens, no money, no entertainment. Um it was it was the most austere monastic tradition I've ever come across. And um and it was hard. But there was a profound beauty with this simple way of living. All I had to do was practice mindfulness and meditation. I wasn't so caught up in you know Buddhist theory or anything like that. For me, it was just about um cultivating the sense of presence. Um my heart continually broke open, my struggles turned into resiliency, and I felt much more embodied and connected over time. So I was ordained for two years, at which point I wanted to share the gifts of mindfulness with others, given how so many people around the world seemed to be suffering more and more. My monastery had a rule though, that I had to be a monk for at least ten years before they would even consider allowing me to teach anything to others. And even if I did teach, my monk teachers wanted me to teach Buddhism, which is way more nuanced and complex than simple mindfulness practices. So, in a way, I kind of felt trapped. Why am I not allowed to teach simple mindfulness practices, even though they've brought me so much benefit? Am I not good enough? What if I just helped a few people be mindful just a little bit? I really wanted to share mindfulness with others. I also at the same time felt like I would be an imposter. You know, I'm not a full master yet. Uh, will people accept me as a mindfulness teacher, knowing that I'm, you know, just Sean Fargo from Bakersfield, California, who maybe drank a little bit in college. Um, I was afraid of being judged. You know, Sean isn't mindful 100% of the time. Who does he think he is? And I was also comparing myself negatively with a lot of famous mindfulness teachers. Like, maybe I need to sound like Jack Cornfield or TikNot Han or uh Tara Brock. I was afraid I wasn't good enough. So maybe some of you are in this boat now. I literally had a recurring nightmare about feeling like an imposter mind mindfulness teacher, and I had this nightmare all the time. The nightmare always went like this. So I'm dreaming, and I find myself in a grocery store pushing my shopping cart around the aisles, and then I turn around a corner and I accidentally bump my cart into the uh shopping cart of a very senior, well-respected mindfulness teacher who I will not name and who I've never named. But we looked at each other face to face. There was no avoiding him, and he said, Hey Sean, I heard you're wanting to teach mindfulness. Who do you think you are to teach mindfulness? And then I would wake up sweating, of being afraid of being found out. Like, oh no, it's the last thing I want to happen. Uh, and I never wanted that to happen in real life. So I told myself, you know, maybe I'm not good enough. Maybe later in life I can do it. Um, but after a few of these nightmares, after wrestling with a lot of self-doubt, I wanted to be free of this fear. So I did something a little scary, which is to bring this gentle awareness, this mindfulness, to the fear itself. So I imagined a scenario, the same scenario from the nightmare, where I'm in the um in the grocery store, reliving that experience. And then after feeling all that fear, I would feel it in my body. I would I would bring this very gentle, spacious awareness to the fear in my body. And I would feel, okay, there's heat in the forehead, constriction around my heart and my chest, butterflies in my belly tingling in my feet. These sensations felt very unpleasant, which I usually judged as bad, and I reacted to them with feelings of shame and guilt. But this time I stayed with these sensations of fear, with more and more gentle awareness, which took all of my courage to be with it, and to not judge it or react to it, knowing that the pain of not facing my fear was larger than the pain itself. I was tired of running away, tired of judging myself, tired of um feeling like an imposter. So breathing in, I feel these sensations of fear, breathing out, I feel these sensations of fear. And over time, these sensations of fear began to subside. And then something remarkable happened. I had the nightmare again. I was in the same grocery store with my cart. I turned the corner, bumped into the cart of the same teacher who said, Hey Sean, I think you're wanting to teach, I heard you're wanting to teach mindfulness. Who do you think you are? But this time the fear was gone. I actually had the courage to respond to the respected mindfulness teacher. I said, A lot of people are suffering right now. Many of them are wanting help, needing help. And I feel called to help them. And I know a few simple mindfulness techniques. That can help them. So if people are hurting, if they want help, and if I feel called to help them, and I know I can help them a little bit, who am I not to help them? How would I feel if I stood by and watched them suffer? Not extending the same support that I or not extending the support that I have to offer. With the same practices that have helped me. That would feel really bad. Just to kind of stand by and watch them suffer and not do anything about it. And then the dream ended. And I felt free. Like the dream just kind of dissolved and I felt empowered. Like, yeah, who am I not to help them? I can do this. And you know, the mindfulness teacher in my dream didn't have anything to say. It's like, I guess that makes sense. And then I felt free, knowing that, you know, if anyone challenged me on teaching mindfulness, this is what I would say. You know, people want help, people are hurting. I can help them even just a little bit. So who am I not to help them? Do you want to stop me from helping people? You know, that would be on their conscience. That's their karma. You know, I want to help them. So who am I not to teach mindfulness? Uh, that would feel worse than being judged by a few people who think that I'm not good enough. So I wanted to teach mindfulness to help people who needed help. Sensing this new mindset, I began contemplating my exit from the monastery, which is kind of a big deal. So that's how I changed my mindfulness teaching mindset from fear to compassion and a sense of agency and service. So um here's how you can use this. You can sense into any fear that you may have. Um, you can think of yourself teaching mindfulness and then reflect on any fear of judgment, sense of unworthiness, or feeling like an imposter. You can sense into the physical sensations of any fear without judgment. Allow these sensations to be here. You can breathe, breathe with them, explore them gently, and sense like where where are the physical sensations of fear in the body? What's their temperature, their shape, their size? Um, are they dense or hollow, tingly or still? Do they feel like they're pulsing? In other words, be curious about how it actually feels. Can you drop names of fear, doubt, or shame, replacing these words with energy? Or just sensations. Can you remember that many other people feel similar feelings? And it's totally normal. This common humanity we're talking about. And can you give yourself the same sense of care that a friend would give you during this time? So give that same sense of care to yourself. You can take the pressure off, rem you know, knowing that we can welcome skepticism. We're not trying to convince anyone of anything, we're simply offering these simple tools for people to try to see what works for them. That's all we can do. Some will like me, some won't, some won't like mindfulness, some will. But either way, we're planting seeds. It's not about me, it's not even about mindfulness, it's about helping others to give them tools and practices that they can try and see what works for them. And also, there's a very common rule of thumb among very senior mindfulness teachers that when they ask dedicated junior practitioners if they want to become mindfulness teachers, if they want to teach mindfulness, it's actually a good sign if the person isn't sure if they're ready, or if they express doubt as to their experience level, or if they express interest in wanting to learn more about how to do it. Conversely, it's usually a bad sign if the person expresses a sense of strong confidence, or immediately speculates that they're going to change the world with their unique vision and wisdom right away, or if they think teaching mindfulness is always super easy, or that they're going to be great at it all the time. These signs may mean that they're focusing too much on themselves, their motivations are not in the right place, their ego may be getting in the way of them actually being able to connect with people with a deeper sense of care and humility. So, when people are considering teaching mindfulness and meditation, we always need to check our motivation, our level of care for the integrity of the teachings themselves, and our level of compassion that we have for the people we want to help. So that's how you can use this mindset today. Now let's talk about the third key aspect of teaching mindfulness, which is um the essential fundamentals for anyone wanting to introduce mindfulness to anyone. So, how do you introduce mindfulness to um to anyone? So here's how I learned how to do it. So after two years and much consideration, I left the monastery to share mindfulness and meditation with others. I was soon hired at Spirit Rock Meditation Center to coordinate mindfulness classes for teachers like Jack Cornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and Tara Brock. I wasn't teaching the classes, I was coordinating them with these teachers. It was a dream job where I supported over 50 revered teachers, my heroes, and over a hundred thousand students over the course of the next five years. While I was coordinating one of the events, I saw a flyer in the hallway where I was working at one of the events. It had a photo of three muscle-bound men, huge, massive guys meditating inside a prison cell. They were convicted, sorry, convicted felons finding peace. The flyer was looking for people who wanted to learn how to teach mindfulness to people on death row in maximum security prisons. And I thought, oh my goodness, wow. In death row? I felt terrified by the thought of going into a prison with convicted felons. But this looked like my first opportunity to actually learn how to teach mindfulness. I thought, maybe I should do this. So I registered for the training without any idea of what I was getting myself into. The leader of the training, his name is Jacques Verdun, who is a very respected mindfulness teacher who brought mindfulness into prisons across California and across the country. He's highly revered by inmates and the general public alike. And um Jack Cornfield just thinks the world of him. And I I came to find out why. Um and so in Jacques's mindfulness teacher training to go into prisons days before we went into an actual prison together, uh, Jacques urged me to try introducing mindfulness through guided experience rather than a long verbal explanation about what it is. You can't adequately describe the taste of an apple. You need people to actually taste it to know what that experience is like. So he asked me to keep mindfulness and meditation as simple and experiential as possible. No fancy postures, no hyper promotion, nothing complicated or cerebral. If inmates voiced skepticism, boredom, or angst or anything, that's okay. We can welcome it. We can validate it, we can honor it. When there's space for conceptual teachings, we can note what mindfulness is, what it isn't, and how it may be helpful in the moments that they need it most. So we can ask them, you know, when could you use a sense of presence or peace, and then apply it to those moments? Simple enough, right? So we walk we walked into San Quitin, which is a maximum security prison where uh inmates are sentenced to life. Um, there are hundreds of convicted felons walking around us in these blue uniforms, and I felt all of their eyes on me. I'd never felt so vulnerable in the presence of convicted murderers, thieves, rapists all around me. Jacques and I walked into a large room with about 30 inmates sitting in chairs in a circle. We sat down with them, introduced ourselves, shared that we felt honored to practice mindfulness with them, and we shared our heartfelt intentions to support them in their difficult situation. It was helpful that Jacques's assist to be Jacques's assistant mindfulness teacher, um, and to allow him to answer some of the questions I had never answered before, get a feeling for being a mindfulness teacher without being the sole focal point. So having a co-teacher can be really helpful, and I encourage that to anyone listening. Um, if you know someone who can teach mindfulness even a little bit, to consider being a co-teacher for a little while. But together we led some mindfulness meditations, answered a few questions, and debunked some common misconceptions about mindfulness. Like, mindfulness is about clearing your mind of all thoughts. You need to be religious to meditate. Meditation requires time, space, incense, music, and other stuff. Mindfulness requires years of practice to benefit, and mindfulness is only about that moment, and then you get back to life. So these are all myths and misconceptions, and so we address some of these uh to help demystify mindfulness and to make make it more practical and relevant for people. So my first mindfulness uh teaching experience went okay. No one beat me up, no one killed me. I survived the tale. A few inmates even said it was the first time they'll felt peaceful in a long time, which made me feel really, really, really, really happy. And I went in to teach in a few more prisons for um about a year or so, and my journey to teaching mindfulness had begun. Yay. So that's how I started learning some mindfulness teaching fundamentals. Um, and here's how you can use it today. So we can welcome skepticism, you're not trying to convince anyone of anything, you're simply inviting people to try some practices to see what works for them. You can remind people that this isn't religious or belief-based, mindfulness can actually enhance whatever they already believe. It can emphasize experiential practice over concepts, no need to be overly formal. We can even invite playful curiosity of however we're feeling. I often don't tell people how long we'll practice for. This keeps them on their toes with the actual practice. To convey concepts or lessons, you can try the method of story, teach, tool. You can begin with a story, convey the lesson of the story, and then give them a tool that they can use. You can mix up your teachings with poems, quotes, infographics, you can relate teachings to current events. Um, you can review mindfulness teaching fundamentals with the MBI T A C, which is the mindfulness-based interventions teaching assessment criteria, which goes over these six domains of teaching mindfulness with examples of um like good and bad ways of doing it. How to encourage courage to practice mindfulness? So you can think in your past, how has a lack of gentle awareness of your most unpleasant experiences negatively impacted your life? These days, how is a lack of gentle awareness of your most unpleasant experiences negatively impacting your life? And in the future, 10, 20, 30 years from now, how will a lack of gentle awareness of your unpleasant experiences negatively impact your life? From your career to your relationships, to your sense of self-worth, to your quality of presence, you know, finance, everything in your life, how will a lack of mindfulness impact it impact you in the past, present, future? And then in your past, how has mindfulness, or this gentle awareness of your most unpleasant experiences, positively impacted your life? Or how is just this sense of presence with anything, whether it's uh unpleasant or pleasant, how has this positively impacted your life in the past, in the present, and in the future, if you practice more and more, what might that do to your relationships, your career, your sense of self-worth, your spirituality, your finances, your dreams? And to cultivate appreciation for this very experience, we can practice mindfulness of death, which is known as the most powerful mindfulness practice, sensing that this very inhale could be your last, which cultivates acceptance and awe for everything that's here now, whether it's pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. We wake up to the preciousness of this moment, regardless of who we are. So that's how you can use some of these fundamentals today. Now let's talk about the fourth key aspect of teaching mindfulness. Three techniques to make mindfulness practical and relevant. Here's how I learned it. So after teaching mindfulness and meditation in a couple of prisons as a part-time volunteer, I was becoming more comfortable that I was that this wasn't as complicated as I had feared. So I wanted to start helping other types of people too. So one day, one of my colleagues at Spirit Rock Meditation Center asked me if I'd like to try sharing mindfulness with kids in their family program. I said, of course. But I wish I'd I'd been taught mindfulness as a kid. My life would have been very different. Probably would never have become a monk, though. But how do I teach mindfulness to kids? Convicted, muscle-bound inmates are very different from innocent little kids. But without much experience being around kids at that time, I became more afraid of the kids than the inmates. Kids tell you what's on their mind. What if they don't like me? They're gonna run all over me. So I asked the Spirit Rock uh family program a lot of questions. What's worked well for other mindfulness teachers who teach these types of kids? What's not worked well? Uh what do these types of kids want? What do they need? What types of experiences can kids be most mindful of? What techniques work uh for them and how do I sequence them? What kind of feedback do the kids give? And what kind of feedback do the parents give? So the family program answered these questions for me, which helped me prepare for my first session with the kids. During my first class, there were about 10 playful kids. They didn't sign up for this, their parents wanted them to be there. So I utilized the advice that the family program gave to me and I listened to the energies these kids were presenting in that moment. I asked them how they were feeling, what was going on for them, and then we organically brought mindfulness to however each of them were feeling, and then gave them some options to sense into their belly while breathing if that felt safe and comfortable and doable, or feel into the their emotions that they were feeling in their body, or name five sounds they could hear, five colors they could see, five sensations they could feel. And we would talk about these simple practices and relate mindfulness to what was organically coming up for them in that moment, and they seemed to appreciate that approach rather than go through a rigid structure of whatever I wanted them to learn. So we even uncovered some pretty sensitive stuff in some of the kids, which led to a warm connection, uh, a sense of vulnerability and and rawness that felt um special in our group. And at the end of the session, I asked each kid to say what they liked and what they didn't like about the mindfulness practices, which gave me some really valuable feedback. The next week I checked in with the parents when they picked up their kids to ask how it was going so far, soliciting their feedback and their insights. So this approach of preparing, listening, and asking helped me to improve with each session to become more impactful with these kids learning mindfulness. It also gave me a framework for helping me succeed in teaching mindfulness to other types of people, which would soon surpass my wildest dreams. So that's how I learned how to make these practices practical and relevant. Um, here's how you can use it today. So before teaching mindfulness, you can prepare. It can help you identify your avatar or like who these people really are in a detailed snapshot, a detailed representation of your average or ideal student or client in that group. You can research and ask about their demographic details, their age, gender, income, education level, psychographic details, their interests, values, beliefs, and lifestyle, behavioral details, habits and patterns. What kind of language do they use? What words and terms do they use to describe their challenges and their goals? Can empathize beforehand with what they may be going through and adapt mindfulness principles, techniques, and meditations to their likely situation in a way that may seem most interesting and practical for them. While teaching mindfulness, you can listen, meet them where they're at, bring mindfulness to their current situation or feelings, listen to and use their language, relate mindfulness to their expressed values, and help them overcome their actual challenges and meet their goals. After teaching mindfulness, you can ask. Ask your students how it's going. Ask them to complete periodic surveys and assessments, asking for feedback and outcomes. You can Google mindfulness assessments and surveys to get started with that. You can ask for quantitative data, which you can measure your answers over time, like on a scale of one to ten. How would you rate your ability to focus before a session? And over time you can see how the quantitative quantitative data rises or falls to give you statistics as to the effectiveness of your teachings. You can ask for qualitative data and measurable measurable answers, or rather open-ended answers, like in your own words. Describe your experience. So prepare, listen, and ask. This is something that most mindfulness and meditation teachers do not do. So using these techniques will help you to stand out, being more practical and relevant than the vast majority of teachers. So that's how you can use it today. So at this point, I'm curious. Um do you want to teach mindfulness to and why? So please uh let me know in the chat section. Who do you want to teach mindfulness to and why? Um, so this will help me to help you um make your mindfulness teachings practical and relevant. Let me know in the chat section. Alright, so let's talk about the fifth key aspect of teaching mindfulness. Uh, we'll talk about the the top templates and credentials used by the most respected mindfulness teachers and wellness professionals. Here's how I learned it. So teaching mindfulness to inmates and kids was illuminating and rewarding, but it wasn't exactly what I had in mind when I left the monastery. I didn't picture myself in a prison or um with a bunch of kids. I love kids. I have a daughter right now, but I didn't imagine that when I was at the monastery. So I was curious about how mindfulness teachers from Spirit Rock were helping people in healthcare settings, corporations, yoga studios, retreat centers, schools, global organizations. How do regular people like me teach mindfulness to other regular people, like in the workplace or you know, um coaching programs? How does that work? So I got up the nerve to how uh to ask one of my teachers how he was teaching mindfulness at Google. Um he told me that he had begun by getting a certification from an accredited coaching program called New Ventures West. So I Googled it and I applied for and received a scholarship. And in two years of uh training, I earned an accredited certification. It gave me the reputable training, templates, and certification I needed to coach people in professional settings. Uh during this time I also met Ched Chad Meng Tan, the founder of Search Inside Yourself, the brand new mindfulness program at Google. He was speaking at Spirit Rock with Jack Cornfield one evening. So I asked Meng, how someone becomes a mindfulness teacher at Google. And he invited me to apply for the Search Inside Yourself teacher training. So I applied for and received another scholarship, partly because I had zero money because I was a monk for so long. And in one year, I became an official instructor for the program. That also gave me the reputable training, templates, and certification to help people be mindful at work. So New Ventures West and Search Inside Yourself were both$10,000 programs in which I saw the world's, I saw what the world's most premier secular mindfulness teachers were teaching in a variety of industries and workplaces. I saw the teachings that were being taught in a variety of industries. And I'm super grateful for the generous scholarships that they gave me. And they were both really expensive at$10,000 each. They were both in-person trainings, which made logistics really challenging. I had to take a lot of time off work. The trainings were limited to one or two years, and the lead teachers didn't offer personalized support, it was all just group training. Both used certain kinds of language and frameworks, but offered no new groundbreaking wisdom. These practices of mindfulness and emotional intelligence are really quite simple. In retrospect, these expensive training programs boiled down to two things. Their teaching templates gave me the accepted and engaging structures I needed, and their accredited certifications opened up new doors that gave me the credibility I needed. So templates and accredited certification. These two things helped springboard my confidence and ultimately my career teaching mindfulness. So grateful to everyone in those programs, I was now ready to leave Spirit Rock to begin teaching mindfulness in the real world. So that's how I learned it. These templates and credentials. Here's how you can use it today. In terms of templates, I recommend a book called A Clinician's Guide to Teaching Mindfulness. It provides templates, techniques, and tools for teaching mindfulness and meditation, not just in clinical settings. And there's the book Learn to Teach Meditation and Mindfulness, which also covers the same. You can also utilize the MBI TAC that I mentioned earlier with detailed breakdowns of high-quality mindfulness teachings. You can also study the Google program, Search Inside Yourself. I have an online course of it.com. It's the only place you can find it. And so you can find it in our courses area. Some people study it and have said that their teachings are inspired by the Mindfulness Program at Google. Most people find that the best options for them are to either download our own Done For You curriculum with 15 hours worth of monetizable teaching scripts, slides, teacher guidebooks, and student handbooks. In other words, I already have a full curriculum you can use and just download and modify it however you want. Or you can become certified through our own mindfulness meditation teacher certification, which is also internationally accredited now. It's endorsed by the world's top teachers. Takes 80 hours of self-paced online study and practice. It offers two to six hours per week of optional personalized support from me and our senior teachers. And it offers premium mindfulness teaching templates that I mentioned earlier and gives you lifetime access to everything at a fraction of the price of the other programs. So that's how you can use this today. The templates and the credentials. Now let's talk about the sixth key aspect of teaching mindfulness. How to lead guided meditations with authenticity and creativity. Here's how I learned it. So with newfound certifications, teaching templates, and now I had a beautiful fiance who I later married and am in love with to this day, I was ready to leave Spirit Rock Meditation Center, or what Jack Cornfield referred to as my halfway house between the monastery and normal lay life, um, so that I could try teaching mindfulness and meditation full time. So I posted my new certification credentials on LinkedIn. Um and a new startup found me on LinkedIn pretty quickly and messaged me saying, you know, do you want to teach mindfulness in healthcare? I thought, sure. So the CE. CEO of Well Brain Healthcare invited me to tea and check my intentions for teaching mindfulness to see whether my intention was based in a sense of compassion or not.

SPEAKER_01: 1:00:13

Sorry, my puppy just got home, so I had to welcome puppy.

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Hi, puppy. And Wellbrain was fantastic. They hired me to write and record hundreds of evidence-based mindfulness meditations that doctors could use to prescribe to their patients suffering from anxiety, depression, addiction, and chronic pain. I had never done anything like that before, so it felt like a steep learning curve, to say the least. I had to learn how to write meditations for guiding them verbally for speaking, which is very different from writing for someone to read. I taught myself how to write introductions to meditations, segue into different parts of a meditation, make meditations relevant for certain feelings, emotions, and outcomes, and write inspiring conclusions and calls to action. Everything was evidence-based. All my practices now continue to be evidence-based. And I was inspired by many teachers' books and meditation recordings that I found on places like Insight, Timer, DharmaSeed.org, and YouTube. I typically follow this general sequence. Welcome them to the guided meditation, introduce the topic and intention, remind them that mindfulness is about noticing what's here rather than forcing anything. Begin with grounding into the body, focus on the breath or a physical sensation, invite awareness of whatever the main topic is about, notice what comes up, practice gentle awareness, allowance, non-judgment, caring curiosity, segue into self-compassion or loving kindness, and conclude with an intention, a brief summary, and further steps. So the more I practice writing these meditations and recording them, the more I realize that there's actually no rules to guiding mindfulness meditations. As long as you invite gentle awareness of moment-to-moment experience, you can be as creative and playful as you want. Next, I had to learn how to record meditations. So I bought a simple USB mic, found a comfy quiet spot in my closet with soft surfaces, downloaded free audio recording software, and uploaded the recordings to a shareable folder in Google Drive. It's really helpful for me to meditate myself in a dark closet before recording. I can't emphasize this enough. The more present you are, the more effective your meditations will be when you guide them for others. So I would ground in my body, open my heart to the people who I'm wanting to help, and allow my energy to be as natural and heartfelt as possible. I would press record on my computer once, and record myself practicing saying each line until it felt right and heartfelt. And then I would continue to the next line after that, knowing that an audio editor would be able to clean it all up later. I could mess up a hundred times, it doesn't matter. And I wouldn't have to worry about getting it all right in one take. In terms of editing, I outsourced it to an audio editor on Upwork and Fiverr and at very affordable rates. The hardest part of the process for me was listening to my own voice in the recording. I would cringe at hearing my own voice. I also quickly learned what sounded right, what felt like me, what pacing made sense, and to get a sense of what other people thought of my meditations, I posted some of my own guided meditations on Insight Timer, an online site, an app where hundreds of people listened to them and gave unsolicited feedback. And I quickly got a sense for how I could improve certain parts, which meditations people resonated with. Sharing my own meditations in my own voice led to keynote speeches and invitations to speak at medical conferences around the country. It also led to job offers and a newfound sense of confidence that I could help a lot of people in a way that felt truly aligned with my values. After a couple years, I was ready to start my own mindfulness business. So, um, in terms of leading guided meditations, that's how I learned it, and here's how you can use it today. When we lead meditations, it's important for us to find our own voice. Sometimes people try to sound like people who they like listening to, but that's their voice. It's not your voice. People will sense whether you're speaking authentically or not. It's really helpful to meditate for a while, empathize with people you're wanting to help, and speak from the heart, from a gentle, embodied place, like I am right now. In other words, let's get out of our own heads and into our bodies and our hearts. And remember that mindfulness is not brainfulness, it's not headfulness. The mind encapsulates our whole sensory apparatus, including our head, our heart, and our body. So if we want to guide a mindfulness meditation, it's helpful if we guide it using our whole being, not just our head. In my opinion, the best way to deepen our ability to guide meditations authentically and creatively is by meditating a lot, being comfortable in our own skin, and sensing into our own heartfelt presence. The best way to meditate a lot is by going on meditation retreats where that's all you do for a day, two days, ten days, or three months at a time, like I did when I was a monk. And that's really where 90% of my meditation guidance comes from. My own presence that I cultivated through these experiences on silent retreats. So if you haven't done many or any meditation retreats, I highly suggest getting some on your calendar. You can do them freely or paid at various retreat centers, or you can create one at your own home. So that's how you can lead meditations authentically and creatively. So let's talk about the seventh key aspect of teaching mindfulness. Simple trauma-sensitive mindfulness methods to ensure safety. Here's how I learned it. So, learning about my mindfulness teachings in healthcare, a well-regarded nonprofit invited me to co-lead a mindfulness meditation retreat for urban teens in the rural mountains, taking kids from the city to the mountains to meditate on retreat. I thought it'd be a nice relaxing time amidst the trees and the birds. But about 30 teens from nearby cities came, many of whom brought their unresolved trauma with them. Some teens suffered physical abuse, recent loss of parents, sexual abuse, severe depression. And our retreat staff had no therapists, no counselors, no doctors, and no patient, no parents. Just me and a few other meditation teachers tasked with helping these teens bring gentle awareness to their experience and to their bodies where trauma happens to live. Trauma lives in our bodies. And I felt super inadequate to deal with anything too intense. So I quickly felt overwhelmed by fear. So how do I teach mindfulness and meditation in a way that won't re-trigger or overwhelm these teens? So fortunately, my amazing meditation co-teachers gave me some invaluable tips. I had to find language that was gentle and encouraging. I didn't want to force these teens to do anything that they didn't want to do. I gave them some options or practices that they could try. I offered extra time for them to ask questions or to share their concerns. And I emphasized self-compassion, tenderness, softening of the body, inviting a sense of care and ease with whatever was coming up. Fortunately, no one ever felt too overwhelmed or got re triggered, but I felt like I was walking on eggshells. Driving home from that experience, I found myself bawling, purging tears, and the fear that I had of accidentally harming any of those teams, teens, with overwhelming or re triggering meditations. I had to learn about trauma sensitivity to better prepare for the possibility of waking a tiger from someone's past. So that's how I learned the importance of trauma sensitivity. Here's how you can use it today. It's important to note that trauma-sensitive mindfulness is not the same thing as trauma-focused mindfulness. Most of us are not therapists who may focus on people's trauma, but many of us are simply compassionate people who want to share mindfulness with others and be sensitive to the possibility of trauma in them. So we might give people a heads up that mindfulness is not a substitute for therapy, that we may be doing practices that bring gentle awareness to physical sensations, and that if it feels unsafe or overwhelming, they can back off and do something else. We can give people a few options for practicing mindfulness. We don't want to force anyone to do anything. Or reading Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine on healing trauma. Or taking our own trauma sensitive mindfulness trainings at mindfulnessexercises.com. It's also within our mindfulness teacher certification program. And so that we can help keep our students safe within their window of tolerance. So that's how you can use trauma sensitive mindfulness tips today. Now let's talk about the eighth key aspect of teaching mindfulness. Insights from successful mindfulness teachers on their top ingredients for the success that they've had in their careers. Here's how I learned it. So when I started forming my own business to teach mindfulness and meditation, I relied on the certifications and teaching templates that I had picked up from my previous training to increase my confidence and credibility. I created a website, mindfulnessercises.com, and showed that I was certified from accredited training programs, and I used my new teaching templates as basic structures and outlines to create my new paid offerings. I experimented asking new students and clients to pay in different ways. I asked people to pay by donation. I tried asking people to pay within a very large pricing window. I offered premium prices for higher tier offerings, and I also offered scholarships to people in need. And they would tell me, you know, what they can afford, why they want this training, how they would use it, what their experience level is, etc. And they all worked to different varying degrees, and different people use those different pricing models. I also offered to teach mindfulness at large companies for free, which I recommend for people starting out, in exchange for feedback and assessment data, statistics, survey results, testimonials, photos of me teaching that I could use for marketing, referrals, and consideration for paid contracts over long periods of time if they liked me and if I was helping them. So this got my foot in the door to working with several well-known clients, both individuals and groups, online and in person, and it added to the popularity of my website. But I was doing all of this alone, which really took a toll. I wasn't sure how much of the feedback I received was genuine. I didn't have a safe, vulnerable place where I could try new meditations or be creative with my own teachings. I wasn't maintaining a network with other mindfulness teachers or wellness professionals. I wasn't keeping up on the latest trends, techniques, or teaching opportunities. I started practicing mindfulness from the lens of a strategic teacher. Like, how can I use this to teach? Rather than as a sincere practitioner. And my mental health started declining, even though I was a mindfulness teacher. And then I remembered how my mindfulness teacher said that they became successful, they supported each other. If you want to go fast, you can go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. Just like with mindfulness practice, where community is everything, mindfulness teaching takes a village. The senior monks at my monasteries would often gather with each other, taking turns, sharing how their practice and their teachings are going. The senior teachers at Spirit Rock Meditation Center would often gather with each other, often, taking turns sharing how their practice and teachings are going. Also, they all said that that's their number one ingredient to long-term growth and impact. Community and teaching practice opportunities. So, with this in mind, I knew that community would need to be a big part of my own business at mindfulnessexercises.com. So I invited thousands of like-minded wellness professionals to form virtual community with me. And so together we created Connect, an online social community where wellness professionals can connect with each other, find accountability buddies, and find mindfulness teaching support and opportunities. A community for supporting each other and being able to find new ways to teach and finding new opportunities to teach. So we created teaching practice opportunities and created a formal recurring space on Zoom where people can practice teaching mindfulness or leading meditations and receive personalized feedback from a senior teacher and from each other, as well as learning about third-party teaching opportunities. We also created Wednesday QA sessions with me and a senior teacher and other senior teachers. That includes live group coaching calls with me and our team to deepen your mindfulness, talk about your mindfulness teaching goals, and support your ability to teach mindfulness and even help you with your business endeavors. We also created monthly calls with renowned mindfulness teachers, with people like Gabor Mate, Byron Cady, Richie Davidson, Rick Hansen, Judd Brewer, David Trelevin, Susan Kaiser Greenland, the world's top teachers. And we meet with them live every month and talk about teaching mindfulness, and we get to ask them questions. And inside our own community, my own mindfulness teaching opportunities increased as well, allowing me to teach more often to more kinds of people, and allowed other people in our community to do that as well. The quality of my teachings blossomed as a result, and I learned where the edges of my understanding were and where my blind spots were, and I would get a lot of great feedback. Feedback about my teachings from the community was always invaluable. There were always new things where we can learn from each other if we're open to it. Our mindfulness teaching community have increased our teaching abilities, our professional networks, and most importantly, our positive impact that we have on others. Our community happens to include people from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or the EPA, Dell Computers, Canadian Olympic Teams, Kaiser Permanente Healthcare, the Veterans Department, Duke University, Tesla, you name it, which opened up a lot more mindfulness teaching opportunities than I could have ever expected. So that's how I learned this important aspect of community and teaching opportunities. So for you, you can find an existing mindfulness teaching community or you can start your own. You can ask local mindfulness teachers in your area how they connect with other mindfulness teachers. Introduce yourself at meditation centers and wellness groups, share your intentions, search for mindfulness-based book clubs, sangas, or coaching programs. You can ask your local university, college, or community center. You can start your own private Facebook group or build a website with the forum. Or you can join our established mindfulness teaching community in our mindfulness exercises teacher certification program where you can practice teaching, learn about new opportunities, and ask anything you want related to mindfulness, mindfulness teaching, or building your business. You can connect with renowned wellness professionals like Gabor Mate, Byron Cady, Rick Hansen, Meg James, Corey Muscara, like seriously, all the world's best teachers, and learn from them and interact with them. You can connect with renowned wellness professionals like Susan Kaiser Greenland, Michael Taft, Sarah May, Conway, Mark Coleman, and many, many other people, and also get lifetime access to all of our workshop recordings as well. So that's how you can use these techniques and ingredients for long-term success today. Okay, so so far in this presentation, we've covered simple steps for increasing your confidence and credibility, teaching mindfulness and meditation. We talked about the foundation of all good mindfulness teachings, how to overcome imposter syndrome, teaching mindfulness and meditation, fundamentals for introducing mindfulness to anyone, three techniques to make mindfulness practical and relevant, the top templates and credentials used by reputable wellness professionals, how to lead guided meditations with authenticity and creativity, simple trauma-sensitive mindfulness methods for keeping people safe, and what successful mindfulness teachers say is their number one ingredient for success. And I've shared all of these lessons from my own journey teaching mindfulness to people in prisons, family programs, coaching programs, corporations, healthcare companies, retreat centers, and even had opportunities to support the US government, Olympic teams, and more. And that's how you know this process works. And it'll work for you. After all, meeting myself with compassion helped me teach others with compassion. Shifting my mindset from fear to service enabled me to take the first step. Focusing on simple experiential exercises allowed me to reach anyone. Listening to what people wanted made my teachings more impactful. Using templates and credentials blossomed my career and my confidence. When I found my voice, I impacted many more people with my meditations. Being sensitive to the possibility of trauma made my teachings more safe. And practicing teaching in a supportive community fueled my personal and professional growth. Can you see how knowing how to teach mindfulness can give you the freedom to pursue the business or the life you want? Can you see how learning to use these eight key aspects can increase your influence, your impact, and even your income? In short, can you see why teaching mindfulness or knowing how to help people be present, caring, and resilient is a skill worth having. And this skill may just be the bridge between where you are and wherever you want to go. It has been for me. Great. So now here's what I know. Even if we had a full day together instead of just 90 minutes, it's going to be hard, almost impossible for me to give you all the things that I could give you. No matter how good anyone is, one short presentation isn't going to change your life. You need more than that. And while everything I've given you today is valuable, it's just the tip of the iceberg. And if you like what you've shared, if you if you like what I've shared with you so far, I think you're gonna love what I have for you next. So before doing this presentation today, I was faced with one of two choices. The first option is to part ways with you and then hope that on your own you can figure it out. Or my second option, I could take you, right? I could take a more active role and responsibility for your success to create a win-win situation. I chose the second option, just to go together, to take action, to support you. So the result of working on this for eight plus years, everything I know from reaching over 20 million people online and in person, and everything I know about teaching mindfulness from a decade and growing, it's a great pleasure to introduce you to our Mindfulness Meditation Teacher certification. With this certification, you'll wield all eight key aspects that I've shared with you today as a credentialed teacher of mindfulness and meditation, increasing your influence, impact, and income. So here's what you're gonna receive: practical mindfulness trainings to deepen your own mindfulness with our best evidence-based methods for enhancing your quality of presence. Mindset training to overcome self-doubt, fear of judgment, and imposter syndrome, bite-sized videos and personalized coaching opportunities to alleviate any worries you have around teaching mindfulness. You'll also get our self-paced video course, Mindfulness Teaching Fundamentals, with over 20 bite-sized video trainings on the core principles of teaching mindfulness, online and in person, with groups or individuals, everything about starting a session, sequencing practices and teachings, experiences, concepts, neuroscience, etc. We'll also give you training on how to relate mindfulness teaching fundamentals to your students, your clients, or your patients in a way that's authentic to you. We give you a downloadable, writable PDF workbook to help you apply what you're learning in the course to your unique situation, your career, your goals, the people you want to help. Also give you optional teaching templates that you can use to create your own monetized teachings from, where I give you all the best frameworks and scripts, slides, and curriculum that I've used for creating wow experiences for my paid clients and creating workshops and classes, coaching programs. So you can have these optional templates if you want. We'll also give you a self paced video course on how to guide mindfulness meditations. The most practical trainings for leading a wide Variety of evidence-based meditations that increase presence, care, and resilience in the people you want to help. We also give you trauma-sensitive mindfulness trainings from the world's top experts and recommendations and tips and methods that help you keep your meditation safe. These trainings are from me, David Trelevin, Will It Be Britain from Brown University, Christopher Germer, who co-founded the Mindful Self-Compassion program, and more. Also, give you our online community spaces with teaching opportunities and the Connect platform and safe spaces where we can all learn, practice, teach, and network in, and get the personalized community and training with Gabor Mate and Rick Hanson and Byron Cady, Richie Davidson, and pract um sessions where we can practice teaching and receive feedback. And of course, you'll receive your internationally accredited mindfulness meditation teacher certification, which is approved and accepted by the world's top companies, healthcare institutions, coaching programs, yoga studios, wellness centers, sports teams, and even the US government. A lot of people ask, how long does it take to certify? It only takes about 80 self-paced hours, including 40 hours of personal meditation practice, 10 hours of reviewing our online training videos, and about 15 hours to complete the PDF workbook that helps you relate the teachings to your goals, and about 15 hours of teaching practice. What do I need to certify? You need to submit records of your meditation hours, your completed PDF workbook, and at least 20 minutes of audio or video of yourself talking about the basic principles of mindfulness in your own words. What are the prerequisites for registering? We require heartfelt compassion for helping others and some experience practicing mindfulness. People ask, do I need to be certified to teach mindfulness? Most professional settings do want or require internationally accredited training, which this is. And they require you to use their brand on any templates or curriculum that they give you, not allowing you to personalize it with your own logo or brand name or name. Most people can't afford all this, which is why I created this program for less than a thousand dollars. Um we offer lifetime access to everything, less than 50 people per optional Zoom call, open to anyone wanting to sincerely help others, with 14 hours of optional personalized calls per month, with no required in-person trainings, no added fees or dues, with optional teaching templates that you can brand and create your own monetized workshops and classes with. She's very satisfied with the program. We'll also add another special bonus if you register today. We'll give you 300 mindfulness worksheets that you can download for deepening your mindfulness and also share them with others to help other people increase their mindfulness. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. We have a whole library of mindfulness meditation teaching resources for you at your disposal whenever you want to download them with lifetime access to everything. Hassan Rafik, who's the Chief Operating Officer of Diversity at Facebook, took our program saying that Sean's the most thoughtful, courageous, and inclusive teacher I've had in a long time. If you want to start your mindfulness teaching journey in a simple, practical, and meaningful way, uh he recommends speaking with me, and you'll be amazed at the impact. Wellness professionals have used this certification in a wide variety of professional contexts, largely because it's internationally accredited by both the CPD or the Continuing Professional Development Certification Service, as well as the International Mindfulness and Meditation Alliance. We're also authorized to use the Mindfulness-based intervention teaching assessment criteria, or the MBITAC, developed by the University of Oxford. So I have a question for you. What would you do as a certified mindfulness meditation teacher? You could add certified MMT to your email byline, add the certification to your LinkedIn profile, add the image of your certification online, add the credentials to your resume, and include it in official training. Sorry, include the official training in your business proposals and frame the certificate in your office or studio. If you became a certified mindfulness meditation teacher, how would your life improve? How would your students' lives improve? So if you register today, we'll also give you white-labeled mindfulness ebooks, emails, and digital trainings, detailed mindfulness teacher training guides, and access to me for feedback and guidance on anything related to your mindfulness practice, your teachings, or your business. Sarah shared that the program changed her life for the better as she teaches mindfulness to physicians, saying this is an important part of her journey, and she's a lot more confident incorporating these ideas and teaching mindfulness to physicians to overcome burnout. So our mindfulness meditation teacher certification program gives you the guidance to deepen your own mindfulness, complete mindset trainings to alleviate doubt and worry, step-by-step trainings on how to teach the fundamentals of mindfulness, lifetime access to all resources, live calls and video recordings, practical methods for guiding meditations in your own voice, interactions with world-renowned mindfulness teachers, optional teaching templates, slides, and curriculum for developing monetized offerings, online community with teaching practice opportunities and support, trauma-sensitive mindfulness trainings, 200 guided meditation scripts, 300 mindfulness worksheets, white-labeled ebooks, emails, and digital trainings, detailed teacher training guides, access to me, and international accreditation with no refuel, no referral, no renewal fees or hidden dues. So our program offers you high-level concepts, frameworks, examples, and templates, and all the nuts and bolts you need to teach mindfulness with confidence and credibility. Christopher Germer, the co-founder of the Mindful Self-Compassion program with Kristen Neff, said that it's a privilege to contribute to this mindfulness teacher program as a guest teacher. The warm and inviting atmosphere of the classes nourishes and reflects everything that is taught. This is mindfulness training in the truest sense. So, what is it worth to you to create long-term impact on other people's well-being? Other certification programs cost$10,000 each or$5,000 each, and usually don't offer personalized guidance from the lead teacher. Our limited time offer of$9.97 gives you everything you need. We have low overhead, which means that we can offer this at a more affordable rate. Hundreds of people watching this week, but we can only accommodate about 15 more people, maybe less, depending on how many people have registered in the past few hours. So this opportunity will expire soon before we close registration and then reopen it. And when it returns, the price may be 50%, maybe 100% higher than it is now. Tira said that the certification program breathed new life into her practice and in her confidence in leading her own mindfulness classes. She can't recommend this enough. Yeah, we're really grateful for Tira and her practice and her teaching. So please, if you are wanting to join, please join now before we close registration because you can get a significant amount of mentorship directly from me and our guest teachers. We do close registration when we re when we reach capacity, sometimes for months at a time, so that our guest teachers and I aren't spread too thin. We want to make sure that every student in this program gets all the time and attention they need to certify and help others with care, confidence, and credibility. So please register now before uh it closes soon. Um we'll give you everything you need to teach mindfulness and meditation. Um yeah, we we give you a lot. If you're interested in the 50 free meditation scripts, you can email code gratitude to support at mindfulness exercises.com and we'll reply within one or two days with those scripts for you. So thank you for um listening. I hope this is valuable for you, whether you register or not. Um, but I do look forward to seeing those of you who want to take a step forward. Um, and I'll see you inside the certification program. Thank you so much, and I look forward to um reviewing all your messages and responding um personally and seeing you inside the certification program. Thank you so much and take good care. Bye.