Mindfulness Training Institute - Australia and New Zealand
The Mindfulness Training Institute is a not-for-profit organisation committed to providing excellent and sustainable professional training in mindfulness-based approaches in Australia and New Zealand. It was established in 2014 by Dr Maura Kenny (MBCT lead), Timothea Goddard (MBSR lead) and Eva Papadopoulo (senior trainer).
The Institute has an Educational Advisory Committee consisting of senior national and international teachers, researchers and academics to ensure that the direction of the institute is in touch with world-wide best practice as well as having the ability to respond to local needs and conditions.
Why establish an Australasian institute for professional training?
Over the past 30 years there has been an explosion of interest in the use of mindfulness programs in the fields of health, education, business and community development. There are dangers and possibilities inherent in this rapid spread of mindfulness-based interventions into a wide variety of secular settings. The benefits include the possibility of people in mainstream settings getting access to a tradition of practice that invites an understanding of one's interior world, to train one's minds in a useful direction, and to thereby radically transform one's relationship to oneself, one's problems and life - in ways which are liberating. The dangers lie in the dilution of the tradition, so that it loses its integrity and power. The intervention will only be as good as the teacher who delivers it, and their grasp and embodiment of the practice in their own lives and teaching practice.
Out of this awareness, we have been motivated to develop a high quality, transformative and rigorous training experience for those wishing to develop these skills and knowledge locally. We have developed a training pathway which maintains strong connections with the contemplative traditions out of which MBPs have developed, and with the contemporary scientific exploration of mindfulness. In this way, we hope that the mindfulness programs offered in the region are efficacious, contextually relevant, ethical and evidence-based.
We hope that the training will offer a grounding in the relational, cognitive, emotional and body-based personal and professional development work necessary for good teaching.
