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You’ve practiced for years.You keep thinking you should be teaching this.
Find out if you’re ready to teach — start here
Question 1 of 10
How many years have you maintained a personal mindfulness practice?
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For 2,600 years, these practices have passed one way only: from teacher to student, “from warm hand to warm hand, and from one heart to another.”
Now Tara Brach & Jack Kornfield — key teachers in the lineage behind modern mindfulness — will train you, mentor you, and certify you to take the teacher's seat. For clinicians, therapists, coaches, and healers who feel the second calling underneath the first: you're not just meant to practice this. You're meant to teach it. Open to all — what matters here is not your years of experience, but your desire and commitment to teach.
“You are the next step. You are going to be the lineage for the people that follow you.”Jack Kornfield, to every new cohort of teachers
Tara Brach tells the story of a woman at the end of her life. A good woman. A responsible woman. A woman who spent decades taking care of everyone around her.
Her last words to her daughter were these:
Read that again. A whole life. And that was the summary.
If you're a therapist, a physician, a coach, a nurse, a chaplain — you have met this woman a thousand times. She's in your waiting room right now. Tara has a name for what she was carrying: the trance of unworthiness — the quiet, constant conviction that something is wrong with me, running underneath the anxiety, the perfectionism, the drinking, the achieving, the apologizing.
It is so distinctly epidemic in our culture that when Jack and other Western teachers asked the Dalai Lama how he works with self-hatred, he was confused by the question. Finally he answered:
We have a word for it. We have a waiting list for it.
And here is the part nobody says out loud at the clinical conferences: the people treating the trance are often in it themselves. You hold space all day for other people's pain and go home with no one holding yours. You prescribe presence you haven’t tasted in days. You know the documented greatest regret of the dying — “I didn't live true to myself. I lived according to the expectations of others” — and some nights you wonder if it is true for you.
There is another way to do this work. It's older than psychology — and, as you're about to see, it's where the psychology came from.
But it doesn't spread through journal articles or treatment plans. For 2,600 years it has spread one way: someone teaches it. Someone takes the seat at the front of the room. The question this page asks is simple: what if that someone is you?
This is not only about becoming a teacher. It is about becoming someone whose presence, clarity, and steadiness reshape the rooms you already stand in.
Your own practice deepens. The doubt that whispers “who am I to teach this?” begins to quiet, not because you silence it, but because you learn to meet it with compassion and evidence. You sleep better. You listen more fully. You become less carried by the weather of your own mind.
You become someone with a recognized certification, a practicum course you have already taught, and the language to offer mindfulness in clinical, corporate, educational, or community settings. You can add a new revenue stream, deepen an existing practice, or step into a role you have been waiting to claim.
Every room you teach becomes a little more sane. Your students carry what they learn into their families, clinics, schools, and organizations. The lineage does not end with you — it moves through you, reaching people and places you may never meet.
Physicians, professors, coaches, counselors, teachers — in clinics, classrooms, boardrooms, and VA hospitals. In their own words.
“This program is, hands down, the single most valuable education I've ever received in my life. Receiving such ancient and precious wisdom from contemporary masters in the company of like-hearted and like-minded individuals was a profoundly transformative experience.”
“MMTCP training allowed me to realize a dream of serving veterans beyond the medical clinic where I practice primary care. The VA has kindly funded me to teach Mindfulness for Chronic Pain and Mindfulness for Women Veterans. The training I received has also made me a better doctor. I am forever grateful!”
“MMTCP has opened up a whole new career path for me—teaching mindfulness meditation and creativity. This is leading to other teaching and mentoring opportunities that appear to be in demand. This small contribution I am making toward growing peace and happiness in the world has given me a tremendous sense of fulfillment and belonging.”
“My two years in MMTCP have been life altering. I utilize the meditations, content, and teachings on a daily basis, not only to keep myself grounded but also in my interactions with my elementary school students, their parents, my colleagues, friends, and family. I teach mindfulness meditation in my 4th grade classroom on a daily basis!”
“MMTCP gave me a full range of interventions in my coaching practice. I include mindfulness practices in all team developments, leadership training, and coaching. Personally, it has helped me in my own awakening and healing process.”
“In the classroom, these teachings have been the most important education of my entire professional career. They are more vital than anything I can think of in my previous education as a teacher—over a period of 30 years—to how I instruct and lead these students.”
“MMTCP has deepened my understanding of mindfulness and has helped me show my spiritual side in the corporate world. I have enhanced my leadership workshops with mindfulness exercises and run mindfulness workshops for big companies.”
“MMTCP grounded me more deeply in my own practice and both solidified and expanded my teaching of the practice. It enriched my understanding and strengthened my confidence as a mindfulness teacher. I would not be the teacher I am without MMTCP training.”
“The MMTCP training helped me to move gracefully and thoughtfully from full-time employment in higher education to retirement. I teach mindfulness meditation now on a part-time basis, and it is a real joy and privilege to do so.”
Wondering if this path is yours? Two minutes will tell you.
Am I Ready? Take the quizThe question nearly everyone arrives with. A short guide from Jack and Tara on what qualifies a teacher, what the evidence actually shows, and how to begin with steadiness. Add your email and it opens right here.
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You will not leave with a few new techniques for your sessions — though you'll have those too. You will leave as something you are not today: a certified mindfulness meditation teacher.
Someone who takes the teacher's seat. Who guides a room into silence. Who leads the 6-week course at the clinic, the hospital, the school, the retreat center — or builds a teaching practice of their own. Who sits one-on-one with a student, not a patient, and mentors their path. Therapy will always be part of what you do. Teaching is a different act: “sculpting the silence”, guiding a practice, transmitting a lineage.
Why would a working clinician take that seat? Joanna Macy — one of the elders who has taught in this program — asks the question that answers it:
A teacher reaches the room. And Jack names what happens to the one who teaches: Your therapy practice grows as your mindfulness develops. And so do you! “You grow so much by teaching, because when people ask you about these things, you have to get quiet and listen to your own heart.”
“That's the greatest joy of teaching,” he says — “to see that there's something beautiful in them and place these timeless teachings in their hearts so that they blossom and grow."
If what you want is only to sharpen your clinical toolkit, there are shorter courses for that. This program is for the one who has felt the second calling underneath the first — the one who is meant to teach.
And let's be equally clear about who belongs here: everyone. There is no required number of years on the cushion, no lineage pedigree to present, no level of attainment to prove. The doorway into this program was never your mindfulness résumé. It's your desire to teach — and your commitment to it: a daily practice you'll deepen inside the training, mentorship you'll show up for, and a course you'll actually teach before you're certified. As the faculty put it, what matters most is “your sincerity. When you really cultivate that sincere desire to point someone toward what these practices offer, there's a purity there that is so, so helpful.”
Trained as a Buddhist monk under the great master Ajahn Chah in a Thai forest monastery — 3:30 a.m. sittings, alms rounds through thousand-year-old villages, cobras on the walking path. He carried the practice into Cambodian refugee camps, where he watched the monk Maha Ghosananda — who lost nineteen family members to the Khmer Rouge — stand before 25,000 shattered refugees and chant: “Hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed.” They chanted it back through tears.
Then he came home, earned a PhD in clinical psychology, co-founded the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock, spent three decades convening teacher councils with the Dalai Lama, and wrote A Path with Heart. More than 40 of his 50+ years have been spent training teachers.
Ten years in an ashram before her Buddhist training. A PhD in clinical psychology — her dissertation tested mindfulness against CBT. Founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, author of Radical Acceptance and True Refuge, creator of the RAIN method now used by therapists all over the world. Her weekly talks reach millions.
She also says this — and it should be on the wall of every graduate program:
“The mind creates the abyss, and the heart crosses it.”
The mentorship program is led by our Mentor Director, Anne Cushman, and a team of mentors who regularly meet with Tara and Jack to help shape the mentor group curriculum and guide mentors in delivering the highest-quality experience to their students.
Anne Cushman (She/Her)Director of MentoringAnne has been integrating mindfulness, embodiment practices, and creative expression for over 35 years. She is a senior retreat teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, where she leads the yearlong Dharma Yoga Mindfulness training. She is the author of the memoir The Mama Sutra, the novel Enlightenment for Idiots, the mindful yoga book Moving Into Meditation, and the India pilgrimage guide From Here to Nirvana. Her essays on spiritual practice in daily life have appeared in the New York Times; Yoga Journal; O, The Oprah Magazine; Lion's Roar; Tricycle; and many other publications. She is currently deeply engaged with the MMTCP Mentor Leadership Team in building personal and organizational practices that promote equity and inclusion.
Dalila Bothwell (she/her)Mentor LeaderDalila Bothwell embraces a dharma-meditation practice centered on love for community, nature, justice, and 12-step recovery. Dalila is a graduate of the Spirit Rock Community Dharma Leaders program, formally educated in nutritional science and food studies, and was a director for New York Insight Meditation Center for nearly a decade. She has served various insight meditation communities throughout North America.
Solwazi Johnson (he/his)Mentor LeaderSolwazi teaches mindfulness meditation classes and leads meditation retreats and workshops across the U.S. and worldwide. He has been practicing mindfulness meditation for over 25 years, focusing on Vipassana since 2003. His practice has taken him to various countries, including Thailand, Myanmar, India, and South Africa. He graduated from Spirit Rock's Community Dharma Leaders' Training and its four-year Buddhist Retreat Teacher Training.
Debra Kerr (she/her)Mentor LeaderDebra Kerr is a graduate of Spirit Rock's Community Dharma Leaders program, and Sati Center's Buddhist Eco Chaplaincy Training. She is a Core Teacher at East Bay Meditation Center, where she also guides the Every Body Every Mind Sangha for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. Deb loves integrating Buddhist teachings with the more-than-human world. Her meditation practice is influenced by both Theravadan and Dzogchen teachings, and she is dedicated to using the tools of Buddhist practice to dismantle racism and other forms of oppression and exclusion.
Not a binder. A set of living methods — each one named, learnable, and proven in rooms full of real suffering. You won't just learn them. You'll be certified to teach them — to guide them out loud, in groups and one-on-one.
Tara's signature protocol for shame, anxiety, and self-judgment. You'll learn it, live it, and be trained to guide it — in groups and one-on-one.
Resourcing, pendulation, and the window of tolerance — in the lineage of Dan Siegel and Peter Levine. Because you already know the secret the meditation apps won't tell you: for some trauma survivors, closing their eyes and following the breath amplifies the terror. This program trains you for exactly those clients.
The working equation for chronic pain, illness, and grief. “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
The one-on-one mentoring method built on two deceptively simple questions: “What are you aware of?” and “Can you be with it?” Faculty describe it as “simple, and learnable… one of those that can't fail.”
Rick Hanson's science of turning fleeting states into permanent traits. The brain, he says, is “like Velcro for the bad but Teflon for the good” — and he will teach you, step by step, how to reverse that. “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”
The exact talk-construction formula behind hundreds of dharma talks — so the day you stand up in front of a room, your hands aren't shaking. (And if they are: “There are two types of speakers,” goes the Mark Twain line quoted in the training, “those who get nervous, and those who are liars.”)
Plus lovingkindness and compassion training, addiction and habit change, grief and loss, forgiveness, conflict, mindful prayer, and the craft of guiding meditation — what one faculty member calls “sculpting the silence.” And because this lineage teaches through the body, not just the mind, you'll train in embodied practice — qigong and mindful movement with masters Teja Bell and Jonathan Foust — for the students (and clients) who will never find the door through seated stillness. As Teja puts it: “It is truly a synthesis of world teachings… unavailable until really recent times.”
A teacher's first responsibility isn't inspiration. It's safety. Three commitments run through the entire training:
You'll know what to do when mindfulness meets trauma — because for some students it amplifies distress. Resourcing, pendulation, the window of tolerance, and the humility to refer: “we're training you to be mindfulness teachers who are sensitive to the presence of trauma.”
A full guest-faculty track on bias, culture, and accessibility — taught by teachers who lived the barriers. The standard, from the East Bay Meditation Center's policy: “All of us or none.” And the guiding question you'll carry: “Who is being left out, and how might we invite them in?”
A professional Code of Ethics, an alumni Ethics Council, and direct teaching on money, power, and boundaries — from Jack, who convened the Dalai Lama's teacher-ethics councils three decades ago. “If your boat is still tied to the shore… you're not living in integrity.”
Wondering if this path is yours? Two minutes will tell you.
Am I Ready? Take the quizA program for helping professionals who want to bring evidence-based mindfulness into their work—whatever their starting point.
Counselors, psychologists, social workers, and clinicians integrating holistic, evidence-based techniques to enhance client outcomes—and to sustain themselves in the work.
Diversifying services with mindfulness groups, private sessions, and trauma-informed coaching.
Physicians and nurses bringing mindfulness to patients—and to their own resilience in high-burnout settings.
A free online open house hosted by the MMTCP program administrator: how the 18 months actually work, time commitment, mentorship, tuition and payment plans, and the application process — with time for your questions. Register to attend live or get the recording.
Tap any module to see what it covers. From the curriculum overview for prospective students. Content, modules, and order are subject to change up to the start of the program.
Every module in detail — what's covered, the practices taught, and how mentorship and the practicum weave through the 18 months.
No application required. Content and order are subject to change before the program begins.
Eighteen months, fully online, built around a monthly rhythm a working professional can actually keep. And unlike programs that hand you a video library and a certificate, the hours here are weighted toward what changes you: live time with the founders, and live time with a mentor who knows your name.
Start to certification, fully online
Jack, Tara & guest specialists
A small group and a mentor who knows you
Practice partners you teach with all the way through
Core teachings on your own schedule
Design and teach your own course in year 2
The whole cohort — thousands of practitioners across 70 countries — convenes live with Jack and Tara to open the container, set intentions, and begin the path together.
Each month brings on-demand teachings from Jack and Tara (25–30 hours across the program) that you take on your own schedule — plus 12–14 one-hour live sessions with Jack, Tara, or both over the 18 months, and live sessions with guest specialists in neuroscience, trauma, racial justice, and addiction. Mentor groups begin in March 2027; your small mentor group and peer practice partners meet regularly — 34 hours of live time with your dedicated mentor across the journey.
You stop studying teaching and start doing it: between January and May 2028, you design your own course and teach it — with mentor feedback — before you're certified. You graduate having done the thing.
At the end of July 2028, the cohort gathers live with Jack and Tara once more to complete the training, mark the transition, and receive what the whole program has been building toward: your certification — and Jack's charge to every graduating cohort.
Tara's own doctoral research concluded that “meditation alone is not enough… it so much needs community and support to really take root.” The method doesn't work without the container. So the program is the container:
The Buddha's attendant Ananda once asked whether spiritual friendship was half of the holy life. The Buddha corrected him: “Not so, Ananda. It is the whole of the holy life.”
Say it out loud. Every clinician considering this program hears the same voice: I'm not enlightened. I still lose my temper. I still check my phone too much. I'm a therapist, not a guru.
Good. That voice is the qualification.
Jack describes his own doubt as he began teaching…
He raises the doubts he had when he first began to teach — “'I don't know if I should take the teaching role. I'm still unripe myself!.' And I won't even ask for a hand raise on how many have had self-doubts like this one” — and then dismantles it: “It’s simple…Teach what you know..”
“When you communicate — 'I've done this, and you can too, and it's really changed me' — they'll get it.”
And for the question you're afraid a client will ask — the one you won't know how to answer? The training's instruction is almost scandalous in its simplicity: “Don't-know mind is a very highly regarded and celebrated state in Zen tradition. So you show yourself as the master that you are: 'I don't know.'”
Still afraid nobody will show up to your first class? Suzuki Roshi — one of the great teachers of the twentieth century — sometimes taught a single student, and said: “I feel so grateful that anyone will sit with me.” Trudy Goodman's one student on a Santa Monica beach became InsightLA — now serving an entire city.
In their own words
A free guide to read, a lecture to watch, a practice to sit with, a short reflection to check your gut, and the full syllabus if you want to see every corner of the 18 months. Take what's useful; leave the rest.
A 12-page guide on evidence, screening, and the practices Western psychology misses.
Get the Free Guide →Watch Jack or Tara teach live and feel the style of the training.
Watch the Lecture →A guided practice you can use today and learn to share with others.
Listen Now →A 2-minute readiness check. No bar to clear — every level can begin.
Take the Assessment →The full arc on one page: modules, mentorship, and practicum.
See the Syllabus →The program is open to all. What matters is less your mindfulness experience and more your desire and commitment to teach — the 18 months exist precisely to build both your practice and your teaching, with mentors beside you the whole way. The cohort spans every decade of adult life: practicing physicians, therapists, mid-career coaches, and retirees moving gracefully out of full-time work. In Jack's words: “yes, you might be a little uncertain in your Practicum as you start, but when you communicate, 'I've done this, and you can too' — they'll get it.” Still unsure? Take the readiness assessment →
75% of people fear public speaking — the training is built for that reality, not around it. You'll learn the PARTS model for constructing any talk (the formula one faculty member credits with easing “so much anxiety… around speaking”), practice in small peer groups first, and teach your practicum course with mentor feedback before you're certified. Confidence isn't a prerequisite here. It's an outcome.
The structured content averages roughly one to two hours a week across the 18 months, on a monthly rhythm designed for working professionals across 70 countries and every time zone: the teachings on your own schedule, the live sessions and mentor group on the calendar. Add your own daily practice — which asks less than you fear. As the training itself teaches, consistency beats heroics: “a very, very wide back door,” every day, no matter what.
No — and the training is explicit about the line. Teaching meditation is a distinct role from clinical treatment: “we're not training you to be trauma therapists… we're training you to be mindfulness teachers who are sensitive to the presence of trauma.” For clinicians this cuts both ways: you'll know exactly where teaching ends and treatment begins, and you'll hold a credential for each.
Tuition is $7,700 ($1,000 off the regular $8,700 through September 10, 2026), and a payment plan spreads it into 18 monthly payments of $452 — roughly the cost of a weekly latte habit and one client session per month.
Legally, no — meditation teaching is unregulated, which is precisely the problem. Anyone can claim the title; almost no one can show the formation behind it. What students, clinics, and employers actually check is who trained you, for how long, against what standard: here, Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield, 18 months, a supervised practicum, a professional code of ethics, and a certificate from the Awareness Training Institute and the Greater Good Science Center. Graduates go on to teach in clinics and hospitals, companies, schools, prisons, retreat centers, and private practices — your practicum course becomes your first real offering, and Jack teaches an entire session on right relationship with money and charging for teaching. Incomes vary widely by setting and ambition; what the training gives you is the competence and credential to build with.
The practices come from a 2,600-year Buddhist lineage — and they're taught, in Jack's words, as “part of humanity's heritage… They don't require you to join something or become something.” No spiritual background is required, no belief is asked of you, and the training explicitly teaches you to offer these practices in fully secular language for clinics, companies, and schools — or with spiritual depth for communities that welcome it. You choose the register; the training gives you both.
MBSR is a single 8-week protocol — a brilliant one, distilled from this very tradition after Jon Kabat-Zinn attended the founders' retreat. This is the source it was distilled from: the full breadth of the practices, plus 18 months of teacher formation — mentorship, practicum, trauma-sensitivity, ethics — rather than one curriculum to administer. And unlike a yoga teacher training, the focus here is the mind and heart: meditation, compassion practices, and the craft of guiding others through them (with mindful movement included, not centered).
No. And it's worth being honest about why that's the wrong measuring stick. CE courses maintain the credential you already have. This program grants you a new one: certification as a mindfulness meditation teacher — a second professional identity, not a line item on your current license. Eighteen months of formation in the tradition the interventions came from. It doesn't change what you can cite. It changes what you can transmit — and who you're qualified to be in front of a room.
You have a budget for maintaining your license. This is the other investment: the one in the instrument itself. You.
Reduced from $8,700 — save $1,000 when you enroll by September 10, 2026. Or 18 monthly payments of $452. Enrollment opens once every two years; the next cohort begins February 5, 2027.
And to the deeper hesitation — is this really possible for someone like me? — the tradition has held one answer for 2,600 years:
Payment plans are available.
The application takes 10–15 minutes. No fee to apply. You'll hear back within 5 business days.
Still weighing it up? Bring your questions to a free open house with the program team →
Wondering if this path is yours? Two minutes will tell you.
Am I Ready? Take the quizThese practices have crossed forests, oceans, empires, and refugee camps to reach you. Monks carried them out of burning monasteries. Teachers taught them to single students on empty beaches. Jack calls them “some of the most skillful and powerful practices in our human heritage… They're sometimes called the Great Medicine.” And they have always traveled one way only:
From warm hand to warm hand. From one heart to another.
Now Jack stands in front of every new cohort and says the sentence this entire page has been building toward:
The people you will teach — the anxious teenager, the burned-out nurse, the man who believes he is unforgivable, the woman in the hospital bed who thought something was wrong with her all her life — they are already on their way to you.
“You become,” Jack says, “midwives at the bedside of the world.”
The second rule is the program. The first rule is this button.
The application takes 10–15 minutes. No fee to apply. You'll hear back within 5 business days.
Not ready to apply? Start smaller:
Take the readiness assessment — see where you are on the path →