Mindfulness Instructor training in St. Louis.

Mindfulness is the practice of bringing intentional, non-judgmental attention to present-moment experience. As a contemplative tradition it has roots in Buddhist psychology going back twenty-five hundred years; as a secular practice in the modern West, mindfulness was systematized primarily through Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, developed at the University of Massachusetts in 1979 and now taught in hospitals, schools, prisons, and corporate settings across the world.

What a mindfulness teacher actually does, day to day, is help other people sit. The work involves leading guided meditations, designing class arcs (typically the canonical eight-week MBSR-style program), fielding inquiry from students about difficulties in their practice, holding silence, and modeling the patience that the practice itself asks for. It is unglamorous and unusually rewarding work.