Learn About MBSR
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is an evidence-based, 8-week course that helps you build a mindfulness habit and apply simple, practical skills to reduce your suffering and increase your well-being.
MBSR combines ancient practices of mindfulness with today’s scientific understanding of stress and well-being to help you strengthen your ability to cope with life’s challenges—including stress, depression, anxiety, illness, chronic pain, and more—and enhance your capacity for peace of mind and joy.
Created by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in 1979 as a complement to traditional healthcare, MBSR can supplement your tools for physical, mental, and emotional well-being.
What to Expect in MBSR Classes
MBSR is experiential and participatory; not a lecture. Each week, you will verify for yourself what’s helpful based on your experience with:
Guided mindfulness practices, including meditation and mindful movement
Exploration of relevant concepts, including mindfulness, perception, conditioning, habitual reactivity, stress physiology, skillful responding, and communication
Meaningful discussion in larger and smaller groups
Ongoing discovery on your own through reflection and exploration
MBSR has 40+ years of scientific evidence supporting wide-ranging benefits to physical, emotional, and mental well-being
How You Might Benefit from MBSR
Taught globally and scientifically evaluated for 40+ years, evidence suggests that MBSR offers potential benefits to physical, emotional, and mental well-being, including:
Lower levels of stress and anxiety
Reduced symptoms of burnout
Increased resilience
Improved ability to manage depression, anxiety, chronic pain, heart disease, and other health challenges
Greater sense of well-being
Stronger ability to focus, handle distractions, and regulate emotions
Less automatic reactivity / More skillful responding
Greater self-awareness, supporting better decision-making, habit change, and self-care
Less self-critical / More self-compassionate
More able to live with greater presence, ease, connection, and joy!
MBSR is a complement to traditional medical/psychological treatments, not a replacement for them.
About the MBSR Curriculum
Orientation: The Orientation is an integral part of the program that lays the foundation for the course by introducing participants to mindfulness, meditation, the structure of MBSR, logistics, and potential benefits and risks of practicing mindfulness.
Week 1 - Beginning: In the first session, we begin to explore the possibility of experiencing ourselves and the world around us with fresh senses, while also co-creating a safe and inclusive group learning environment.
Week 2 - Perception and Creative Responding: This session explores the impact of our perceptions on our experiences. Through various activities, we discover that how we see things (or don’t see them) determines in large part how we respond and how we respond ultimately affects the health of our bodies and minds.
Week 3 - Presence: In this session, we introduce both gentle, mindful movement (yoga) and meditation in stillness as ways to investigate how things are in the body and mind. We also explore our experience of pleasantness.
Week 4 - Reacting to Stress: With the growing awareness being cultivated through the preceding weeks of practice, we turn our attention to the physiology of our stress reactivity, investigating the nature of stress reactivity and identifying our own habitual patterns related to stress.
Week 5 - Responding to Stress: Building on Week 4, we explore how mindfulness can be used as an intervention, helping us interrupt our habitual stress reactions and choose wiser, more skillful responses. This is the mid-point of the course, so we also reflect on where we are each at in the course and our intentions for the remaining classes.
All Day Class - A Silent Retreat: Occurring after the fifth or sixth session, the all-day session is guided by the MBSR teacher, leading participants through familiar and new practices. Setting aside a full day of uninterrupted time creates an opportunity for deeper practice, discovery, and perhaps new insights.
Week 6 - Relating and Communicating: In this session, we investigate more skillful ways of relating and communicating by bringing mindful presence, awareness of our feelings, and creative responding to relationships.
Week 7 - Mindfulness in Daily Life: By this time in the program, participants have been discovering greater skill and resilience in a wide range of situations. With this greater awareness of the choices we make in daily life, we explore the effects of what we “ingest,” bringing curiosity to the impact they have on us / others.
Week 8 - “The End is the Beginning”: In the last session of the course, we reflect on what has been learned and explore potential resources as we move forward, and consider ways in which we can keep the momentum of practice going.
Your MBSR Time Commitment
Taking the live, online MBSR training program, you will participate in each of the following:
Orientation (2.5 hours): An overview of the course
8 Weekly Classes (2.5 hours): Exploration of concepts and practices, discussions, and related home practices
All Day Retreat (7.5 hours): Opportunity for deeper practice and understanding during 2nd half of program
Home Practice: Time for discovery on your own, using recorded meditations, awareness exercises and optional supplemental material
As our mindfulness grows, we strengthen our ability to make wiser, kinder, more mindful choices, ultimately leading to positive outcomes for ourselves and the world around us
About Our MBSR Teacher
Karyn Sandelman, Founder and Principal of A Mindful Choice, is a Certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Teacher, a Certified Mindfulness Mentor, and a Certified Mindful Schools Teacher. She has taught more than 40 MBSR courses, offers mindfulness programs to a wide range of clients (healthcare organizations, cultural institutions, businesses, schools, and individuals), and has supported 1,000’s of mindfulness explorers from around the world.
Before launching A Mindful Choice, Karyn directed mindfulness programs for Minds Inc., developing curricula, training a large network of mindfulness educators, and leading programs in schools. In addition, she has more than 25 years of experience leading teams, mentoring individuals, and facilitating learning programs. In sharing mindfulness with others, Karyn draws upon her years of mindfulness practice, facilitation, and leadership; her warmth and inclusiveness; and her passion about the positive, transformative potential mindfulness offers to all.
Try a guided meditation by Karyn, or learn more about her and our organization here.
MBSR FAQ’s
How do I register for an upcoming MBSR course? To register, visit our MBSR Registration page or contact us for additional information.
Will I receive a Certificate of Completion? If you complete all the course components, you are eligible for a Certificate of Completion for the course.
Is this the full, official MBSR curriculum? Yes, this is the standard, in-depth, most current MBSR curriculum and format, as originally developed at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and later updated at Brown University’s Center for Mindfulness.
Is the teacher a certified MBSR instructor? Yes, the course is taught by a Certified MBSR instructor who is a seasoned, inclusive, skilled, and caring teacher (see below for more information).
Is this course taught live? Yes, each class is live; held in a safe, supportive, and responsive environment with a committed peer group and a trained and experienced teacher creating a safe space in which to explore challenges and share discoveries.
How does this course relate to MBSR Teacher Training? Taking the full, 8-week MBSR course with a Certified MBSR Teacher is a pre-requisite for MBSR teacher training programs. This course fulfills that requirement.
What is your refund policy? If a registrant requests a refund with more than five days notice prior to the first class, a refund will be issued minus a $50 processing fee. After that time, the tuition is non-refundable.
Why Participate in MBSR
1. Practicing mindfulness can help you navigate life’s uncertainty with greater ease. In this 8-week course, you will tap into and strengthen your innate inner resources, enhancing your ability to more effectively handle stress and daily challenges (such as pain, illness, anxiety, difficult emotions, ruminative thinking, uncertainty, etc.) and be more resilient.
2. Participating in MBSR offers you valuable guidance as you begin or deepen your mindfulness practice. Through an evidence-based, experiential framework, you will be supported in your exploration and learning, with an emphasis on applying and integrating your discoveries in your daily life to help you live with greater balance, vitality, and joy.
3. With over 40 years of experience and scientific evidence, MBSR has demonstrated wide-ranging benefits, including improvements to physical, mental, and emotional well-being. If you are longing for less stress and anxiety and more well-being and peace, participating in MBSR can help you change your life for the better!
4. Learning and practicing with a skillful, knowledgable teacher in an optimal size group can help spur your motivation and enhance your growth. With our smaller classes and our focus on inclusion and connection, our aim is to offer personalized support to you in a more personal setting — see our testimonials below or here for more on this.
Upcoming MBSR Classes and Other Programs
Why not enrich your life by making a commitment to yourself and taking an MBSR course? Upcoming MBSR courses, along with additional opportunities for experienced meditators, are below. Just click on the one you’re interested in for more information. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
Testimonials
Here are a few testimonials from former course participants; you can find more testimonials here.
10/9/21: “I came to this course with some experience with mindfulness practice but I never really got it going on a regular basis, and I was suffering a lot from acute anxiety. I wholeheartedly recommend this course. It provides very practical tools, lots of information, and above all a direct experience of the practice in a way calculated to make sure you incorporate it into your life. The group experience was unexpectedly important, because we all openly shared our experiences, reactions, and questions. Karyn is an amazingly skilled facilitator. Highly recommended.” Anonymous (Online MBSR Course - Fall 2021)
10/9/21: “Karyn's deep experience, knowing, empathy and kindness created a safe and welcoming environment to be vulnerable, "not know," learn, and practice. I was grateful for how she met each participant with compassion and encouragement and for how she facilitated community building of the participants - all on Zoom. I've taken mindfulness classes in the past, but this experience was deeper, richer and one from which, unlike before, I am already building.” Anonymous (Online MBSR Course - Fall 2021)
6/10/21: “I was looking to the course to enliven my meditation practice. Karyn did just that by presenting the course content in a deep and motivating way. Her voice and delivery is soothing and serious and she is extremely responsive to all students questions and contributions.” Susan Seidman (Online MBSR Course - Spring 2021)
5/7/21: “This course came at a time when I needed to find an outlet to help me relax and shed stress before I imploded. I felt a positive impact from the very first guided meditation! Karyn was amazing - her kindness and her gentle but knowledgeable guidance made me want to get to class every week. And now - months later - I still feel an instant peace when I tune into one of her guided meditations. Thank you Karyn and MBSR!” Gail M - Halifax, Nova Scotia (Online MBSR Course - Winter 2021)
3/12/21: “As a long-time mindfulness and yoga practitioner prior to this course, I appreciated Karyn's ability to relate with both brand-new practitioners as well as those with more experience; her unfailing kindness and the way she lives out her practice "in the real world;" as well as the full range and scope of materials and practices she includes as part of the course. I also admired the way Karyn would gently and yet firmly keep the course and participants from getting off-track. I would highly recommend Karyn and this course!” Anonymous (Online MBSR Course - Winter 2021)