2025 Review
As many of you know, I’d changed careers several years ago, moving from management in IT to more closely align with my activities as a mindfulness professional in my personal life. And while that work in strategic planning and business management was rewarding and helpful to those wonderful partners and clients over the (yikes) decades, it’s been a very different kind of amazing to positively impact my students, supervisees, and the field of mindfulness more directly. Here’s a quick run-down of the variety of activities mindfulness professionals are often called to do, just from the past year:
Organizational Development
I’ve had the great honor and privilege of serving the Mindfulness Network in the UK, and about six months ago stepped in as the Acting Director of the Board of Trustees. Those of you in mindfulness are likely aware of a variety of challenges faced by charitable organizations in our field; this has been and continues to be a bumpy ride that nonetheless is critical to the integrity and standards needed to ensure participant safety and well-being.
MBSR Curriculum
Thanks to Jon Kabat-Zinn, I’ve been an active participant of a team of international teachers reviewing proposed updates to the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course curriculum managed and overseen by Lynn Koerbel. The insights and wisdom of the international body of senior teachers has been, in word, inspirational, and I’m eager to have these revisions made available in the coming months.
Workplace Mindfulness
My program development has continued as well, with the first cohort of my new Mindfulness in the Workplace course finishing up to even-better-than-expected reviews from the participants. This program was designed for those who want to bring mindfulness into various kinds of work environments, learning what needs to be considered but may be missed, providing files and resources to get started, and even an automated AI Workplace Assessment tool to make recommendations based on the unique needs of each workplace.
Supervision and Mentorship
Starting off this past year with a presentation for the International Mentoring Center, I’ve continued to offer supervision and mentoring on mindfulness and strategic planning. Supervisees and mentees from at least eight different countries with various needs and interests keep me on my toes, and I’m very grateful to the sixty participants of the International Supervisors SiTT Group I’ve taken on hosting from the person who started the group, Jem Shackleford.
Mindfulness World Community
There’s a wonderful new resource to support mindfulness professionals, the Mindfulness World Community. I’ve been posting there on a regular basis about research in our field, and have been honored to be part of the ongoing administrative team. We’ve held several topic sessions this year, and have more coming in 2026 for the over 500 members of this professional community.
Scientific Research
As many of you know, I’m a peer reviewer of scientific studies in mindfulness. You may have seen me post about the difficulties faced in publication, with tensions between for-profit journals, unpaid reviewers, and the constant pressure of researchers to “publish or perish.” I’ve said yes to most review requests, with a few number of intentional refusals when asked to review for journals that push pseudo-science. I’m also on the other side of it as a researcher, hopefully to have another publication coming out this year. And, as always, will continue to post almost daily on social media about the latest findings in the field of mindfulness.
Podcasting and Webinars
As of this writing, I’m celebrating about sixteen years of podcasting and 600 total episodes through three series: The Secular Buddhist, Present Moment: Mindfulness Practice and Science, and the newish video podcast Mindfulness Voyage. Throughout all of these, the focus has been on sharing how the work of others is contributing to the wellbeing and mental health of those engaging in mindfulness — not about my own work. For that, I’ve been fortunate to have been asked to be a guest on other people’s podcasts, have been asked to do more this year, along with various webinars for different groups like the upcoming program on Social Media Use with Oxford Mindfulness.
There are some other things this past year, and more coming up I’ll be posting about in the coming months, so will just finish this up the same way as each podcast episode: Every moment, you have a choice. Make it the best you can.
— Ted