welcome

The Earth calls for our help. Can you hear it?

The Earth needs our love and care right now. For ourselves, for our global human family and for all our more-than human kin, we can step up to serve.

As Mindfulness teachers, the most powerful action we can take is to bravely invite both ourselves and our students into EcoAwareness.

Together we can bring heart, hope and great care to our one Earth home.

It’s wonderful to hear about your moving more into ecodharma — certainly not different from dharma, if one realizes the nature of self and other, and the universe we are all embedded in and part of the fabric of. Of course the MBSR curriculum of this era needs to bring more light to the interface of person X environment. For the first two years, MBSR was ten sessions (and no all-day). The 8th was devoted to food X the world, and the ninth to world stress. There are chapters on both in Full Catastrophe Living. But of course, forty-four years out from 1979, the world is far different, almost unimaginably so, and much more emphasis needs to be put on our relationship with the planet, as individual humans, as families, as societies, as nations, and as a species.

~ Jon Kabat-Zinn, in a message to Margaret Fletcher in 2023

A little about the MBSR & EcoAwareness Project

Our project began offering the MBSR & EcoAwareness Workshop with a pilot in the winter of 2024, as an experiment in inviting MBSR teachers into the same wondering she had carried for herself: how can I serve the needs of the Earth at this critical time within my role as an MBSR teacher? The pilot session included 10 teachers who shared a desire to cultivate practice, understanding, and ways to help people wake up to the Earth’s beauty and vulnerability. Their time together proved that MBSR teachers can incorporate Earth awareness into the MBSR curriculum with joy and care.

Over time, this project has a goal to encourage as many MBSR teachers as possible to bring the Earth into their practice and teaching. We have committed to removing any barriers to participation, particularly with the financial support of the BESS Family Foundation. Those of us involved have set a goal to include a minimum of 50% of program participants from BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and young adult populations. This goal is a work in progress. We are open to hearing about ways and opportunities for making that goal a reality.

As we pursue our work, we honor the lands on which we work and those Native and Indigenous peoples who have stewarded this land, these waters and this air through the millennia and right up to this day, with steadiness, joy and brilliance. We recognize the harms caused by ignorance, arrogance, greed, abuse and violence toward these peoples and their lands. Through the work of the MBSR and EcoAwareness Project, we commit to repairing these harms and returning to a sane, respectful and joyful relationship with this, our Earth home. We ask permission of this land to do our work here.

The MBSR & EcoAwareness Workshop is generously supported in partnership with the BESS Family Foundation.

Here are a few ways to get started with your Earth awareness practice and teaching:

EcoAwareness Teaching Tips for Mindfulness Teachers

Get started with these simple ways to bring the Earth into your mindfulness classroom

For Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Teachers:

MBSR & EcoAwareness Workshop

Live online: 6-session teacher development workshop for bringing EcoAwareness into your MBSR teaching

Awareness, Care and Sustainability for Our Earth

Bringing Inner Development and Climate Action Together; March 7 2025 webinar recording with Bruce Barrett, Jamie Bristow, Margaret Fletcher, Jon KabatZinn, Liane Stephan, and Christine Wamsler, offering mindfulness practice and learning in support of our vibrant, precious Earth.

Resources

More ways and places to study, practice and engage in mindful EcoAwareness

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