1. We often have an occupation or profession that has ethical guidelines (for example, teachers, doctors, social workers, coaches, psychologists, marriage and family therapists, yoga teachers, and ministers). We work within those guidelines.
   

An example may make this clearer. I was talking to a friend who is a licensed clinical social worker about the ethical standards in her field that apply to romantic involvement with clients. She explained that ethical standards in social work prevent a social worker from dating a client for at least two years after the end of their professional relationship.

So, if you were teaching mindfulness to someone who was seeing you as a clinical social worker, then you need to work within the ethical standards of your profession. That is, you could not ask out your former client until at least two years after the end of your professional relationship.

I should mention that my friend also said that she “would never socialize with a client, even years after terminating. I just feel it crosses a line.”

2. We conduct mindfulness training only in areas in which we are competent (based on our training, supervised experience, consultation, study, or professional experience).
   

One person in the Pathways program asked us, “Is each trainee’s area of competence defined in writing for each course?” No. This is more of a general guideline than something that is precisely defined. This is one of many standards whose application ultimately depends on your sound professional judgment, but an example may be helpful here. If you have only been teaching U.M. to your students in college classes and just finished the Foundations program, you shouldn’t be taking on a new client with severe, easily triggered trauma without some kind of preparation, supervision, consultation, study, etc.

Mindfulness Training and Psychotherapy. Sometimes people confuse learning mindfulness with psychotherapy, and this is understandable because mindfulness practice can help with mental health problems. If someone approaches you for help with a mental health problem like anxiety, what are you to do? It would be dishonest to say that mindfulness can’t help with anxiety and at the same time it would be dishonest to say that you are qualified to treat it (assuming that you aren’t a psychiatrist or other mental health professional).

In some ways you are in a situation that is parallel to a fitness instructor who is approached by someone who is suffering from depression and wants help. Exercise can help with depression, but fitness instructors aren’t trained to treat it. Both the mindfulness teacher and the fitness instructor can say what they have to offer that may help, but may also want to explain that they aren’t a substitute for a trained mental health professional. They may offer to work with the depressed person and at the same time recommend that she or he work with a counselor, psychotherapist, or other mental health professional.

Sometimes mental health clients want to escape from certain types of treatment—especially those involving drugs. U.M. doesn’t train people to provide treatment for mental health disorders, or to determine what mental health treatment is necessary. So, if you don’t have a relevant degree or license, you are ethically obligated to be clear about your limitations—that you aren’t an expert in treating mental health problems. Asking a mindfulness teacher about mental health questions is like asking a car mechanic those same questions–it doesn’t make sense. Teachers should make clear that mindfulness techniques and skills are their area of expertise and that the clients must be responsible for their mental health needs. Among other things, this means that it isn’t the teacher’s responsibility to coordinate with health care providers.

If you do have a degree and/or license in a mental health field, and if you have been trained in using mindfulness in the treatment of a specific disorder, then you have the option to do so.

Either way, if you’re not trying to be their therapist, don’t act like you are. Be explicit about this so that your client is clear what your professional relationship involves.

Also, as a teacher, if you think someone needs professional mental health support, consult with others and be prepared to say so to any client that needs to hear it. Be supportive, not afraid.

3. We maintain a deep mindfulness practice, which includes:
   
   • Regular formal mindfulness practice
   • Regular practice in life
   • Regular attendance at mindfulness retreats
   • Accountability to a group, teacher, or coach
     

“Regular formal mindfulness practice”

Does this mean that if someone wasn’t practicing every day, they would not be up to the standard? Isn’t that a high bar?

We should make clear that we don’t mean that the occasional lapse means that you should quit teaching. By “regular formal mindfulness practice” we mean a minimum of most days of the week for people who have completed the Foundations course, and more often than that for people who complete more advanced training, such as Pathways. It is essential that individuals who teach mindfulness have a deep, regular practice. Their own experience of mindfulness is an important source of their authority. When we teach, we often ask others to engage in formal mindfulness practice, to engage in life practice, to attend retreats, and to be accountable. With regard to these basics of practice, we should only ask others to do these if we do them ourselves.

“Accountability to a group, teacher, or coach”

 This may involve regular meetings with a group of fellow mindfulness practitioners, or working individually with a mindfulness teacher (or coach). Or it may involve having an agreement with another mindfulness practitioner in which you text each other each day about your practice. For example, two long-term mindfulness practitioners may want to do more micro-hits each day. They keep each other accountable by texting each other every day, saying how many micro-hits they did.

4. We engage in activities that develop and maintain our competence. These may include:
   
   • Regular supervision with a qualified mindfulness teacher
   • Feedback from a co-teacher
   • Sharing experiences with and learning from other mindfulness teachers
   • Reflection by reviewing video recordings of our teaching
   • Reading books, articles, and other writings on mindfulness
   • Participating in additional training

 “Regular supervision with a qualified mindfulness teacher”

What makes someone qualified? This generally refers to someone who has been teaching for a longer time than you have, and who knows the UM system in depth. You may also want to work with someone who teaches mindfulness but who is not a UM teacher.

5. Keep up to date with the literature on mindfulness.

There are many ways that you can do this. You might join the American Mindfulness Research Association, which puts out a monthly list of all the recent published research on mindfulness. You could create a Google alert for new research on mindfulness.[2] Subscribing to Mindful magazine or the academic journal Mindfulness are also ways to keep up.

6. While the Unified Mindfulness system is secular, we are aware that UM teachers, teachers-in-training, and clients come from a variety of religious backgrounds. We honor every individual’s right to choose whether or not to participate in any service or program we offer. This might mean we decline to offer a program at an organization that requires attendance.

Although UM is a secular program, it is still important to be sensitive to the spiritual and religious stances of your individual clients and of participants in a class. Because the origins of secular mindfulness programs go back to Buddhism, some people may perceive them as religious.

For a mindfulness teacher in the U.S., this can become a particularly touchy issue when you are teaching in a school system or other government organization, as they are prohibited by the U.S. Constitution from advocating a particular religion or religious point of view. Roughly 4,000 religious discrimination lawsuits are filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission each year.

A good example of how a lawsuit can happen even in a non-government organization occurred years ago at the Pacific Bell corporation in California. Management required all 67,000 employees to attend a leadership training program based on the works of Gurdjieff—a maverick spiritual leader whose teachings resemble those of the Sufis of Islam. The $25 million program did not mention Gurdjieff by name, although it incorporated many of his spiritual principles. Understandably, some Christian employees objected and sued, claiming that it violated their religious beliefs. A large controversy arose which received national news coverage and eventually involved Pacific Bell’s state regulatory agency. The company dropped the program.

If someone objects to a UM program because of religious concerns, you might gauge their degree of objection. Some people are simply not candidates for the training. But others just need validation that the concern is legitimate while also being open to reassurance that frees them to voluntarily participate. If they are asking for an alternative perspective, you may point out that UM is a secular program and its effectiveness is supported by scientific research. Other points that you might make include:

• Mindfulness is an innate human capacity.[3] Everyone is more or less mindful. Each person has more or less mental concentration at any given point in the day, has more or less sensory clarity from moment to moment, and has more or less equanimity. This includes people from every culture, every country, and every religion.
• The techniques we teach are not in any way based on belief. They are strictly methods for strengthening your attention.
• Many of the techniques of mindfulness are patterned after what Buddhists have discovered, but Buddhists don’t own mindfulness or the techniques they discovered any more than Christians own literacy or the calendar or Muslims own math. Furthermore, if you teach the “golden rule” in an ethics courses, you aren’t teaching Christianity or Judaism, you are teaching a useful ethical principle that also happens to show up in these religions (and every other world religion).
• Buddhists have done some very useful research into mindfulness, as have Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, and agnostics. Many Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other religious organizations teach mindfulness programs and find no conflict with their beliefs.
• Mindfulness programs are also taught in many secular organizations, including many government organizations.
• Nevertheless, if you find this program is in conflict with your beliefs we want to honor that. If you do take the program and you have doubts about any of the exercises we do here, I want you to know that you aren’t obligated to do any of them. Please feel free to let me know if issues come up.
• In our experience, we’ve seen that whatever a person’s spiritual tradition, mindfulness practice usually deepens it, rather than interfering with it. For example, Shinzen has an evangelical Christian student who had a deep spontaneous awakening that was not related to meditation and upon discovering Shinzen’s work she got profound relief. This inspired her to begin going on retreats while continuing to honor her religious beliefs as a Christian.
• Julianna had a client who stated that they believed Buddhism and the concept of emptiness was evil and they were concerned because mindfulness practices were derived from Buddhism. She addressed that concern with transparency. In the end this client was open enough to try practicing mindfulness and experienced profound relief from it. This person was surprised at how generic mindfulness practice is—that it’s simply a way to strengthen attention. After a few weeks, this person revealed that they were grateful because they had spent significantly more time focusing on God as a result of practice.

Some people assume that mindfulness practice will challenge their deeply held beliefs and make them stop believing. That may be possible, but we haven’t personally seen any evidence of that.

You may mention all the points above, and a person may still feel that they do not want to try practicing mindfulness. It is important to respect their decision.

In one respect, your beliefs and motivations don’t matter so much when it comes to this issue. You can have Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, ethical, or even monetary motivations for teaching, but it is your actions that count. If you believe that your mindfulness teaching practice is a way of helping individuals learn some Buddhist techniques and values, but you are teaching mindfulness as an attention-based behavioral intervention and you aren’t trying to sneak in any religious content, that doesn’t pose an ethical problem from the perspective of UM. You wouldn’t want to prevent Muslims from teaching mindfulness because they see it as a way of promoting the Islamic values of mercy and compassion, or prevent Christians from teaching mindfulness because they see it as a way of promoting love. You wouldn’t want Jews, Hindus, or anyone to be prevented from teaching mindfulness because of their religion. In fact, in the U.S. it is illegal to discriminate against someone in a job situation because of their religion.

On the other hand, if your main motivation is to transmit Buddhism through your mindfulness teaching and this influences the way you teach, you should not hide this. It’s important to be honest and transparent. You don’t want to misrepresent what you’re doing or mislead people.

7. We do not make false claims about the benefits of mindfulness practice or intimidate potential clients into purchasing our services.

Crazy claims are often made about mindfulness. One of my favorites appeared in a Forbes Magazine blog post. It claimed that entrepreneurs who practice mindfulness always increase their cash flow. While we don’t think any of you would claim something like this, the actual business of making a claim about mindfulness practice can be tricky.

For example, there are levels of support for a claim.

• If you know of a meta-analysis (a very structured review of many studies) that supports your claim, that is usually very good support.
• If several research studies support your claim, it’s pretty good evidence, and if one study is supportive, it is still some evidence as long as a number of studies don’t disagree.
• Finally, your own experience counts as some evidence too; you may have worked with many people who suffered from anxiety and found that mindfulness practice has helped them.

How much you want to go into the evidence for a claim that you’re making about mindfulness depends on many aspects of the situation, but the main thing is to not make a claim about mindfulness that you believe is untrue.

8. We are, when we are asked a question and don’t know the answer, willing to admit we don’t know.

Sometimes we feel like we should have all the answers, but almost no one actually expects this. Being honest when you don’t know the answer to a question builds trust. You can simply say, “I don’t know” or “I don’t know, but I’ll find out and get back to you.”

9. We realize that when people come to us for help, they may reveal very private thoughts or feelings, and this makes them vulnerable. So we keep the information clients share with us confidential.                                         

Few things can reduce trust more between you and a client than for them to discover that they can’t rely on you to keep what they have revealed confidential.

Further, we disclose that it is not in any way necessary for a client to reveal personal information to us, in order for us to effectively train them. And if they choose to reveal personal information, we are transparent and explicit about our role: We are not counselors or therapists, but we can help them work with the issue, using applied mindfulness techniques and strategies.

10. We are sensitive to the dynamics of power and idealization that may occur between teacher and trainee. We are sensitive to the implicit power difference between teacher and client and realize that sometimes our clients may idealize us. We do not exploit either situation for personal or professional gain. This means that we:
    
    • Avoid giving unrelated advice when teaching, even if someone asks directly. (“Should I stay in this relationship?”)
    • Do not ask our clients for favors. (“Could you stay for an hour after the end of the class tonight and help me clean up? The work we are doing here is so important.”)
    • Do not use idealization or our authority to develop a sexual relationship with a client.

How do you make decisions about whether to engage in romantic relationships with clients? Are there any general criteria? How and when you draw the line when it comes to sex? Should romantic involvement never be an option with anyone who has had any interaction with you as a mindfulness teacher, or does it depend on the situation? If the situation does make a difference, what are the things to consider? Does it make a difference:

• Who initiates intimacy—you or the other person?
• What the nature of your relationship is with the other person? What if it’s a person who hears a talk you give on mindfulness? Someone who attends a three-hour mindfulness workshop? Someone you work with one-on-one?
• How long you’ve had a professional relationship? What if it’s someone who works with you one-on-one once? Twice? For a month? A year?

The question of romantic involvement is a complicated one, although there is a clear answer to at least one question. If you do become involved with someone, you should not be their mindfulness teacher.

On the other hand, many questions do not have a clear answer; they require a judgment call. In situations where you are unsure, remember that you represent the UM community and are accountable to it. It can be a good idea to consult with people that you respect in the community before deciding.

All that being said, if you aren’t sure about whether a romantic relationship with someone is a good idea, it’s usually a good idea to err on the side of restraint.