Course Content
Teacher Training Class 1
Good day to you friends, it's Mark Joseph here and welcome to the Mindfulness Teacher Training. So this is the introductory video and just a little explanation of how this all came to be. Well, let's go to the beginning. My journey really started born out of anxiety, born out of panic attacks and my father unfortunately died of suicide when I was 21 years old. I was following a similar downward trajectory with my mental health after his death, and I decided not to go the chemical route, which is the route that he took, but rather to go the route of breathwork and mindfulness. As a young man, I started to explore that, and it was miraculous. I felt that I finally had control over my life, and I was wondering why did nobody else know these techniques? Why are they just prescribed medication when they could at least try and work on some of these mindful techniques—mindful movement, mindful breathing, mindful meditation, journaling, and so on? Why can we not try these first before we go on to the medication? So I practiced for a while, I went to India, I traveled throughout India, the Himalayas for one year, and then I lived in a monastery, in a temple actually, for three years—can you believe it? During that time, I was grappling with the idea of becoming a monk, but I eventually left the temple without becoming fully ordained, and I got married. But my passion for mindfulness carried on, and I realized it wasn't so much in a religious framework that I wanted to help people—it was more from a practical, scientific point of view. When I go into the ancient scriptures of mindfulness, I don't see the spirituality—I see the science. I see the ancient technology that we have at our disposal today, now validated by scientific research and neuroscientists. Throughout this program, you'll get to know all of them in their full range, supporting the growth of mindfulness. So yes, it's an incredible journey. The modules are amazing—they've been put together as my life's work that I'm sharing with you. In a way, it was an intuitive flow, but as I was going about it intuitively, I realized that I had so much research to back up what I felt inside. It's just been such an amazing process. I have taught thousands of people. I have a lot of students that are now my peers—they became their own mindfulness facilitators, gurus, whatever you call them. I don’t like to be called a guru, but it gives me the greatest joy—the greatest, greatest joy—to see people whom I've trained go on and incorporate this into their professions. Into dancing, into pottery, into their therapy, into their practice, into their physiotherapy, into everything. Into teaching children at school and stopping to do mindfulness exercises with them before the classrooms. I've seen it spread right across the world actually, through the programs that I run—corporate, professional, and so on. It’s just a remarkable time. We are in a mindful revolution, and I just couldn't be happier. So let's explore this series together. Let's have fun. Let's ask questions. Let's engage. I am at your disposal, and I am guiding you—you are leading, and I am just encouraging you. Let’s go forward into the most dynamic process that one can go through—truly life-changing. And I am not just saying that—I know it's a cliché, but whenever people do this training, that’s what I hear. Their lives just change. So welcome to the Mindfulness Teacher Training. This is where you begin.
0/12
Class 1: Part 1
04:55
Class 1: Part 2
05:29
Class 1: Part 3
06:07
Class 1: Part 4
04:26
Class 1: Part 5
05:49
Class 1: Part 6
06:32
Class 1: Part 7
03:38
Class 1: Part 8
09:18
Coffee Practice
02:49
Breath Meditation
Keeping a Journal
06:12
Starve your Distractions and Feed Your Focus Practice
05:34
Teacher Training Class 2
0/12
Class 2: Intro
04:50
Class 2: Part 1
10:36
Class 2: Part 2
04:00
Class 2: Part 3
08:57
Class 2: Part 4
07:04
Class 2: Part 5
07:55
Class 2: Part 6
08:01
Class 2: Part 7
04:36
Class 2: Part 8
00:00
Pre Body Scan Practice
02:25
Body Scan Practice
12:14
Mindful Eating Practice
06:31
Teacher Training Class 3
0/10
Class 3: Introduction
03:01
Class 3: Part 1
05:17
Class 3: Part 2
11:20
Class 3: Part 3
07:42
Class 3: Part 4
05:30
Labelling Practice
Ocean Mind Practice
08:57
Sky Like Mind Practice
00:00
Non-Striving Practice
08:45
Looking & Problem Solving Practice
06:54
Teacher Training Class 4
0/5
Class 4: Part 1
06:01
Class 4: Part 2
08:30
Class 4: Part 3
07:59
Healing of the Inner Child Practice
09:11
The ‘Nice’ Self Compassion Practice
09:53
Teacher Training Class 5
0/10
Class 5: Part 1
08:21
Class 5: Part 2
06:55
Class 5: Part 3
03:19
Class 5: Part 4
09:53
Class 5: Part 5
05:24
Class 5: Part 6
09:28
Are You OK? Checking In Practice
08:32
Loving Kindness, EQ Meditation Practice
09:17
Empathy for Forgiveness Practice
04:05
Feed Your Emotions a Cookie Practice
05:24
Teacher Training Class 6
0/8
Class 6: Part 1
05:51
Class 6: Part 2
09:08
Class 6: Part 3
08:38
Class 6: Part 4
05:10
How To Remain Curious Practice
07:13
Finding Your Values Practice
14:10
Bonus Video: Self-Investigation by Jon Kabat-Zinn
02:08
Bonus Video: Teach Back Advice
13:45
Mindfulness 8-Week Course

Mindfulness brings us into the moment—what we are actually doing—and helps us to be less on autopilot. We can often find ourselves during the day flying off into an unknown future or visiting a past where we feel longing or regret. How do we feel if we go off into the future? Most people tell me they feel a sense of anxiety.

Our ability to focus and to stay present is a power of our mental fitness. As George Lucas says, “Your focus determines your reality.” So what is your reality? What is our reality? What are we focusing on? When we worry about a future that hasn’t happened, it is a survival mechanism that has been inbuilt in us for thousands of years—hunting, gathering, and remembering particular terrain.

There was a wild beast that could have taken my life. I have a memory. I recall that memory. I play it over and over again—what I did, what worked, what didn’t work, what I could have done differently. Then, when going into that terrain again, I think about what to expect. This anxiety and rumination served us well as a human race and kept us alive. But in this modern-day culture, is it really serving us that well? The prevalence of ill mental health is skyrocketing.

More and more, we need to bring ourselves into this moment, where it’s happy, calm, and peaceful. Yet, we fly off again like time travelers into the future and the past. We don’t have to fear as much as we used to as hunter-gatherers, and yet we do. We have the same stress responses over small things.

We don’t have to fight for survival as we used to. We can live a better life, a happier existence in the now by being present. We are able to take the next leap in our evolution—to really feel what happiness could look like. It’s exciting times.

Our modern-day living is hurting our minds. Our ancestors never had so many constant digital distractions. Nearly half of the world’s population will experience ill mental health at some stage of their lives. Conditions such as anxiety, bipolar disorder, burnout, depression, substance abuse, obsessive-compulsive disorder, sleeping disorders, and abusive disorders have dramatically increased.

Our self-care routines, when we take breaks from work, often consist of social media, watching the news, and binge-watching TV. Social media is designed to keep us entertained and stimulated. It’s a little dopamine house of lux, feeding us things we love. Dopamine, the feel-good chemical, is released for these activities, and we get addicted. We really are addicted to dopamine.

Gloria Mark from the University of California says that our attention is dying. Two hours of every day are spent in distraction or recovering from distraction, with every 11 minutes bringing a new distraction. Ellen Langer from Harvard University says that we are on autopilot for 47% of our day—constantly traveling into the future or the past.

Ellen Langer goes on to say that much of our suffering comes from our struggle to be present. We find it very difficult to be in the moment. Yet, things are good here in the now. They’re okay. But if we’re living on autopilot, these distractions become our new mental health threat. As our attention spans deteriorate, so does our mental wellness.

Meta-attention versus subjective mind—meta-awareness is our ability to watch our mind move and then encourage our attention to return. “Come back, attention,” like calling a little puppy dog. This is the active ingredient that actually increases the prefrontal cortex.

Yes, it grows your brain. The functions of the executive front of our prefrontal cortex include attention, motivation, working memory, reasoning, overcoming ingrained behavior patterns, dealing with novel situations, decision-making, error correction, troubleshooting, task flexibility, planning, execution, flexibility of thinking, concept formation, abstract thinking, and creativity. These are what make us human beings.

I have noticed in my work with brain-damaged patients how these functions are lacking or don’t work anymore. My sister is a neuro-occupational therapist, and she has clients with head injuries where these functions are impaired. It’s obvious.

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