Some Reflections on Being Good, on not Being Good and on Just Being

Over the last 12 years, through my work at the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice (CMRP) at Bangor University, I have been engaged with colleagues (both within CMRP and from other training centres in the UK) in an exploration of how to support the development of a robust professional practice context for our own teaching team and for the growing community of mindfulness-based teachers in the UK. There have been a number of academic outputs from These academic writings have been largely presented as an exploration of these issues from the perspective of training organisations and the UK Network for Mindfulness-Based Teacher Trainers (2012). The view from these perspectives leads to the aspiration to support the creation of high standards and clear boundaries for professional practice for trainees, students and practising mindfulness-based teachers in the UK context. These explorations and investigations have also though been nourished and influenced by the view from the inside of my experiences of growing my skills as a mindfulness-based teacher and trainer, by my fluxing perceptions of my own competence and incompetence, by being alongside our trainees as they explore these themes in their practice and teaching and by my connection to my own personal meditation practice which began during the 1980s—before there was significant interest in the professional potential for this work. The learning journey that I have engaged in while undertaking these explorations has thus taken place on a number of levels including the personal. Mindfulness practice reminds us and enables us to consciously work with the continual influence of personal interior experience on our behaviour, actions and choices. This reflective piece is intended to bring to the fore some of this 'back story' that has influenced the production of academic outputs. An example of these subjective/objective dynamics in practice is the process of developing and researching the Mindfulness-Based Interventions: Teaching Assessment Criteria (MBI:TAC) (Crane et al. 2013; Crane et al. 2012b). This process employed a third-person stance in relationship to the object of study—the mindfulness-based teaching process. This was necessary to enable the level of objectivity that is required to reliably assess teaching skills. However, it was clear that in-depth first-person, inside perspectives on and understandings of the teaching process were essential in enabling the development team to capture the subtleties of the teaching process. Although these internal processes are not generally publically disseminated, they are completely integral to the investigative …