Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is an experiential, evidence-based course that can help you build a meditation habit and apply mindfulness in practical ways day-to-day. By integrating mindfulness in your life, you can more effectively manage stress, illness, pain, and other challenges, while strengthening your capacity for peace of mind and joy.

Join us online and learn simple, powerful tools to improve your quality of life.

How MBSR Can Help You

Taught globally and scientifically evaluated for 40+ years, evidence indicates that MBSR offers many potential benefits to physical, emotional, and mental well-being, including:

Improved ability to manage anxiety, stress, depression, chronic pain, heart disease, and other health challenges

Reduced symptoms of burnout and increased resilience
Greater sense of overall well-being
Greater ability to focus, handle distractions, and regulate emotions
Less automatic reactivity; more skillful responding
Stronger self-awareness, supporting better decision-making, habit change, and self-care
Less self-critical; more self-compassionate
Able to live with greater presence, ease, connection, and joy!

MBSR is a complement to traditional medical and psychological treatments, not a replacement for them.

Upcoming Online MBSR Courses

Begins Oct. 7th, 2024

MONDAYS, 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM ET

Orientation: Monday, Oct. 7th
Weekly Classes: Mondays, Oct. 14 - Dec. 2, 2024, 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM ET
Retreat: Sat., Nov. 16th, 9:30 AM - 5:00 PM ET
Location: All sessions are held online via Zoom
Teacher: Karyn Sandelman, Certified MBSR Teacher
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Begins Oct. 9th, 2024

WEDNESDAYS, 9:30 AM - 12:00 PM ET

Orientation: Wednesday, Oct. 9th
Weekly Classes: Wednesdays, Oct. 16 - Dec. 11, 9:30 AM - 12:00 PM ET (No class Wed., Nov. 27)
Retreat: Sat., Nov. 16th, 9:30 AM - 5:00 PM ET
Location: All sessions are held online via Zoom
Teacher: Karyn Sandelman, Certified MBSR Teacher
Convert to your time zone here.

Sliding Scale Tuition

Use our sliding scale tuition to choose what you pay. Help us make MBSR available to all by selecting the highest amount appropriate for you based on your circumstances. Tuition includes 31 hours of class time and all course materials.

$650 —Sponsor Tuition: Helps support others who need assistance
$550 —Standard Tuition: This is the regular, baseline tuition
$400 —Reduced Tuition: If the standard tuition is a stretch for you
$275 —Scholarship / MBSR Alumni: If you are experiencing financial hardship or you have taken MBSR with us before
If you need additional financial support, contact us.

What to Expect in Classes

Created by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in 1979, MBSR is an experiential, participatory course that that helps you build, reinforce and integrate mindfulness in your life. Weekly classes include:

Guided mindfulness practices, including various forms of meditation and mindful movement
Exploration of relevant concepts, including mindfulness, perception, conditioning, habitual reactivity, stress physiology, skillful responding, and communication
Meaningful discussion in larger and smaller groups
Personal discovery through reflection and exploration

About the MBSR Curriculum

Orientation: The Orientation is an integral part of the program that lays the foundation for the course by introducing participants to mindfulness, meditation, the structure of MBSR, logistics, and potential benefits and risks of practicing mindfulness.
Week 1 - Beginning: In the first session, we begin to explore the possibility of experiencing ourselves and the world around us with fresh senses, while also co-creating a safe and inclusive group learning environment.
Week 2 - Perception and Creative Responding: This session explores the impact of our perceptions on our experiences. Through various activities, we discover that how we see things (or don’t see them) determines in large part how we respond and how we respond ultimately affects the health of our bodies and minds.
Week 3 - Presence: In this session, we introduce both gentle, mindful movement (yoga) and meditation in stillness as ways to investigate how things are in the body and mind. We also explore our experience of pleasantness.
Week 4 - Reacting to Stress: With the growing awareness being cultivated through the preceding weeks of practice, we turn our attention to the physiology of our stress reactivity, investigating the nature of stress reactivity and identifying our own habitual patterns related to stress.
Week 5 - Responding to Stress: Building on Week 4, we explore how mindfulness can be used as an intervention, helping us interrupt our habitual stress reactions and choose wiser, more skillful responses. This is the mid-point of the course, so we also reflect on where we are each at in the course and our intentions for the remaining classes.
All Day Class - A Silent Retreat: Occurring after the fifth or sixth session, the all-day session is guided by the MBSR teach, leading participants through familiar and new practices. Setting aside a full day of uninterrupted time creates an opportunity for deeper practice, discovery, and perhaps new insights.
Week 6 - Relating and Communicating: In this session, we investigate more skillful ways of relating and communicating by bringing mindful presence, awareness of our feelings, and creative responding to relationships.
Week 7 - Mindfulness in Daily Life: By this time in the program, participants have been discovering greater skill and resilience in a wide range of situations. With this greater awareness of the choices we make in daily life, we explore the effects of what we “ingest,” bringing curiosity to whether the impact they have on us / others.
Week 8 - “The End is the Beginning”: In the last session of the course, we reflect on what has been learned and explore potential resources as we move forward, and consider ways in which we can keep the momentum of practice going.

Your MBSR Time Commitment

Taking the live, online, 8-week MBSR training program, you will participate in each of the following:

Orientation (2.5 hours): A key overview of the course
8 Weekly Classes (2.5 hours each): Exploration of concepts and practices, relevant discussion, and review of home practices
All Day Retreat (7.5 hours): Opportunity for deeper practice and understanding; occurs during 2nd half of program
Home Practice: Time for discovery on your own using recorded meditations, informal awareness exercises and optional supplemental material
Research suggests that participating in MBSR can help you reduce stress and burnout and live with greater ease, well-being, and enjoyment

About Our MBSR Teacher

Karyn Sandelman, Founder and Principal of A Mindful Choice, is a Certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Teacher and a Certified Mindful Schools Instructor. She teaches mindfulness to a wide range of clients (including corporations, healthcare organizations, cultural institutions, schools, and individuals), and has taught more than 40 MBSR programs with 100’s of participants from around the world.

Before launching A Mindful Choice, Karyn directed mindfulness programs for Minds Inc., developing curricula, training a large network of mindfulness educators, and leading programs in schools. She has more than 25 years of experience leading teams, mentoring individuals, and facilitating learning programs. In sharing mindfulness with others, Karyn draws upon her years of mindfulness practice, facilitation, and leadership; her warmth and inclusiveness; and her passion about the positive, transformative potential mindfulness offers to all.

Try a guided meditation led by Karyn.

Why Take MBSR with Us?

Personalized support and guidance: We are a small organization that offers personalized support and guidance, giving you direct access to a seasoned, certified mindfulness teacher in a smaller, more personal setting — see our testimonials below or go here for more.
Optimal Class Size: Our classes are limited to no more than 20 participants to ensure an optimal group learning environment. This is smaller than many other organizations.
Full, Official MBSR Curriculum: We teach the current, in-depth, official MBSR curriculum, as originally designed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. and later updated by Brown University Mindfulness Center.
Sliding Scale Tuition: Our range of tuition options aims to make MBSR as accessible as possible to everyone. If the tuition you are looking for is not available, or if you need additional financial support, contact us to explore possibilities.
Certified, Experienced MBSR Teacher: The current courses are taught by Karyn Sandelman, a Certified MBSR instructor who is experienced, inclusive, and skilled at facilitating MBSR and other programs (see below for more information).
Certificate of Completion: You will receive a Certificate of Completion for the course if you attend the orientation, weekly classes and all day retreat (with allowance for absence at one weekly class).
Fulfills Pre-requisite for MBSR Teacher Training Programs: For those who are looking to become MBSR teachers, this fulfills the first requirement and helps you take an important step on your training path.
Accessible, Inclusive, and Responsive: We aim to support YOU in your mindfulness journey. That’s why we do the work we do. We are available to you during the course and now, as you contemplate whether MBSR is for you. Feel free to contact us with any questions.

Testimonials

Our intention in offering MBSR is to support others in living with greater happiness, health, and balance by helping them integrate mindfulness into their lives. This is reflected in our MBSR participants’ testimonials.

“Karyn Sandman was a superb guide to MBSR and facilitator of our group. She demonstrated excellent social-emotional skills and was respectful, patient and compassionate to each person involved in our diverse group. The course content was all quite fascinating and I loved the pacing of each class that included a good variety of meditation modalities and time to be in the larger group and in break out groups.”

“I came to this course with some experience with mindfulness practice but I never really got it going on a regular basis, and I was suffering a lot from acute anxiety. I wholeheartedly recommend this course. It provides very practical tools, lots of information, and above all a direct experience of the practice in a way calculated to make sure you incorporate it into your life. The group experience was unexpectedly important, because we all openly shared our experiences, reactions, and questions. Karyn is an amazingly skilled facilitator. Highly recommended.”

“Karyn's deep experience, knowing, empathy and kindness created a safe and welcoming environment to be vulnerable, "not know," learn, and practice. I was grateful for how she met each participant with compassion and encouragement and for how she facilitated community building of the participants - all on Zoom. I've taken mindfulness classes in the past, but this experience was deeper, richer and one from which, unlike before, I am already building.”

“As a long-time mindfulness and yoga practitioner prior to this course, I appreciated Karyn's ability to relate with both brand-new practitioners as well as those with more experience; her unfailing kindness and the way she lives out her practice "in the real world;" as well as the full range and scope of materials and practices she includes as part of the course. I also admired the way Karyn would gently and yet firmly keep the course and participants from getting off-track. I would highly recommend Karyn and this course!”

“Terrific course that gave me the tools and knowledge to develop my own meditation practice and bring mindfulness into my daily life. I really enjoyed the class experience and getting to know my cohort and learning from them through their experiences. Karyn is a very skilled and thoughtful facilitator and brings a sense of warmth to the class that makes the experience all the richer.”

“I highly recommend learning more about the practice of mindfulness with Karyn Sandelman. She quickly established a wonderful rapport with all in the class, making all comfortable participating in meditation exercises in an online setting. I particularly enjoyed how she used Zoom rooms and interactive whiteboard features to allow everyone to learn by doing. She also gave us follow-up activities, and resources, encouraging us to dive a bit more deeply into the science behind the practice. Definitely a class worth taking!!”

“Karyn's MBSR class had a tremendous impact on my ability to cope with my challenging chronic pain condition. My anxiety and pain levels have diminished and I am now better at appreciating and noticing all the positive things in the world around me. The variety of meditations that Karyn offers allowed me to use the ones best suited for me and helped me to be okay with doing only what I was capable of.”

“While the world was feeling chaotic, uncertain and dark, this mindfulness course was invaluable for inner peace. The practices taught me how to kindle that little light inside myself that is helping me stay grounded, unafraid and grateful. The concepts and practices are so simple that inner change is attainable within the time of the course. The timing was one of the silver linings of the pandemic for me.”

MBSR FAQ’s

Is this the full, official MBSR curriculum? Yes, this is the standard, in-depth, most current MBSR curriculum and format, as originally developed at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and later updated at Brown University’s Center for Mindfulness.
Is the teacher a certified MBSR instructor? Yes, the course is taught by a Certified MBSR instructor who is a seasoned, inclusive, skilled, and caring teacher (see below for more information).
Is this course taught live? Yes, each class is live; held in a safe, supportive, and responsive environment with a committed peer group and a trained and experienced teacher creating a safe space in which to explore challenges and share discoveries.
Will I receive a Certificate of Completion? If you complete all the course components, you are eligible for a Certificate of Completion for the course.
How does this course relate to MBSR Teacher Training? Taking the full, 8-week MBSR course with a Certified MBSR Teacher is a pre-requisite for MBSR teacher training programs. This course fulfills that requirement.
What is your refund policy? If a registrant requests a refund with more than five days notice prior to the first class, a refund will be issued minus a $50 processing fee. After that time, the tuition is non-refundable.
How do I register for an upcoming MBSR course? To register, click one of the “Register” buttons on this page or contact us for additional information.

Technology Requirements

Computer or tablet with video camera, microphone, and speaker
High-speed internet connection
Zoom (free account is fine) installed on your computer or tablet