Date of Award

Spring 5-2018

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

MA - Master of Arts

Department

Interdisciplinary Studies

First Advisor

Melissa Jean

Second Advisor

Nancy Waring

Abstract

This study investigates teaching trauma-sensitive meditation, its importance, and its principles and practices. In order to investigate this topic, five experienced meditation teachers were interviewed. The participants of this study were Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction teachers and insight meditation teachers from the Buddhist Theravadan tradition, living on the East Coast and the West Coast of the USA. The aim of the research was to gather practical experiences on teaching trauma-sensitive meditation and to share the knowledge that exists among meditation teachers with the ever growing number of mindfulness professionals. The data were collected from interviews which were transcribed and returned to the participants to confirm that they had been understood correctly. The participants of the study offered perspectives, examples and practical tools for teaching trauma-sensitive meditation. The transcribed interviews were categorized and analyzed using the Five Principles of Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness by Treleaven (2018). The teachers’ responses fell naturally into these categories and they both intuitively and professionally followed the Five Principles and taught meditation in a traumasensitive and inclusive way. The results were also discussed from competence perspective with the idea of trauma-sensitivity being an important part of a meditation teacher’s competence. The teacher competence was analyzed using the MBI-TAC by Crane et al. (2012) in order to reflect the competences that the teachers discussed.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Language

English

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