Keentune

Mindfulness curriculum

8 chapters
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201 concepts
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free
Everything the adaptive question bank can teach and test in Mindfulness, from foundations through advanced practice. Work through it in order, or start practising and let the questions find your level.
New here? Read the Mindfulness guide
A free 17-minute primer — the mental model, the mistakes beginners make, and what to practise first.
A. Core definition and attitudes
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Attention to the present moment, on purpose, without judgement.
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Intentionality is part of the definition, not an accident of attention.
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Neither rehearsing the future nor replaying the past.
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Noticing the judging mind rather than trying to silence it.
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Being aware OF a thought rather than being inside it.
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Watching experience arise and pass without stepping in.
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Open monitoring vs single-pointed focus.
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Allowing what is already here, which is not approval or resignation.
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Practising without a goal state to reach.
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Letting things unfold at their own pace.
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Meeting a familiar experience as if for the first time.
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Trusting one's own experience over an idea of how it should go.
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Releasing the grip on what the mind wants to hold.
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The two attitudes later added to the original seven.
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Treating oneself as one would a struggling friend.
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Recognizing difficulty as shared rather than personal defect.
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Automatic pilot as the contrast case that defines the skill.
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Relaxation is a frequent side effect, not the aim.
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The goal is not an empty mind.
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Non-attachment is engaged; detachment is withdrawn.
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Mindfulness does not replace thoughts with better ones.
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The practice is secular and does not require doctrine.
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Noticing the wander and returning IS the repetition.
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The first arrow is the event; the second is what we add.
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Steadiness of mind across pleasant and unpleasant alike.
B. Formal practices
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Using the breath as the returning point for attention.
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Upright and alert without rigidity; dignity, not endurance.
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A choice made for alertness and safety, not correctness.
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Breathing in difficulty and breathing out relief.
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Imagery practices for stability and reflective stillness.
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A question that defeats discursive answering.
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Intensive practice and the re-entry it requires.
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Sound, hands or feet when the breath is not workable.
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A scaffold for a scattered mind, retired when steadier.
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Two different levels of support for concentration.
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Sequential attention through the body without changing anything.
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Walking, stretching or yoga with attention on sensation.
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Pace, contact and turning as the objects of attention.
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Short and daily beats long and occasional.
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Frequency is the variable that builds the habit.
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Support for beginners vs self-directed practice.
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Choiceless awareness of whatever is most prominent.
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A one- or two-word label applied lightly and released.
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Just sitting, without object or technique.
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Eating one object slowly as an introduction to sensing.
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Hunger, taste and satiety noticed rather than overridden.
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Metta phrases extended in a widening sequence.
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Self, benefactor, friend, neutral person, difficult person, all beings.
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Short repeatable well-wishes, kept simple and sincere.
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Meeting suffering with the wish to relieve it.
C. Informal practice and daily application
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Inserting a gap between stimulus and response.
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Stop, Take a breath, Observe, Proceed.
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Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture.
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Allowing is the step most often skipped, and the one that works.
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A sensory grounding sequence for acute distress.
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Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired as a state audit.
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Double inhale and long exhale to down-regulate arousal.
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Freedom located in the space between stimulus and response.
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Noticing arousal before the conversation escalates.
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Why exhale length affects the parasympathetic response.
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Attending fully without composing a reply.
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Using doorways and commutes as practice cues.
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Attaching a micro-practice to an existing routine.
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Riding a craving as a wave that peaks and subsides.
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Labelling an emotion reducing its physiological grip.
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Keeping the label short so it does not become analysis.
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A short three-step practice inserted into the day.
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Regulating oneself first as the intervention.
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Doing one thing as a practice, not as productivity advice.
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Noticing the pull before the tap.
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Attention practice inside real constraints and deadlines.
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Practice as preparation rather than as a sleep technique.
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Separating sensation from the story about the sensation.
D. Obstacles, hindrances, and common errors
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The most common beginner misunderstanding.
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Chasing calm, which reliably prevents it.
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Wanting the experience to be other than it is.
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Pushing away discomfort, which amplifies it.
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Dullness and sleepiness, and the energizing responses to them.
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Agitation and worry, and grounding as the counter.
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Uncertainty about whether the practice works, and how to hold it.
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Using practice to avoid rather than to meet difficulty.
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Judging yourself for judging, and the exit from it.
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Grading a sit as good or bad, which is itself the wander.
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Restarting without penalty as part of the method.
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Numbing out is not open awareness.
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Choice, titration and exits as safety requirements.
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The arousal band within which practice is workable.
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Above and below the window, and what each needs.
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Orienting to the room before interoception.
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Documented difficult experiences and the duty to disclose them.
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When intensive practice is not the right intervention.
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Boredom as a stage rather than a verdict.
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Practice measured against someone else's report.
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Individualizing problems that are structural.
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Attention training separated from the ethical frame it came with.
E. Contemplative roots and tradition terms
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The Pali word usually rendered as mindfulness, closer to remembering.
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Clear comprehension accompanying bare attention.
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The four foundations: body, feeling-tone, mind, and phenomena.
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Mindfulness of breathing as a structured sixteen-step practice.
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Feeling-tone: pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, prior to emotion.
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Reaction begins at feeling-tone, which is why it is watched.
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Impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and not-self.
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Everything observed is in the process of changing.
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The unsatisfactoriness produced by grasping at what changes.
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No fixed, findable self behind experience.
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The five aggregates that experience decomposes into.
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Conditioned arising: this being, that becomes.
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The diagnostic structure the practice sits inside.
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The eight factors, grouped as ethics, concentration and wisdom.
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Sila, samadhi and panna as the training's divisions.
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Effort that is neither slack nor strained.
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Calm-abiding and insight as complementary strands.
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Absorption states, and why modern programs mostly set them aside.
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The four immeasurables: kindness, compassion, joy, equanimity.
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Sympathetic joy, the least-practised of the four.
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Equanimity as balance, distinguished from indifference.
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Mahasi noting and Goenka body-sweeping as distinct methods.
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Direct seeing, minimal technique, and the koan tradition.
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Analytical meditation, visualization and lojong.
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The hook: the moment of being caught, in Chodron's vocabulary.
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Meeting uncertainty without needing solid ground.
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Unconditional friendliness toward oneself.
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Engaged Buddhism, interbeing, and everyday practice.
F. Contemplative science and evidence
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What the evidence supports well and what remains uncertain.
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Modest-to-moderate effects for stress, anxiety and depression.
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Why comparison to nothing overstates the benefit.
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Belief in the intervention as part of the measured effect.
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Small positive trials being likelier to appear.
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Which findings have held up and which have not.
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Practice minutes as a predictor, where it has been measured.
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Reduced threat reactivity as a common finding.
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Top-down regulation of limbic response.
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The self-referential network quieted during practice.
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Wandering as the brain's baseline mode.
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Structural change as a claim requiring careful hedging.
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Alerting, orienting and executive control as separable.
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Attention-training effects on capacity under load.
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Two weeks of training improving comprehension and reducing wandering.
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Sensing the internal state of the body.
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A physiological correlate of regulatory flexibility.
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Stress-hormone results and their inconsistency.
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Reduced unpleasantness with sensation intensity less changed.
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Biological-marker claims and their evidential weakness.
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MAAS, FFMQ and what each questionnaire captures.
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Observing, describing, acting aware, non-judging, non-reacting.
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A two-component consensus definition for research.
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Intention, attention and attitude as the mechanism.
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Attention regulation, body awareness, emotion regulation, self-perspective.
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The shift in perspective proposed as the core mechanism.
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Active noticing of novelty, a distinct research tradition.
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Trials increasingly required to report harms.
G. Clinical programs and models
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Adding cognitive therapy to prevent depressive relapse.
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Repetitive self-focused thought as the target mechanism.
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A self-compassion practice for physical distress.
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Relapse prevention rather than treatment of an acute episode.
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Seeing thoughts as mental events rather than facts.
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MBCT's portable core practice.
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Kabat-Zinn's eight-week stress-reduction curriculum.
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Practice alongside, not instead of, indicated treatment.
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Behavior and function, not just self-reported calm.
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Founded in 1979 in a hospital pain clinic, secular by design.
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Weekly classes, daily home practice, and a day of silence.
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Mindfulness as the first DBT skills module.
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Integrating reasonable and emotional mind in DBT.
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Observe, describe, participate; non-judgementally, one-mindfully, effectively.
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Mindfulness-based relapse prevention for substance use.
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Mindful Self-Compassion as a distinct curriculum.
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Self-kindness, common humanity, mindfulness.
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Adapted curricula and their mixed trial results.
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App-based and employer programs, and their evidence limits.
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Why instructor training and personal practice matter.
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Whether a shortened program is still the intervention that was tested.
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Adherence, dropout, and what apps do and do not replicate.
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Identifying who needs a modified approach.
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Scope of practice for non-clinical teachers.
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Disclosing what practice can and cannot do.
H. Acceptance, defusion, and adjacent frameworks
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Contacting the present and acting on values.
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The six ACT processes and how they interlock.
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Willingness to have the experience in service of action.
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Avoiding inner experience as the transdiagnostic problem.
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The observing self that contains experience but is not it.
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Chosen directions, distinct from goals.
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Behavior in the direction of values, with the discomfort included.
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The fight with the feeling as the real source of suffering.
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Matching the approach to the person's actual obstacle.
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Noticing that the avoidance strategy has not worked.
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The metaphor for driving while thoughts shout.
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Making room for a sensation rather than bracing against it.
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Being willing to feel something you do not want.
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The pain itself vs the pain about the pain.
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The physiological wave of an emotion passing quickly.
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Where mindset research overlaps and where it does not.
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Changing the relationship to a thought, not its content.
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Saying it slowly, singing it, or prefacing "I'm having the thought that".
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A thought's persuasiveness is not evidence of its truth.
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Where the two traditions overlap and where they diverge.
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Precise labelling improving regulation.
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Changing meaning vs changing relationship.
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Kindness that does not depend on evaluation.
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Absorbed attention distinguished from meta-aware attention.
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Acting first vs feeling better first.
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