Back in April, I started Mindful IN MoCo as a way to bring new kinds of mindfulness programming to my local community of Montgomery County, Indiana. Personally, I have practiced meditation for many years, and began my study of mindfulness back in 1998. This has been an important part of my life, and something that has been personally helpful in dealing with stress and other challenges.
Starting Mindful IN MoCo was a new step for me, and one that grew out of my hope to help people in our community who may be struggling in any number of ways. After the website was launched, I didn’t really know what to expect (or hope) for. But over the past eight months, I’ve been very grateful for the opportunity to talk with so many people about mindfulness practice.
We’ve met at the first mindfulness workshop that I led at the local Aligned with Green studio, and many other workshops at our local public library. We’ve connected online through Facebookand Instagram. And, we met in the 8-week mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) course that I was able to lead twice this year at the local Quest for Balance Wellness studio.
While I appreciate any chance to help people explore and support their mindfulness practice, I am particularly focused on getting MBSR classes started in our community. MBSR was developed back in the 1970s at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn. Over the past 50 years, this program has been examined by hundreds of research studies, and there is good evidence today that it can be helpful for people dealing with anxiety, depression, chronic pain, and many conditions that involve stress.
In our MBSR classes, I have been very grateful for the chance to explore mindfulness with so many people in our community, and to be able to bring this program to our local community. While many excellent MBSR options are available online, I feel that it is especially important to be able to offer this class locally, and in-person.
Looking back, looking ahead
As we come up on the new year, my main focus for Mindful IN MoCo will be to continue to offer the 8-week MBSR course, and to occasionally offer new programming when opportunities present themselves. Looking at the whole of my life, since the MBSR program is rather intensive, I feel that needs to continue to be my main focus for the present moment.
In getting the MBSR program off of the ground in 2024, my main challenges were to get the word out to people in our community and to make the class accessible to anyone who is willing to make the commitment to doing the entire eight week program.
I’ve tried out a variety of strategies this year to spread the word about MBSR. Word-of-mouth has been helpful (very helpful!), but I have also had to expand into online advertising (mainly Facebook and Google ads), posting on Meetup, and on our local online community calendar (Yodel). And, you might see posters placed around town, or notice an ad in one of our local newspapers (keep an eye out in January!).
Even with all of these efforts, many people still have not heard about the MBSR program. So, I’ll keep working in 2025 to get the word out, in the hopes that no one who might be interested ends up missing out on the opportunity.
Paying it forward
Making the MBSR class affordable has also been an important goal of mine from the start. My main motivation when I started training to teach mindfulness was to help the people in our community: my students, the Wabash College campus, and the broader community.
MBSR classes can be expensive (usually several hundreds of dollars), though many teachers offer a reduced rate (essentially a scholarship). I experimented with a similar approach (setting a fee for the class, but encouraging people to ask for a reduced price if they had financial need).
In the end, I just wasn’t happy with this model. It seemed to me that some people stopped considering the class once they saw the overall price, and the option for requesting a reduced fee just did not work for me.
To make the class truly accessible, my main goal is that paying for the class should not be a financial burden. After all, how terrible would it be for the cost of the class to be a cause of stress!
So, for our last class of the year (which just finished earlier in December) we tried out a “pay-it-forward” registration fee. Each person was asked to commit to an amount that they could pay (over one to two months), from as low as $25 to as high as $450 (if that were reasonable for their situation).
And, I called this a pay-it-forward model to make it clear that the registration fees that we received would be used to pay for the next class. Each person should know that their spot in the class had been paid for by people who had taken a previous class. This idea resonated with me, as I see that my own mindfulness teaching is a way of paying forward the generosity that I have experienced from so many teachers over the years.
The pay-it-forward model worked well in 2024, and allowed me to help support the Quest for Balance Wellness studio, and covered the expenses for advertising the course (online ads, costs to reserve space at our local library for mindfulness workshops, website hosting fees, etc.). So, we are going to continue that model in 2025, and hope to be able to continue to bring MBSR to as many people in our community as we can!
Next MBSR class: Starting January 19th
Our next MBSR course will be starting on January 19th at Quest for Balance Wellness. This class will meet on Sundays from 4-6:30pm starting on January 19th, and ending on March 9th. We will also have an all-day class (essentially a mini-retreat) on Saturday, March 1st, from 10am to 6pm.
You can find more information and registration details on our MBSR page. And, please do spread the word!