Teaching Clergy and Religious

Exploring self-care tools for Christian social workers to prevent burnout

“…41 Marks and Moriconi wrote a chapter in an international handbook by McCown, Reibel and Micozzi entitled Resources for Teaching Mindfulness. 42 The chapter generated a mindfulness-based intervention curriculum for clergy and religious personnel. They developed this curriculum for individuals experiencing vocational stress that could eventually evolve into psychological distress.…”

“…Although mindfulness-based therapy was provided, ministry leaders found it to be a challenge to fulfil ministerial duties and prevent burnout. 43 Lewis-Hathaway and Eubanks proposed that individuals who participated in a mindfulness intervention would decrease their levels of burnout and increase mindfulness. 44 Participants reported that mindfulness gave them a greater insight into their bodies and their feelings of stress and thought processes, and a greater desire to share their feelings with others.…”

Mindfulness for Global Public Health: Critical Analysis and Agenda

“…Religious meditation has also been used as a mindfulness analogue in grade school educational settings (Graham & Truscott, 2020). Regarding the religious sector, a rare account of using a slightly adapted MBP for explicitly religious recipients is Marks and Moriconi's (2016) report of delivering an MBSR adaptation for religious professionals such as clergy. Adapted elements seemed primarily to reflect surface structure (e.g., ordering of activities), with additional adjustments for how to handle specific issues that may arise in discussion (e.g., the relevance of Matthew 6:28 to "non-driven ways of being," p. 424).…”

“…Importantly, religious mindfulness adaptations/analogues vary along a surface-to-depth spectrum. At the surface end of the spectrum are MBP adaptations that make small adjustments to accommodate the culture of the target religious tradition (e.g., Marks & Moriconi, 2016). At the deepest end of the spectrum are interventions-perhaps best called "analogues" rather than "adaptations"-that are entirely reliant on a target tradition's contemplative practices (e.g., Knabb, 2012).…”

“…And Kabat-Zinn (2010) has stated that he personally considers "sitting long [dharma] teacher-led retreats periodically to be an absolute necessity in the developing of one's own meditation practice, understanding, and effectiveness as a [mindfulness] teacher," with benefits he views as derivable, as noted earlier, from "traditions that value the wisdom of mindfulness, such as Sufism, the yogas, and Taoism" (p. xii). But with the partial exception mentioned earlier of the clergy adaptation by Marks and Moriconi (2016), little published attention has seemingly been given to how teachers can understand and respond to pre-existing religious, spiritual, or contemplative interests of MBP participants. For example, although readers are urged to impartially distinguish between concentrative and mindfulness forms of meditation (e.g., p. 36), "religion" is essentially unmentioned in the volume by Crane et al (2021b), except as part of a laundry list of "considerations" for adapting an MBP (p. 11; see also Roberts & Crane, 2021, p. 198, Fig.…”