Frequently Asked Questions

Most of our courses are delivered online. We’re sometimes able to arrange in-person or hybrid commissioned events where these would best meet your needs. Please feel free to contact us about this.

We offer lots of information on our website to help you make the best decision for you. You may find our page ‘Is a mindfulness course right for me?‘ helpful. If you’re still unsure please contact us and we’ll be happy to support you.

At the end of an event, you’ll be issued with a certificate confirming that you participated in that specific Oxford Mindfulness event.

We’re always happy to be contacted to explore how we might be able to collaborate and work towards common goals of supporting mental health and well-being. Please contact us and we’ll be happy to discuss this with you.

Our courses have been developed in collaboration with the University of Oxford and are designed for adults. There are many organisations working with under 18’s but this isn’t something we offer right now. If you’d like to be connected with an organisation for under 18’s please contact us and we’ll help you to make a connection.

For most of our courses and events, you’ll receive your joining instructions over email around 48 hours before it starts. For our longer, 12-month teacher training, you’ll usually receive joining information via email a few weeks before the course starts, to allow time for the pre-reading.

A link to Terms and Conditions can be found on all application forms for our courses and events, but you can also find them here.

For the majority of our courses and events, we aim to process our applications within 5-7 days. For our longer teacher training course applications, these generally take up to 4 weeks to process following the application deadline. This is so we can consider all applications together.

Once the closing date for a course has ended, we are busy putting the final arrangements together and it’s unlikely that your application can be accepted. There can sometimes be late changes that mean a space becomes available and if you’d like to join a course after the application has closed, we’d encourage you to contact us to check.

To meet the UK’s Good Practice Guidelines for mindfulness training, and to deliver the best experience for our community, we have ratios of teachers-to-participants on all our events, even for those delivered online.

When a course or an event is full, we create a waitlist list and if there are enough people on the list, we add more to avoid disappointment. So, if you see a course or event is ‘waitlist only’ it’s worth joining!

Please contact the course/event teacher and/or admin@oxfordmindfulness.org to let them know if you’re unable to attend a session.

We ask that you attend our courses and events with your camera turned on. This lets your teacher or trainer know that you’re there and OK, as well as contributing to a sense of community. Exceptions to this are the Live Online Meditation sessions, and some Guest Talks.

We follow strict guidelines in terms of confidentiality and data protection legislation and, in general, our courses and events are not recorded.

From time to time, we may choose to record training events to support learning, but only if we have received express permission from all attendees.

Guest Talks are usually recorded so that we can share these on our website and via social media.

For most courses and events, you’ll be asked to pay in full on application. For our longer teacher training courses, we offer the option of paying in instalments. If you’d like to pay in instalments, please email us at finance@oxfordmindfulness.org

Please email admin@oxfordmindfulness.org with your name and details of the course you applied to. If we still have space, our event administrator will support you in reinstating your application and arranging payment.

As a not-for-profit organisation, we aim to price all our events to be as accessible as possible whilst remaining financially viable for us to run. Therefore, there is no automatic discount for joining multiple events. We’ll soon be offering a membership programme which will entitle you to benefits, including discounted event attendance – find out more.

To check whether a refund is possible, please read our Terms and Conditions.

We’re very happy to work with employers and sponsors to help you access our courses and events. Please complete the application form as usual and then submit it without payment. Once you have submitted the application, please contact us on email at finance@oxfordmindfulness.org to advise us who to invoice.

We’re able to offer group discounts where a number of bookings for a course or event are being made by the same organisation. Please contact us to find out more.

Mindfulness is a personal choice and we find that sometimes offering it as a gift can put pressure on someone to attend when maybe it’s not right for them at this time.

If you know someone is interested in mindfulness and you’d like to offer this as a gift, we recommend you create your own voucher and ask them to follow the steps for employer/sponsor payment as shown above.

We take great care to ensure everyone who joins a course or event with us will get the best experience. To do this, skilled mindfulness professionals in our team review applications and this takes time.

To enable us to keep our fees as low as possible, we ask for payment at point of booking as this ensures commitment from the applicant and reduces the administration involved in processing your application.

If your application isn’t accepted by us, you’ll receive a full refund.

As a registered UK charity, providing educational activities, we’re exempt from VAT and therefore no VAT is included in the fees.

We take great care to ensure that applicants are booked onto the right course at the right time, but if you wish to leave a course once it’s underway, it’s rarely possible to issue a refund since it’s no longer possible to offer your place to another person.

We recommend trying a different browser or alternative payment card, if you have one. If this doesn’t work, please contact finance@oxfordmindfulness.org.

Thank you for your interest in this! As a not-for-profit organisation, we rely on donations to deliver our mission. You can make a donation here or contact finance@oxfordmindfulness.org for assistance.

For general queries, please contact admin@oxfordmindfulness.org.

Financial queries should be directed to finance@oxfordmindfulness.org, and queries relating to the Oxford Mindfulness app should be sent to app@oxfordmindfulness.org.

The app is available in many countries worldwide and continues to be rolled out to new geographic areas. It can be downloaded from Google Play for Android users and from the App store for iPhone users.

Thank you for your interest in this. We welcome opportunities to offer taster sessions or other talks in workplaces, and are able to discuss your requirements and the costs and logistics involved on a case-by-case basis.

Details about our teachers/trainers are available via our directory of people we’ve trained. It provides information about their training and experience.

Other teachers may also be listed with BAMBA (British Association of Mindfulness-Based Approaches) or in similar equivalent international organisations.

If you’re attending one of our courses or training programmes, you’ll be provided with all of the necessary materials, including any recordings. In addition, the Oxford Mindfulness app and website offer guided practices to support you.

We offer Days of Practice led by an experienced teacher. At these events, you’ll be guided through practices that allow you to deepen your understanding further with prolonged periods of silence. If you’re looking for longer periods of silent retreat, there are many providers, both in-person and online.

Our courses are delivered online to an international audience and we offer a range of times to try to accommodate different time zones and for those outside of the UK.

You can also view our partner organisations and the directory of those we have trained to teach.

Yes. We hope that you’d never have cause to complain however, if you do, please visit our Policies and Procedures page where you’ll find a document outlining our Complaints Policy & Procedure.

Our courses take two main forms: those for people relatively new to mindfulness, and those who have already attended a recognised mindfulness-based course.

• If you’re new to mindfulness, we offer the following:
• Introducing Mindfulness (a 3-week brief introduction).
• Mindfulness for Life (8-week course plus a practice day)
• Finding Peace in a Frantic World ( 8-week course).

If you’ve already completed an 8-week course (such as Mindfulness for Life), we offer:

• Deeper Mindfulness (8 weeks)
• Taking-it-Further (12 weeks)

To a large extent the decision will depend on whether you want to further develop previous learning (Taking it Further) or deepen your practice through exploring new/more specific themes (Deeper Mindfulness).

You can find out more on the ‘Personal learning’ section of our site.

The courses we offer support learning through group discussions and recognition of common human experiences and habits and so we don’t offer one-to-one courses. However, if you’d like to explore one-to-one learning, you are welcome to view our directory of trained teachers.

We review every application carefully as we want to be sure that you join the right course, at the right time for you. Please outline any difficulties you’re experiencing on your application form and these will be fully considered when your application is reviewed. We may need to have a chat with you to better understand your current situation.

We try to advertise our personal learning courses in plenty of time. To keep up-to-date with what’s on offer, you could subscribe to our mailing list.

To benefit from our personal learning courses, you will need to be able to understand and speak English to a level that doesn’t require any additional translation. We have partnership courses which are offered in a range of other languages, so it’s worth looking at what might be available in your native language.

All of our courses are designed to develop experience and understanding session-by-session, as a group. If missing a session of the course is unavoidable, you’ll be given resources to help you understand what you’ve missed. However, it isn’t possible for us to provide a full catch-up session.

If you’re going to miss the very first session of a course, or more than two sessions of an eight-week course, we would strongly recommend you book onto the course at an alternative time, when you know you’ll be able to attend all of the sessions.

In our experience, it’s not ideal to attend a personal learning course with people you know well as this can impede the learning for some people and may affect the group dynamic. For Guest Talks and other larger scale events, it’s perfectly acceptable to attend with friends and family.

Our personal learning courses offer three different rates, including a supported rate which is 20% lower than the standard fee.

We’re also sometimes able to offer late spaces on our 8-week personal learning courses to those who meet specific criteria. If you’d like to join a waitlist for a bursary place on one of these courses, please email admin@oxfordmindfulness.org with details of the course you’d like to attend and why you’d benefit from a bursary place.

Our 12-month mindfulness teacher-training is a foundational course which trains you to teach a variety of curricula including Mindfulness for Life, Introducing Mindfulness, MBCT (for clinicians) and/or Finding Peace in a Frantic World.

Our Train to Teach ‘Introducing Mindfulness’ course will teach you to deliver the 3-week Introductory Mindfulness (IM) curriculum and practices without undertaking the 12-month teacher training pathway.

If you complete and fully engage in all aspects of the teacher training, you’ll receive an attendance certificate. Following this you, if you teach two courses under supervision, you can then apply for a Trained Teacher Certificate.

You can apply for a Trained Teacher Certificate once you’ve taught two full 8-week courses under supervision, and have met the criteria.

A Certificate of Competence is provided following a Competency Assessment – a further assessment of your competency involving independent assessment of recordings of your teaching against MBI:TAC criteria.

To attend our 12-month teacher training course, you need to have attended the 8-week Mindfulness for Life course as a personal learner, within the last 12-18 months.

Find out more about the entry criteria on the train to teach section of our website.

So that you can engage fully with the teacher training, you’ll need to be able to understand and to speak English very competently, without need for additional translation support.

It’s important that you’re able to attend every day of the training. We ask prospective trainees not to sign up to one of our teacher training programmes if that’s not going to be possible at this time. You may need to consider the impact of any differences in time zones.

We have an ongoing partnership with the Mindfulness Network around offering supervision from experienced and quality-assessed mindfulness-based supervisors. You can search for a supervisor over on the Mindfulness Network’s site.

All of our teacher trainees and trained teachers, as well as the University of Oxford Masters Mindfulness students may be listed on our directory. The directory will indicate your stage of training.

We invite teachers to join our team when / if we find we are unable to keep up with public demand. Our teachers must meet a range of criteria including full competency assessment at proficient level, have Professional Indemnity Insurance in place, meet all of the UK’s Good Practice Guidelines and have taught a minimum number of courses over a period of years. If you’d like to be on the list to be invited to apply next time we are recruiting, please email your CV to admin@oxfordmindfulness.org

To enquire about the possibility of a bursary to support teacher training, please contact admin@oxfordmindfulness.org for further information.