A Clinician's Guide to Teaching Mindfulness

Christiane Wolf, MD, PhD, is a mindfulness teacher and teacher’s trainer. Her mindfulness practice started in the late 1980s. Before becoming a full-time mindfulness teacher, she was a board certified OB/GYN at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. She also holds a PhD in psychosomatic medicine from Humboldt University, and is a certified senior mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) teacher and supervisor for the Center for Mindfulness at UMASS Medical School. She is also the director of MBSR programs at InsightLA, a Los Angeles-based non-profit, and the director of the VA CALM program at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, training staff and clinicians in mindfulness and how to teach it. Wolf received Dharma transmission from Trudy Goodman in 2011, and is part of the current master Insight meditation teacher training under Jack Kornfield (Spirit Rock Meditation Center, CA) and Joseph Goldstein (Insight Mediation Society, MA). She is also on the advisory board of the Center of Mindfulness, Mindfulness-Based Professional Training Institute at the University of California, San Diego. J. Greg Serpa, PhD, is a clinical psychologist for the Department of Veterans Affairs at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System. He is honored to teach mindfulness to America’s veterans and is the first full-time mindfulness teacher and trainer in the federal system. Serpa is an assistant clinical professor at the University of California, Los Angeles psychology department. He teaches the intensive mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), as well as introductory level mindfulness classes at four area hospitals, and serves as a trainer, supervisor, and consultant to clinicians at the VA and UCLA. He is currently the director of inter-professional mental health education at the West Los Angeles VA, where he trains psychology postdoctoral fellows, psychiatry residents, social work interns, and nurses in mindfulness and integrative modalities of health and well-being. Serpa is a national mindfulness content expert for the VA’s Office of Patient Centered Care and Healthcare Transformation where he and Wolf are preparing mindfulness toolkits for national use. He is also an active researcher with a number of projects expanding on the evidence basis of mindfulness interventions. This includes a National Institutes of Health-funded biomarker study examining the impact of meditation on brain structure in combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan who have traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic headache.