Why Tailored Teaching Beats Cookie Cutter Mindfulness

A stressful morning, a deep tissue reset, and a simple lesson that changes how we teach: relevance beats routine. Sean shares how tuning into the body can open the door to smarter, kinder mindfulness instruction, especially when life is messy and attention is thin. We walk through a practical approach to choosing what to teach by asking short, respectful questions, listening for needs, and then adapting practices so they fit real people and real constraints.

You’ll hear why a trauma‑informed stance matters, how to phrase cues that feel human rather than clinical, and where short, concrete practices outperform long, abstract scripts. We unpack ways to tailor mindfulness for healthcare workers, corporate teams, caregivers, and teens, adjusting length, tone, and focus so the work actually helps. Along the way, Sean introduces a plug‑and‑teach curriculum: 900 minutes of modular lessons with hundreds of slides, teacher deep dives for nuance, guidebooks to scaffold delivery, and student handbooks to support learning beyond the session. It’s flexible by design, so you can brand it, adapt it, and bring it to groups without starting from scratch.

If you’re a new or seasoned teacher who’s ever wondered, “What should I teach this group, right now?” this conversation offers a clear path: assess, adapt, and keep it practical. Expect tangible prompts, language tweaks, and ideas you can use today to create safer, more relevant experiences. If this resonates, subscribe, share with a colleague, and leave a quick review so more teachers can find these tools—and tell us: which audience are you tailoring for next?

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Episode Transcript

SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
Hey everybody, it's Sean Fargo from Mindfulness
Exercises here.
Just got out of a deep tissuesports massage and feel like a
million bucks.
This morning was a little bitstressful, juggling work and
family stuff.
A tick crawled into mydaughter's ear yesterday, and so
we had to get that removed.

(00:21):
And so I was feeling a littlestressful this morning, but just
got a deep tissue massage andjust reminded me how important
it is to take care of ourselves,take care of our bodies, kneed
our bodies a little bit and kindof unwind the tension and to
feel into the body, get to knowwhat we're carrying.

(00:44):
And so I encourage everyone outthere to get some deep tissue
massage every once in a while,especially from a therapist
who's trauma-informed, justbecause we don't want to
exacerbate any trauma that wemay or may not have.
But while I was laying down onthe massage table, I was just
thinking about a commonchallenge that a lot of

(01:05):
mindfulness teachers have, whichis knowing what to teach to
their audience or to theirpatients or to their students.
You know, there's so manymindfulness practices out there,
so many principles andfoundational layers of
mindfulness that it's hard toknow what to teach to who
sometimes.
And so I always make it a pointto really stress the point that

(01:30):
we need to make mindfulnessrelevant to who we're teaching
it to.
So that means asking questionsabout what their challenges are,
what their experience is like,whether they've tried different
kinds of mindfulness practicesin the past, what's worked, what
hasn't, and to then make thepractices and the teachings

(01:52):
relevant for them.
Finding the right wording, theright stories and experiences
and practices that they canrelate to, and making it as
applicable and practical aspossible.
And so that's something that weoften teach in our mindfulness

(02:14):
teacher training program is howto make it relevant to different
people, how to introducemindfulness to different
demographics, and then whatkinds of curriculum we can share
for different audiences.
And something that we just cameup with a couple months ago is a
mindfulness teaching curriculumthat you can download and teach

(02:37):
from.
You can brand it, you can adaptit and modify it to your
audience and teach from it.
You can teach courses andprograms, you can consult
corporate clients or uh medicalpatients, you can do whatever
you want with it in terms ofteaching.

(02:59):
You can't resell the actualcurriculum as it is, but you can
teach from it all you want andmonetize your teachings.
But it's an easy way to download900 minutes worth of teaching
curriculum that you can teachfrom word for word.
We have slides, like hundreds ofslides, that map onto the

(03:22):
teachings.
We have teacher deep dives thatgive you some of the nuance of
how to teach the curriculum.
We have teacher guidebooks thatyou can use to follow so that
you know how to teach thecurriculum, and student
handbooks that you can give toyour students for them to follow

(03:42):
some of the practices andteachings of what your program
is.
So it's pretty neat.
So this is all to say that it'simportant to make the teachings
relevant to who we're teaching.
Um, I don't believe in cookiecutter uh mindfulness teachings.
I don't believe in cookie cuttermassages.

(04:05):
You know, we need to be able totune in to what's here for each
person to support them.
So we need to make thingsrelevant so that we can connect
with our students from the heartand and really help them because
people aren't, you know,cookies.

(04:26):
So I teach cookie cutterteachings.
So that's my thought for theday.
I hope all of you are doingwell.
Um it's a beautiful day here inBerkeley, California.
Uh, all these beautiful treesover here, the canopies are so
beautiful.
So I hope you're doing wellwherever you are in the world,

(04:46):
and take good care.
Bye.