Teaching about, Training in, and Acting with Compassion – Mindful Compassion in the Academy

Since 2010, the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK, has offered an MSc in studies in mindfulness degree programme within its School of Education. The programme has attracted over 500 students from multiple professional contexts such as Health, Education, Business, Creativity, Social Work, Sport, and Criminal Justice. The paper initially creates a picture of the current UK ‘studies in mindfulness’ landscape by describing the established programmes at UK universities. This demonstrates that Mindfulness programmes and Mindfulness
Based Interventions (MBI’s) have various positions about the role of compassion training, something which the Aberdeen programme includes as a core experiential and academic module. Possible reasons for this are discussed, including debates about the secularity or otherwise of MBI’s as they have developed. The approach taken on the Aberdeen programme is informed by evolutionary psychology as well as positions adopted on compassion by diverse wisdom traditions. In this paper it is argued that such training in compassion is possible and important, particularly in light of failings by multiple institutions and organisations to uphold compassion as a core value or to go beyond these values serving tokenistic or decorative purposes. The University of Aberdeen’s programme perhaps represents a move towards more holistic, pastoral and multi-professional applications of mindfulness. This contrasts with the clinical, pathological settings for mindfulness to date. This paper is also informed by the testimonies of 3 cohorts of students on the MSc programme who share their
experiences and how the training has impacted their personal and professional lives.