IOI Training

Monthly meetings are held on the 3rd Saturday morning of the month via zoom and are both training and spiritual community building. Unless another course of study and practice of mindfulness has been undertaken and approved of by the Program Director, we ask that volunteers complete a free online Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course,  Palouse Mindfulness. In addition, volunteers are asked to read The Clinician’s Guide to Teaching Mindfulness by Wolf and Serpa. From this basic training, we consider teaching to be an ongoing learning process and offer small group practice and study groups as additional support. 

We encourage sharing at the monthly meetings, and work to make this a safe space to do so in. We emphasize how it is to teach groups whose life experiences may be quite different from our own, applying mindfulness and compassion to the conditions of racism, sexism, classism.

Introduction to Our Philosophy

Please watch  TedTalk Michael Welp ‘White Men: Time to Discover Your Cultural Biases’ for a short orientation to our philosophy. 

Mentorship

Each facility has its own process for volunteer orientation, and we have a point person for each facility who will guide you through the process of getting cleared as a volunteer. Your interaction will be with this point person, not the volunteer coordinator at the facility.