AMS2022 Learning Session

Imagining The Future of Mindfulness with Foresight

This session narrates the strategic visioning process a community organization (Mindfulness Hamilton) engaged in with community members to reflect on the needs of the community, consider emerging changes in the world, and source new ideas for how and who they might serve better.

Over the course of two virtual co-creation sessions and a set of reflective activities, we show how current experiences, challenges, and hopes of local mindfulness leaders were solicited and then explored through a future lens. In the first session, we worked with a set of emerging trends and ‘signals’ from the local and global context to prompt community members to imagine new services, approaches and offerings. Top ideas from the process were synthesized and during the second session participants developed strategies for implementing new ideas.

We aim to demonstrate the process, tools, and pedagogy for facilitating this organizational renewal process in a virtual setting. With intentional design, appropriate pre-work, rich artifacts, and supportive scaffolding for focused conversations, we believe it is possible to reimagine the future of mindfulness as a community.

Ken Burgess, MD

Ken Burgess MD CCFP FCFP- Ken is a semi-retired family, occupational and emergency physician. He has been on faculty since 1980, teaching medical students and residents. He helped found the first free –standing occupational health clinic in Canada in 1981. He was a leader in the Hamilton Family Health Team and the Ontario Association of Family Health teams. He has had a meditation practice for about twenty five years has attended numerous meditation retreats and mindfulness courses and teaches mindfulness, and in particular the neuroscience of mindfulness. Since 2014 he has been a co-chair of the Program for Faculty Development’s Discovering Resilience Leadership Team which has run mindfulness courses and workshops.