One moment.
About Beginnings
Mindfulness, a shape you can actually use.
Five weeks. One hour a week. A practice you can do standing at the kettle. Built for busy lives, limited hours, and real stress.
The science, short version.
MBSR came out of Jon Kabat-Zinn's lab at UMass in 1979. A 2022 JAMA Psychiatry study found it as effective as Lexapro for generalized anxiety, without the side effects. Thousands of studies since say the same kind of thing. The science is solid. The format was the problem.
Online is not new either. Im2 board member Tim Kurtz co-designed the first online MBSR program in 2015.
Beginnings is an accessible adaptation of MBSR: the same method and the same practices, in five weeks instead of eight. The person who rebuilt it had spent years teaching the original.
Those studies are of MBSR, not of this five-week format. We have not run trials on ours and do not claim their results as our own.
The founder
Jerry Cambra
Founder and senior MBSR instructor · UMass & Brown
For years, Jerry taught MBSR the way it had always been taught, and watched how many people who needed it never made it past the format. Beginnings is his answer: the same method, in a shape that fits a real week.
Why this, why now.
A 2022 survey asked what would make a mindfulness program actually work for people who've tried it and quit, or never started. The answers were specific, and they're what the program is built from.
- Five weeks, not nine.
- An hour per session, not two and a half.
- Daily practice that starts at four minutes, not forty-five.
- Priced so a scholarship fills the gap when it needs to.
- A small group going through it with you.
- Tools you can use between meetings, not only on the mat.
Beginnings was built from those answers, one by one.
“Mindfulness is about being fully awake in our lives.”
