Requesting a Certificate of Completion
for the Palouse Mindfulness Course

To receive a Certificate of Completion, you need to have completed all eight weeks of the Palouse Mindfulness Course, all five steps of Getting Started, and each week's reading, videos and practices. After you send the materials indicated below, we will send you a personal note of congratulations along with your certificate.

NOTE: We respond to each request personally, so depending on the volume of requests, it could take up to two weeks for you to receive your certificate after we receive all of your materials. If you need the certificate by a specific date, please plan accordingly.

Thanks to the generosity of Mindful Leader, and through a special collaboration with Palouse Mindfulness, with your congratulations letter and certificate will be a coupon for a live one-day online retreat, led by a qualified MBSR instructor. These retreats are provided to new graduates of Palouse Mindfulness free of charge and include participants from Mindful Leader's live MBSR courses as well as other Palouse Mindfulness graduates.

What to include in your request

Information about you:
1. Your name
2. Email address
3. Where you live (city, state/province, country).This is required for our records. Also, your location is used for the Map of Graduates, but only your first name and last initial will be shown on the map. NOTE: You can opt not to have your initials on the map, or to have your initials attached only to your state/province or country, but you do need to let us know your city, state/province, and country for you to be issued a certificate.
A one-page description of what you've learned ("letter of learning") and how you will be incorporating what you've learned into your life. Write in English, drawing from your own personal practice. Be honest and submit only your own work, not copied or AI-generated. This helps ensure the certificate remains meaningful for everyone (see "Note about Integrity and Privacy", below).
Practice sheets for Weeks 1-7
1. Formal and Informal practice sheets for each of the seven weeks (14 practice sheets)
2. For each of the 14 practice sheets, you need to show at least six practices on each sheet.
3. If you are not comfortable writing in English, it's fine for the practice sheets to be in your native language.

A Note about Integrity and Privacy

INTEGRITY: This course is based on personal practice. We ask that you reflect honestly and submit work based on your own experience—not copied from others or generated by AI. This protects the value of the certificate for everyone. We reserve the right to compare your submission with those of others submitting certificate requests.

PRIVACY: All of the materials you send are kept totally confidential. The "letter of learning" is kept for our private records, but the practice sheets are deleted once the certificate is issued. No one's letter is shown in the Testimonial section except those graduates who have given us explicit written permission to publicly share their letter.

How to send the request and materials

Sending everything electronically is best. The letter can be included as text in the email or attached as a WORD document. The practice sheets can be scanned, photographed with a smartphone, or you may already have recorded these electronically, such as in a WORD or text file. (Hint: If you photograph the practice sheets with a camera or smartphone, you can do two sheets per photo, so all 14 practice sheets will only need 7 photos instead of 14).

If it's too difficult to put the materials in electronic form, you may send them via physical mail, but be sure to keep copies and to include your email address since the certificate will be sent to you electronically. In most cases, you will receive your certificate in a week or two.

Send the request and documentation with "Mindfulness Certificate" as the subject to:

team@palousemindfulness.com

If the material needs to be sent physically, send it to
Dave Potter, 1009 Tolo Trail, Moscow, Idaho 83843, USA

If you'd like to help keep the Palouse Mindfulness freely available to all:

If you found the course valuable, you are invited to make a donation to keep the site alive and to help make the course even more accessible to people around the world. This is not expected or required. Please donate only if you are able and feel moved to do so. See About Contributions.

Graduate Offerings

Once you receive the certificate of completion, you may consider yourself a graduate of MBSR. As a graduate, you will receive the monthly Palouse Mindfulness Newsletter via email. This is the same monthly email you have been getting if you have already joined the Palouse Mindfulness Community. If you'd rather not get the monthly newsletters, just let us know at any time and we'll take you off our list.

After you've completed the course, you may want to take a well-justified rest from videos and readings about mindfulness, but if you find yourself wishing there was more, you're in luck! There are 23 modules in Going Deeper: Graduate Explorations which came from in-person meetings of local graduates with Dave Potter, in which we explored topics in more depth than is possible in the standard 8-week course. Each one of the modules include videos and readings organized similarly to Weeks 1-8 of the Palouse course, and most of them include a video-recording of Dave Potter introducing the topic and guiding a meditation. You can do them in any order, or just choose one or two that look interesting.

A note for those who teach, or wish to teach mindfulness skills:

The Palouse Mindfulness Certificate of completion documents that you have successfully completed this particular 8-week online MBSR course. It does not make you a "certified mindfulness instructor" nor is it certification to teach the MBSR course. This doesn't mean that you can't use what you've learned in your work and/or teaching, it just means you cannot call yourself "MBSR certified" or a "certified MBSR instructor" on the basis of this one 8-week online course alone.

If you are interested in building on what you have learned to earn formal certification in teaching mindfulness, see the training programs listed on the Teacher-Training page. Some, but not all, of these training programs allow the Palouse Mindfulness course to serve as a prerequisite for further training.

That being said, there are many talented people who effectively incorporate mindfulness into their teaching or work who are not certified in a formal way from one of these training centers. They are typically omnivores, finding training from varied sources, from videos, articles, books, or whatever in-person workshops they can find in their area, building on the skills they already have in their own areas of expertise. Whether or not you pursue a certificate specific to teaching mindfulness, if you plan to use any of the materials from the Palouse Mindfulness course, please see “Can I use the Palouse Mindfulness course in my own work or teaching?".