Creating a Printed Manual

Although it is not necessary to have a printed manual to benefit from the program, having printed materials makes it easier to see what’s been covered, provides a very good reference for later review, and allows you to mark your progress through the course as well as highlighting passages and/or making notes.

You can build your own manual by adding to the manual a little bit each week by following the instructions below, or alternatively, at the bottom of this page are instructions for printing the entire manual at once. This is a good option if you want to have a print shop do the printing - you just direct them to this page and have them use the appropriate link in the note below.

Binder and graphics for the spine and cover

We suggest using a binder and one-inch rings, with clear pockets for the cover and spine (such as an "Avery Durable View Binder with 1-inch slant ring"). Here is the graphic for the cover and title for the spine that we use for our local MBSR class. We usually use white binders for the class since that blends best with the manual cover and spine graphic.

Dividers for each of the 8 weeks

Use an 8-tab divider set to give each week a separate section. You can simply write or print "Week 1", etc. on each tab.

First pages of the manual

Print the following pages for the very first section, before the divider for "Week 1":

Table of Contents
Introduction (printer-ready version of the "Introduction" page)
MBSR: An Overview (this is the article by Roberta Lewis that is mentioned on the Intro page)
Getting Started (printer-ready version of the "Getting Started" page)
Getting Started Worksheet

Contents for Weeks 1-8

The contents for each of the eight weeks can be added later, as you progress through the course. This is the way we do it in the live MBSR class - students get that week's materials at the beginning of each weekly class.

At the bottom of each week's page, you will see instructions for the printing for that week, including, at the very bottom, a link to a "printer-ready" version of that page, formatted for inclusion in the manual (for instance, see Week 1 and scroll down to the bottom of the page). Typically each week's printing will include:

Overview and instructions for that week (use the link to the "printable version" at the bottom of each week's page)
Printed copies of material from "Reading" (use the links under "Reading List" heading)

Some of the articles in the "Reading" sections are long, so if you are able to print them double-sided, that will reduce the bulk of your manual, and stapling each multi-page article will help separate them in your binder.

If you'd like to print the entire manual at once...

This can be done, but it requires a pretty hardy printer and a lot of paper. If your printer can do double-sided printing, use manual-print-double.pdf (~80 pages), otherwise, use manual-print-single.pdf (~120 pages). Even better, just tell your local print-shop to go to this page and print directly from the double-sided link above! Ask them to print it in black-and-white since color will be very expensive. Your print-shop may require this Release to Print letter giving them permission to do this.