Mindfulness is a practice that requires you to focus on being hyper-aware of your current feelings and senses without attempting to interpret or judge them. Practicing mindfulness can involve guided imagery, breathing methods, and various other practices that are meant to relax the mind and body and reduce your overall stress.
Practicing mindfulness is not always easy, especially for those who live hectic daily lives. Thankfully, there are a few online courses out there that can help guide us to become more mindful and peaceful.
We’ll be reviewing some of those online courses in this article. Read on for more.
Best Online Mindfulness Courses Reviews
Seven Minute Mindfulness
To understand this mindfulness course, it’s important to know a bit of backstory. Greg Thurton, the creator of the course, was born with a physical injury that made his life difficult at times. To combat this, he took up meditation and yoga. While these practices were making him happier, he struggled to maintain a good schedule and eventually fell out of them.
After becoming frustrated by the constant ups and downs, he took five years to explore the mind’s capabilities, and from this, Seven Minute Mindfulness was born. The course is essentially a series of 7-minute podcasts, with each consecutive ‘episode’ diving deeper into relaxation.
This course is designed to help you release stress quickly to become more deeply relaxed, prime your mind with belief, energy, and motivation, and become more resilient. It is also meant to help you be more patient and gain the clarity you need to make decisions, seize opportunities, and be authentic to yourself.
Udemy Mindfulness Certificate Course
This mindfulness course comes in four ‘levels’: Level I, II, III, and Master. Once you have completed the course, you will, essentially, become certified in mindfulness. You do not need any prior experience, and you’ll be able to take the course wherever you have a stable internet connection.
The course will teach you useful principles based on mindfulness and how to use them with clients, in your relationships, profession, and in your private life. You will learn to enhance your self-awareness and your ability to self-regulate, which will improve your overall social effectiveness.
One of the main benefits of this course is that it teaches you how the mind works by discussing its various components and how these components can be trained to further your personal growth and effectiveness.
If you’re looking to improve your listening skills – and, let’s be honest, who isn’t? – then this is the course for you. You’ll learn how to ask reflective questions and become far more observant when you are interacting with other people.
Universiteit Leiden: De-Mystifying Mindfulness
This course, which is offered by the Universiteit Leiden in The Netherlands, aims to answer all of the questions that you might have about mindfulness. It is an innovative course that combines traditional scholarly inquiry from disciplines like psychology and philosophy with experiential learning. Its ultimate goal is to provide a comprehensive, responsible, and inclusive education about mindfulness as a modern phenomenon.
Like the previous course, you will receive a certificate upon completing your De-Mystifying Mindfulness course, though there is only one level to this one. The deadlines are completely flexible, so you can adjust them to fit into your busy schedule. The entire course will take place over 35 hours, and you’ll gain skills like meditation and ethics.
The course will teach you how to understand the popular conceptions and misconceptions surrounding mindfulness and how to interpret your own mindfulness experiences. You will learn how to compare different therapeutic and psychological mindfulness approaches and evaluate the significance of the practice.
Monash University: Maintaining a Mindful Life
Get ready to do some studying, because the Maintaining a Mindful Life course, which takes place over four weeks, requires you to do three hours of studying each week. While that might sound like tough work, the rewards are worth it.
By the end of the course, you will be able to evaluate the impact of mindfulness, experiment with various techniques, engage in formal and informal practices, and model a more mindful approach to relationships, communication, and emotional health.
The Maintaining a Mindful Life course was designed for those with previous experience practicing mindfulness, meaning that it is a more advanced course. If you have no prior mindfulness experience, there is an introductory course to compliment this one, which Monash University highly recommends completing.
The syllabus is laid out for you on the website, split into the four weeks that the course takes place over. You’ll start with Communication, then move onto Mindful Relationships, then to Cultivating self-compassion and emotional health, and finally, end off with The Big Picture.
Yale: The Science of Wellbeing
In The Science of Wellbeing course by Yale University, you will engage in a number of challenges that were created to boost your overall happiness and help you cultivate more productive habits. In preparation for these tasks, Professor Laurie Santos will showcase some misconceptions we have about happiness and some irritating features of the mind that lead us to think in certain ways.
The course spans a duration of 10 weeks, with each week discussing a different topic. Week One is introductory and will explain why taking this course will benefit you. Then, you’ll move on to some misconceptions about happiness, then to why we have bad expectations, and so on and so forth.
The course covers a plethora of important topics, and by the end, you will learn to appreciate the progress that you have made. There is a financial aid option available to those who need it. You’ll receive a certificate when the course is complete.
Final Thoughts
If you are trying to become a more mindful, self-aware person, then we highly recommend trying one of these best online mindfulness courses. Each one was designed by professionals and provides unique psychological benefits, which will only improve your overall well-being and state of mind. If we had to choose one, then it would be 7 Minute Mindfulness program by Greg Thurston.