Mindfulness Techniques to Promote Culturally Appropriate Engagement

Attention to a client’s culture is at the core of counseling services. Working within a client’s values and beliefs must be a lifelong commitment and not restricted to training alone, as cultural competence is a journey and not a destination. Two distinct paradigms available for training are the Multicultural Counseling Competence Model and the Cultural Humility Model. These two models provide structure for working within a client’s culture. The authors propose the integration of mindfulness techniques into classroom training activities to move beyond superficial application and into ownership of culturally appropriate engagement.