Ethical Mindfulness
From mindfulness to responsible action
Mindfulness that includes action, relationship, context, and consequence.
An open platform and the MBEL practice path for everyday ethical life.
Some features are still being rolled out or in beta.
What you can do here
Everything in one place. A home for the whole field of mindful, ethical living — its ideas, its practice, its people, and its resources.
Find courses and events. Discover courses, workshops, talks, meditations, and gatherings related to mindfulness, ethics, compassion, responsibility, social engagement, and mindful living.
Connect with others. Meet people, groups, teachers, and projects who share an interest in bringing mindfulness into everyday ethical life.
Share and contribute. Add events, recommend resources, start conversations, offer projects, or support others in building a more mindful and responsible culture.
Explore resources. Find texts, videos, practices, and reflections that connect mindfulness with ethics, habits, relationships, structures, and action.
Why Ethical Mindfulness?
- Many people first learn mindfulness as a way of pausing, sensing, and becoming aware of what is happening within us and around us. These are valuable starting points. But mindfulness can also open a wider field: the field of our actions, relationships, habits, social structures, and consequences.
- Ethical Mindfulness brings this mindfulness into everyday life — into moments of choice, conflict, communication, care, responsibility, and social engagement.
- It is not about moral perfection. It is about learning to notice more clearly, pause more wisely, and respond with less harm and more care.
In many Western contexts, mindfulness has been separated from its ethical roots and reduced to a tool of self-regulation. Ethical Mindfulness and its practice path, Mindfulness-Based Ethical Living (MBEL), point in a different direction: here, ethics is not imposed from outside, but grows from mindful attention to our conditioned reactions and to the effects of our actions on others, relationships, communities, and the wider world. They show how mindfulness can once again support a way of life that is responsive, responsible, and caring toward others and the world.
What Ethical Mindfulness is about
- Ethical Mindfulness connects inner awareness with responsible action. It asks simple but important questions:
- How do I respond when I feel pressure, fear, anger, or uncertainty? How do my habits shape the way I treat myself, other people, and the world around me? Where do my actions create harm, trust, distance, care, or possibility? And how can mindfulness become a path of ethical practice in everyday life?
- Ethical Mindfulness is not an abstract theory. It is a practice of seeing situations more clearly, understanding our habitual reactions, and cultivating wiser responses in real-life moments.
- This is what Mindfulness Based Ethical Living – MBEL – puts into practice — the guided practice path at the heart of Ethical Mindfulness, where it is learned step by step.
THE COURSE
Mindfulness Based Ethical Living - MBEL
MBEL is a course and practice path for working with the Ethical Habit Loop one situation at a time:
CLEAR
Catch the first ethical noticing
Look wider
Examine the reactive loop
Align with care and responsibility
Respond into the world.
It is an eight-unit course for people with some mindfulness experience — not primarily a meditation course, but a guided training in seeing situations more clearly and responding to them with more care, in relation to yourself, to others, and to the wider world.
The course is secular, practice-oriented, and grounded in one simple question: how can mindfulness help us live with less harm, more care, and greater responsibility?
Where Ethical Mindfulness comes from
Ethical Mindfulness startet to grow out of Dr. Jochen Weber’s work on mindfulness, secular Buddhism (founder of BuddhaFoundation), ethics, and habit transformation, around a single question: what would it mean for mindfulness to shape not only how we feel, but how we act, relate, and take ethical responsibility?
The approach took shape in dialogue with Stephen Batchelor and was further developed over two years with the international MBEL-Workgroup of mindfulness and dharma teachers.
The current MBEL course is rooted in that work and continues to evolve in a new workgroup as a practical path for bringing mindfulness into everyday ethical life
ETHICS IS MORE THAN ONE
Join the community
Ethical Mindfulness is an open platform for people who want mindfulness to become part of everyday ethical living. You can join for free, explore resources, connect with others, and take part in courses, events, and projects.
Whether you are a practitioner, teacher, organizer, researcher, or simply curious, you are welcome
ETHICAL MINDFULNESS
The book
A book on Ethical Mindfulness and MBEL by Dr. Jochen Weber is currently in preparation. It develops the vision behind this platform, the ethical foundation and the practice path of MBEL in greater depth: mindfulness becomes ethical when clear seeing opens into responsible action — in our habits, relationships, communities, and ways of living together.
More information will be announced here.
