Buddhist centers often have options for those who have trouble paying, and mental health providers sometimes will offer a sliding scale. Insurance might cover it if it’s through a health provider. But they are fairly intensive 8 week programs, and instructors have to go through a standard training and certification program, so it’s quite an investment to run them, and I don’t know that you’d be able to find one completely for free, though there might be a recorded or self paced version you can access.

MBSR was indeed based on Buddhist practices. The point of the dedicated sessions is that it helps you build some capacity for mindfulness that you can bring with you to other situations, not that you simply do it and be done with it. That’s also the point of the the full day session of n the program. In addition, they have to have some, specific, defined benchmark in order to study “mindfulness” vs a known intervention. They can’t just get 100 people and tell them to go out and “do mindfulness”.

The MBSR protocol has you do a daily practice of a (usually) 45 minute session of some kind. This is similar to mindfulness training in Buddhist settings where formal meditation periods are typically at least 30 minutes, which is supposed to be in addition to taking a more mindful approach to everything outside of the dedicated practice period.

They used mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR). It’s an 8 week protocol that has you doing about 30 to 45 minutes of some kind of mindfulness practice each day, and has a full day session towards the end of the program. It’s been around since the 80s and if you have a large medical center, mental health center or Buddhist organization near you it’s quite possible they have a course, and I’m sure they have some online as well.

There’s no single definition or conception of mindfulness. It’s meaning and use can vary pretty considerably, but the description from Mindful linked here is probably the most relevant to the study, as it’s from Jon Kabat-Zinn who developed the MBSR protocol and is largely responsible for bringing mindfulness practices into western medicine

What are you on about?

How did you get that 276 is “tiny” for an RCT? Unless you’re expecting a very small effect (in which case you probably aren’t bothering with an RCT) ~200 certainly isn’t tiny.

And what do you want them to do, test it against every single drug that is used for anxiety? That would mean dozens of comparison groups, which would necessitate thousands if not tens of thousand of participants and would basically guarantee some significant effect somewhere. Lexapro is a first line treatment for anxiety which makes it a reasonable choice as a comparison group, which was offered without therapy since that would have been a confound.

MBSR is a standardized protocol that is widely used in therapy and research and can go look up yourself.

The headline is perfectly fine.