Julianna Raye.

i.The curriculum.

Julianna Raye has been training individuals and groups in the Unified Mindfulness system for over two decades. She designed the Unified Mindfulness Teacher Training, the certification path that produces the teachers and coaches who deploy the system in clinical, corporate, and athletic settings.

The system itself comes from Shinzen Young, who developed it over more than fifty years of research and teaching across contemplative traditions. As CEO, lead curriculum designer, and head trainer at Unified Mindfulness, Julianna is the steward of how that system is taught, how new teachers are certified, and how the curriculum evolves. The lineage chain that anchors MindSize Sports begins with Shinzen, runs through Unified Mindfulness, and is co-authored, in this sport-specific application, by Julianna and Christian Straka.

ii.The science, in the room.

Julianna designed and led the mindfulness program for the workplace research study run by David Creswell, PhD at Carnegie Mellon University’s Health and Human Performance Lab. The study showed improved employee wellbeing and reduced stress. She is co-author of the two peer-reviewed papers published from that work, in Mindfulness and the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. A defining feature of the study, and of the Unified Mindfulness system more broadly, was the emphasis on applying mindfulness techniques inside daily life rather than only on the cushion.

Her own brain has been studied in neuroscience labs at Vanderbilt, the University of New Mexico, the University of Arizona, and in a published UCLA study comparing long-term meditators with non-meditators. With David Creswell and Mat Polowitz, she co-founded Equa, a closed-loop interactive app for training equanimity built on the UM model. The research footing of the work sits inside her practice, not adjacent to it.

iii.Today.

Julianna serves as CEO, lead curriculum designer, and head trainer at Unified Mindfulness, where she leads the teacher training programs and the yearlong certification path for those becoming UM teachers. She is co-founder of MindSize Sports with Christian Straka, the sport-specific application of the system she has spent over two decades teaching.

Her practice across the mindfulness and Zen traditions, deepened through more than twenty thousand hours of formal training, is the source from which the curriculum is taught. The MindSize Sports program is one expression of that curriculum. The curriculum precedes the program, and the practice precedes both.