Mindful Self-Compassion for Healthcare, a 6-week course.
The current course is full and I'll be offering it again at some point. You can sign up for email announcements on the Contact page, or email me if you have any questions: modestlymindful@gmail.com. You can also check out my meditations and other offerings on my Media page.
Thanks for your interest in this!
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[Please note that because of my unpredictable schedule I may need to change some of the dates. Thank you for understanding.]
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This course is drawn from the evidence-based Mindful Self-Compassion program developed by the psychologists Kristin Neff at University of Texas, Austin and Chris Germer at Harvard Medical School. There are over 5000 peer-reviewed publications exploring the role of self-compassion in well-being, and research shows that self-compassion skills can be of particular benefit to healthcare professionals, allowing them to experience greater satisfaction in their caregiving roles, less stress, and more emotional resilience. And everything in this class can also be easily adapted to helping patients, family and friends.
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Of course, no training can fix our broken healthcare system and all the obstacles it creates when trying to treat patients. But it really is possible to change how you are affected by that system. This is because we are all caring and compassionate people, but for some reason many of us do not include ourselves in that circle of care—we tend to be unnecessarily harsh with ourselves. And that has consequences. We can’t be all we want to be for those around us, and we don’t even have our own backs when things get difficult. There is something fundamentally empowering when you re-learn how to deeply appreciate and care for yourself, and it isn’t hard to do.
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This course consists of 6 weekly 75-minute sessions, although I’m happy to stay longer to discuss issues that come up. Each session focuses on specific self-care practices for different situations. There will be discussions in both small groups and with the entire group, along with teachings on various topics and several experiential exercises and practices each session. Here is a breakdown of each class:
Session 1: Exploring what self-compassion is and seeing how it does or does not show up for us, and then looking at ways to cultivate it even in the middle of difficulties. This session is a nice standalone offering if you want to check out the idea of self-compassion without committing to the entire course.
Session 2: Seeing how mindfulness plays a crucial role, and how it can be brought into your day even if you barely have time to go to the bathroom. We'll also look at common obstacles and misgivings that surround self-compassion, such as the perception that it is "weak" or leads to being self-indulgent.
Session 3: Looking at ways to motivate ourselves to do our best by bringing compassion to our inner critical voice that, although well-intentioned, drains our energy and resilience by being excessively harsh---often without our realizing it.
Session 4: Using self-compassion to work with difficult emotions, including one of the most valuable practices in the series.
Session 5: Investigating caregiver fatigue and burnout, and how self-compassion can remind us to offer care to ourselves as we attend to the needs of others, even as we are immersed in providing that care.
Session 6: Exploring the importance of our core values in working with burnout, and how self-compassion can help us build resilience by living more in alignment with those values--even if we think we don't have time. We will also look at the resources available to maintain a self-compassion practice going forward.
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This class is very similar to my usual 6-week Mindful Self-Compassion course---so if you have taken that, this will be a redo. The main difference here is that most attendees are involved in healthcare, and we get to commiserate about how hard it is to work within a system that seems specifically designed to create profound moral injury in providers. Having said that, anyone is welcome to attend if you want to learn more about self-compassion; this applies to everyone. (You just may have to put up with lots of comments about healthcare! 😊)
If you want to get a taste of how self-compassion works, you are welcome to just do the first class—it provides a nice experiential foundation. You are also welcome to attend the other sessions as you are able; I’ll be sending out links that go over what we cover in each class so you can review each session on your own. This class is very informal, so if you register you’ll get the additional info whether you can attend or not. You can register here or use the button below. It can be challenging to explore self-compassion if you are going through a difficult time, so please register only if you feel this is a good time to explore this topic---I will be offering it again in the future.
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If you have questions about the class, please contact me directly at modestlymindful@gmail.com. For my background, you can view the “About Me” page. Testimonials are here.
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Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash