Mindfulness
Training and Experience
My introduction to mindfulness and meditation began at the outset of my doctoral training in 2011. I was seeking a way to cope with the stressors of graduate school and discovered that integrating regular meditation into my daily life was deeply transformative for me both personally and professionally. What began as a personal process of healing developed into a fully integrated way of understanding what it means to heal human suffering. My curiosity led me to study the scientific literature of approaches including Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and Mindful Self-Compassion.
I continued to grow my personal practice by attending extended silent retreats and more brief clinical trainings. Later in my doctoral training I had the opportunity to share my knowledge and experience as a teaching assistant for courses taught in my graduate program and as a co-facilitator for several mindfulness-based workshops. I also had the privilege of being mentored by Dr. F. Delia Kostner in a 6-month consultation seminar on mindfulness and psychotherapy. As a capstone to my education and training experiences, I completed a dissertation looking at the effects of using a mindfulness-based mobile application on levels of empathy and mindfulness in therapists.
Today I maintain a regular meditation practice and continue to attend trainings and retreats. I would describe my overall approach to psychotherapy as mindfulness informed, which means that when I think about how to define and describe the problems that bring people to therapy and what drives the changes that lead to improvement, I hold in mind a knowledge base that integrates Buddhist and Western psychologies
Professional Affiliations
“Our shared commitment to mindfulness offers us a powerful lens for seeing just what needs tending and a method for learning the art and craft of working with ourselves and relating to one another.”
— Saki Santorelli, Heal Thy Self: Lessons on Mindfulness in Medicine
Listen to my library of free guided meditations
