Welcome to the Integrated Mindfulness & Mindful Resilience Enhancement website
This site is an evolving resource for anyone interested in cultivating mindful awareness in their life and work.
We have finalised the dates for our level 1 training - please go to our newsletter page here as we are also in the process of moving to a new website in the next month so we are only doing updates at the newsletter page while we get the new one set up. We have also closed the site to new registrations while the move is happening - to keep in touch please sign up for our newsletter.
There are also details here about our free Thursday evening one-off workshops exploring mindfulness of breath and body in the context of trauma.
Warm wishes
Tim
Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness
The first part of our online training course offers an experiential introduction to Mindful Resilience Enhancement (MRE), a trauma sensitive approach to safely and accessibly teach mindfulness to most individuals and groups. Around experiential practices (essentially a compressed version of an MRE course), we will develop the theoretical framework we have developed that underpins teaching mindfulness safely and accessibly to most people, including those who have experienced trauma.
We believe that a trauma sensitive approach should be the default approach to teaching mindfulness as, to do otherwise, risks the wellbeing of course participants because we cannot know who may be adversely affected by mindfulness practices mismatched to individual need. We also consider that there is no compelling clinical rationale to offer mindfulness courses that are not trauma sensitive. In our experience, teaching mindfulness in a trauma sensitive way helps everyone learn mindfulness more easily and integrate mindfulness more quickly into their lives, regardless of whether they have experienced trauma or not.
The course is also a conversion course for mindfulness teachers who have completed teacher training in approaches such as Breathworks, .B, MBCT, or MBSR and who want to integrate the approaches MRE has developed into their work.
The standard approaches to teaching mindfulness-based programmes tend to be based on the eight week course format of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). From the research evidence, it is clear the format of MBSR (and its adaptations like MBCT) meet the needs of many individuals.
However, there is a growing appreciation that people with previous or current experiences of trauma may struggle with the way mindfulness practices are taught within the standard curriculum of such courses.
Indeed, while cultivating mindful awareness is often an essential part of trauma recovery, mindfulness practices, if poorly matched to the person practicing them, may themselves be traumatising or re-traumatising.
In particular, body and/or breath focused, close-eyed, static and longer practice forms risk overwhelm for some people with trauma, leading to a variety of negative experiences including panic or shut-down. The experience of overwhelm can also be very shaming if the person feels they are the only one struggling in a group where everyone else appears to be benefiting from a practice (even though others may also be silently struggling).
This course will offer participants experience of a wide range of trauma sensitive approaches that are also highly accessible and safe mindfulness practices suitable for most groups whether clinical, community, corporate or educational.
The philosophical framework draws on both person-centred therapy and aspects of CBT around graded exposure and behaviour change. In our experience this approach of starting small and building and to empower participants to adapt practices to their own situation and needs results in lasting integration of mindfulness practice into people’s lives.
The underpinning philosophy of MRE emphasises accessibility and the incremental development of mindfulness and self-compassion rooted in a person-centred therapy and aspects of CBT around graded exposure and behaviour change. As such there is a focus on starting to cultivate mindfulness in a focused and structured way but, unlike many mindfulness based approaches, to do this initially in the context of existing daily routines. Once the principles of mindfulness and a framework of mindfulness in daily life are established there is a firm foundation to explore longer practices to further develop the capacity for mindfulness and self-compassion.
Around the experiential aspects we will explore the theoretical framework underpinning MRE and how mindfulness can be integrated into professional practice.
MRE is supported by an extensive set of free to access audio files (see www.resilience.plus) and information sheets. This ensures that you or your clients using these approaches are not burdened by additional expenses.
MRE TEACHER TRAINING
This course forms the first part of a professional teacher-training programme in MRE.
MRE teacher-training is in 2 levels and a pathway to a competency certificate is available after each level. Level 1 MRE teacher-training focuses on teaching clients to stabilise their attention and self-soothe. Level 2 MRE teacher-training focuses on teaching clients how to turn towards difficulty they are experiencing with self-compassion.
Please be aware that MRE training is designed for professionals with membership of a professional body that has a code or practice or ethics to provide a framework for accountable practice. If you do not belong to a professional body or are still in training please contact us to see whether you are eligible to undertake the MRE training course beyond Level 1, Part 1. Those without a membership of an appropriate professional body may still be able to do the training if you can clearly demonstrate how you will be working in an accountable way when offering MRE. We will need to discuss this on an individual basis.
So although this Part 1 course is open to any students, trainees, professionals and practitioners working in health, educational, social and complementary contexts, Workshops 2 & 3 may not be open to you if you cannot demonstrate how you would be teaching mindfulness in an accountable context.
The mindfulness-approaches you will have the opportunity to learn have been specifically developed to be integrated into both one-to-one professional practice as well as delivered as a course: they form a very safe set of approaches called Mindful Resilience Enhancement (MRE). These approaches are designed to be quickly and easily taught to clients in the session and then the client can practice them between sessions.
In our experience professionals find that when their clients start to practice mindfulness it enhances the client’s responsiveness to the other interventions being offered.
If you sign up for our occasional emailed newsletter we will be sending out more details of the online courses via our newsletter as soon as we have them confirmed.
You may be interested in the materials we are developing as part of our work to offer a very accessible approach to learning mindfulness: Mindful Resilience Enhancement (MRE). This approach integrates mindfulness and self-compassion approaches and can help even the busiest people weave mindful awareness into their lives. MRE also offers a very kind way of working with what troubles us, opening up new ways to respond to the situations we struggle with. There are more details and free downloads here.
You can now easily access most of our free mindfulness audio tracks via our ResiliencePlus* page at SoundCloud.com. This is an audio streaming site that is very easy to use and also has an iPhone and Android App for easy access by phone or tablet. You might find our looped body scan of particular interest as it is a very accessible (and, we think, much kinder way) of practicing a body scan.
We share many of the resources we develop - you can find examples at www.attentioncycle.com. Our chart of Key Capacities, available there, may be of particular interest to mindfulness teachers.
If you are interested in trauma sensitive mindfulness teacher-training there is a self-contained set of 3 course now available that form the first part of our 3 level training. Levels 1 & 2 are a training in teaching MRE, with Level 3 further developing your skills as an Integrated Mindfulness teacher. Each level leads to a competency certificate in teaching specific sets of approaches allowing people to train at their own pace.
Our contact details are on the Getting in Touch page if you would like to find out more.
Our Approach
We are working with fellow professionals to develop an evolving network of people passionate about exploring the potential of mindfulness to enhance our life and work.
We draw on existing experience, research and practice to develop new ways to introduce the practice of mindfulness and its associated concepts to individuals and groups who may be uncertain or resistant to exploring its potential to transform their relationship with their experience of life.
What We Offer
We offer an integrated and bespoke approach to mindfulness practice, teaching and training in community, educational and corporate contexts.
Our particular focus is on how mindfulness can enable us to engage with the roles we play and the tasks and activities of our lives more spaciously, compassionately and creatively. For those also interested in training to teach mindfulness to others this means discovering how to compassionately and creatively introduce mindfulness teaching into one's existing work and how to be mindful in the midst of that very activity of teaching mindfulness.
Get Involved
Whether you just want to experience mindful practice, learn to practice or deliver it through supervised training, or want to be part of a network of mindful professionals, we have a range of ways to be more involved.
A first step is to register with the site to access more information and / or contacting us with any specific enquires.
* 'Resilience Plus' is a Registered Trademark.
For resilience in the context of leadership and coaching we are pleased to refer you to LifeTimesWork who specialise in these fields.
Events Happening Soon: New dates for our online Level 1 and Level 2 MRE are on our Newsletter page
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