Mindful Psychotherapy 2018
Integrating Mindfulness into Emotion-Focused Therapy

Dates: Saturday October 20, Sunday October 21
Saturday November 17, Sunday November 18
Saturday December 8, Sunday December 9, 2018
9:00am-5:00pm each day
(all 6 days to be attended)

Fee: $995 (includes daily breakfasts, mid-morning & afternoon refreshment breaks)

The MSPI Mindful Psychotherapy 6-day skills-based workshop trains participants in how to clinically apply and teach mindfulness meditation in psychotherapy, using an emotion-focused mindfulness therapy approach that emphasizes therapeutic presence and empathic following and responding to emotions as adaptive resources in meditation and therapeutic encounters with clients. Emotion-focused mindfulness therapy integrates emerging secular Buddhist perspectives and meditation practice into emotion-focused therapy to enhance the ability of clinical mindfulness to deepen experiencing, transform deeply conditioned maladaptive emotional patterns, and cultivate human flourishing. The approach provides a particularly coherent way for people to be introduced to mindfulness and to be supported in developing mature mindfulness practices in clinical and professional training contexts. Rather than feeling better, the emphasis is on getting better at feeling, so that our feelings help us better navigate our lives.

The training integrates didactics, meditative practice, experientially-grounded inquiry, reflection, videos, live modeling, supervised role-playing practice, and clinical- and theory-based discussions. Weekends also include brief, gentle movement sessions clinicians can easily share with clients. The MSPI Mindful Psychotherapy workshop teaches an experientially open meditation approach that emphasizes a receptive, responsive relationship with embodied mind states and emotions. This gentle, psychologically-oriented meditation is accessible to long-time meditators and beginners alike.

What Past Participants Have Said About Our Mindfulness Workshops:

“The entire workshop was instructive and constructive and felt myself and others were honoured in their experience.  Thank you so much!”

“Life-changing experience.”

“…a wonderful course and learning experience.  Learning has never been so gentle!”

Who Should Attend?

Clinical professionals and students providing counselling or psychotherapy from all professions, including psychiatry, family practice, psychology, social work, nursing, occupational therapy and spiritual care (chaplaincy), whether new to mindfulness or established mindfulness teachers.

Learning Objectives

At the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:

• Assess, teach and coach clients in how to use mindfulness in psychotherapy
• Recognize and empathically follow emotional process in self and others (includes thoughts, feelings and somatic experience)
• Facilitate marker-oriented, process-experiential, emotion-focused therapy empathy, relational, experiential, reprocessing and enactment tasks for enhancing emotional intelligence
• Ground and calm clients struggling with overwhelming affect through brief, guided mindfulness exercises

Faculty

Bill Gayner, BSW, MSW, RSW, has trained and mentored mental health professionals in mindfulness for over a decade, and has practiced mindfulness meditation for over 30 years. An Adjunct Lecturer at the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, U of T, and Mental Health Clinician at Mount Sinai Hospital, he teaches mindfulness to outpatients in psychiatry, people living with HIV, and hospital staff. He led a large RCT of mindfulness for gay men living with HIV, and is developing emotion-focused mindfulness therapy, for deepening empathy for self and others and cultivating our own and others’ flourishing.

Jeanne Watson, PhD, C. Psych, is a Professor in the Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development at OISE/University of Toronto. As a major exponent of humanistic-experiential psychotherapy, she has contributed to the development of emotion-focused therapy, the process-experiential approach. In 2001, she received the Outstanding Early Career Achievement Award from the International Society for Psychotherapy Research and served as president of the International Society for Psychotherapy Research from 2014 through 2015.

Dr. Watson has co-authored and edited seven books on psychotherapy and counselling practice, including Learning Emotion Focused Therapy: the Process-Experiential Approach to Change (2003); Expressing Emotion: Myths, Realities, and Therapeutic Strategies (1999); Client-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapy in the 21st Century (2002); Handbook of Experiential Psychotherapy (1998); Emotion-focused Therapy for Depression (2005), Case Studies in Emotion-Focused Therapy for Depression (2007) and, most recently, Emotion-Focused Therapy for Generalized Anxiety (2017) as well as more than 70 articles and chapters. She conducts trainings in emotion-focused therapy in Europe and North America and maintains a part-time practice in Toronto. 

Register Now!

Registration will close automatically when capacity is reached.

Cancellation and Refund Policy

A $50.00 handling fee will be deducted upon cancellation.  Refund requests must be received in writing at least 2 weeks prior to the start date.  In this 2 week period, 50% will be refunded. However, after the start of the workshop, no refunds will be given.