Creating a Healthy Mental Posture with Mindfulness and Self-Compassion

Do you feel your emotions trapped? Do you recognize yourself? Do you recognize those around you? How could you manage these challenges?

This meeting is a space and time to dedicate ourselves to ourselves.

Take control of your emotions with BenThePsychologist and learn to manage them mindfully with the Managing Emotions Mindfully (MEM) program. This program is designed to help you understand and manage your emotions better in order to create a healthier and more satisfying life. Through this shared space and time, you will learn to lead and manage your affective life and build relationships that are both fulfilling and positive.

This program is expected to run for 4 weeks on a weekly basis with sessions lasting approximately 90min. Sessions typically start with a brief warmup activity and then an explanation and guided practice focusing on acceptance, compassion, gratitude, or motivation. This is typically followed by more concrete work on specific techniques or theories. We aim to send you home with concrete exercises each week that you can use to level up your awareness, self-warmth, and ability to manage your emotions.

This program will teach you about mindfulness and self-compassion from a practical mental health perspective. This will include both theory about how these ideas work with emotions, mental health, and daily life and also specific concrete exercises for how to cultivate them and what to do when things seem not to be working.

The course will also be a vehicle for us to create some specific habits together, building a more mindful and compassionate approach to our lives day by day over the length of the course. By creating some brief daily habits of mindfulness and self-compassion, we will set a process in motion that can carry you out of the course and into the rest of your life. You'll leave the course with momentum toward a more mindful and self-compassionate future. Here's a brief outline of what we'll cover:

1. Basic mindfulness and how it relates to mental health.

2. Creating a mindful mental posture and installing it in your life.

3. Compassion, caring, and how to soothe yourself.

4. The basic emotions, what they're useful for, and how to work them.

5. Befriending your emotions and slowly turning them from enemies to allies.

6. A very brief introduction to habit formation.

7. A very brief introduction to values, intentions, and life crafting

 Note: This is an English-language program, and it will be important for participants to feel comfortable speaking and listening in English.

This group is run 100% by donation! So if you think you might be interested, please don’t let cost deter you.

Group Participation:

Of note, this program is more psycho-educational than therapeutically intensive. There will be opportunities for individuals to share their experiences, but sharing deeply about personal topics is not required. In this way, it is more of a mindfulness and emotion regulation workshop than what is traditionally considered “group therapy”. That said, we do utilize partner and small group exercises to keep things interesting, so there will be a fair amount of interpersonal interaction. We actively encourage all participants to take each others’ feelings and confidentiality seriously and problems are very rare.