Thriving in a Changing World: An Intensive Online Retreat for Mental Health Professionals

“On the other side of a storm is the strength that comes from having navigated through it. Raise your sail and begin.” 

― Gregory S. Williams

Thriving in a Changing World:

An Intensive Online Retreat for Mental Health Professionals

March 10-14, 2023  

ONLINE hosted by the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy (IMP)

With Bill Morgan PsyD, Susan Morgan, MSN, RN, CS, and Ron Siegel, Psy.D.

REGISTER through the IMP website

The Thai Buddhist meditation master Achan Cha was once asked by a western student if he could sum up his extensive teachings. “Yes,” he replied: “not always so.” The COVID pandemic, climate change, political upheaval, our own aging and personal challenges—do we need more evidence that everything changes?

While we welcome some changes, we often resist others, and suffer as a consequence. Mindfulness, especially when practiced more intensively, can help reveal the fluid nature of both consciousness and the outer world, allowing us to live in greater harmony with reality. Along with compassion practices, it can also help us to settle and soothe ourselves, connect more deeply to nature and one another, and find refuge in the present moment.

This intensive online retreat will offer a deep dive into both exploring uncertainty and impermanence and caring for ourselves, developing the resources we, and our clients need to lovingly embrace this changing world on fire.

While an online retreat may sound like a strange idea, it can be a surprisingly powerful format, allowing not only for deep practice, but also cultivating gratitude and appreciation for the simple gifts of home.

You’ll learn tools to restore balance to your heart and mind using varied meditative postures, breathing practices, exploratory exercises, and both stillness and movement techniques designed to investigate challenging realities and integrate difficult emotions.

We’ll discuss how to use these practices ourselves to be more present and responsive in our personal lives and clinical work, as well as how to share them with our clients to help them work creatively with the difficulties that constant change presents for them.

Let’s gather together and support one another as a community of spiritual friends. In addition to receiving mindfulness teachings, instruction, and guided meditations, this retreat will offer ample opportunities to participate in small group discussions and explore personal practice questions.

Please join us!

12 CEs will be offered for this retreat to social workers and psychologists (see details below)

RETREAT SCHEDULE (all times Eastern USA):

You’re encouraged to the extent that you can to use the hours outside of our formal sessions for individual practice

Friday: 7-9 pm

Saturday through Tuesday: 9:00-11:00am, 2:00-4:00pm, 7:00-9:00pm

COST: 4+ day retreat and clinical training, including 12 CE credits

This retreat is offered as a benefit. All tuition payments after administrative costs will go to support equitable access for underserved communities to programs at the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy and the Center for Mindfulness & Compassion at the Cambridge Health Alliance. Please choose to pay according to your ability.

• Benefactor: $500
• Sustainer: $300
• Scholarship: $150 (does not include CE credits)

An opportunity for optional donations (offerings of dana) for the teachers will be provided at the end of the program.

REGISTER through the IMP website

__________________________________________

CONTINUING EDUCATION (CE): 12 CE's available

Learning Objectives:

At the end of this retreat, participants will be able to:

1. Describe the three core components of mindfulness practice.
2. Identify the evolutionary roots and mechanisms of compassion toward self and other.
3. Demonstrate an experiential understanding of mindfulness and compassion interventions through personal practice.
4. Specify how a therapist can best choose which mindfulness exercises are most appropriate for different arousal states.
5. Describe how to use mindful movement to release anxiety-related tension.
6. Identify how mindfulness and compassion practices can enhance emotional regulation.
7. Discuss ways to assist clients to integrate mindfulness practice in their lives, especially during uncertain times.
8. Describe the use of mindfulness and compassion practices to support parasympathetic activation and calm sympathetic activation.
9. Specify contraindications for various mindfulness and compassion practices.