A Nurturing Exploration of Your Heart, Body & Mind
with Psychotherapist and Meditation Teacher Dr. Karen Walant
With increased awareness, acceptance and compassion, we can make wholesome, skillful choices that are of real benefit to ourselves and our wellbeing and begin to live with more contentment, peace and grace.
Do you want to learn new, proven and effective ways to relate to unwanted thoughts and feelings, develop compassion-based skills to cultivate your inner nurturer and respond to thoughts and feelings in intentional, kinder and mindful ways?
Would you like to become more of a friend to yourself, reducing internal distress and experiencing greater ease, joy and peace in your daily life?
If so, I invite you to join me for a Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) online class that meets weekly for eight weeks and provides you with cognitive skills and mindfulness practices that can help you build, cultivate and enhance a supportive, nurturing relationship with yourself. The most primary relationship we have is the internal one we have within ourselves, and that relationship affects the relationships that we experience with others and the greater world.
Mindfulness & Meditation Can Rewire The Brain
We live in a busy, distracting, oftentimes overwhelming and even frightening world. Rates of people suffering with depression, anxiety and loneliness continue to increase, with more and more people feeling disconnected from themselves and the world around them.
Even within (or, perhaps, because of) this chaos and confusion, so many of us are trying to improve our mood and get our lives back on track, and we need strategies to both help us get well and stay well. In a search for the beauty, joy and peace that also exist in our human psyches and complex world, more and more people are looking for holistic, noninvasive and sustainable ways to ease their suffering and experience more contentment in their day-to-day lives. While medication works for some people, it isn’t the right choice for others, and there are approaches to treating depression, anxiety and other alignments that we can learn to access within ourselves.
Scientific research continues to catch up with what meditators, yogis and mindfulness practitioners in the East have known for thousands of years. Regular practice of mindfulness and meditation can literally rewire our brains, and consistent practice comes with a multitude of mental, emotional and physical health benefits. These positive impacts include everything from reducing anxiety and depression to increasing the vitality of the immune system, lowering blood pressure, improving sleep and even coping with pain.
Understanding Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)
MBCT (Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy) combines mindfulness meditation practices with principles from cognitive therapy.
Mindfulness helps us focus our awareness on the infinite possibilities found in the current moment of NOW—rather than ruminating over the past or worrying about an uncertain future, which is at the crux of what creates suffering. The therapeutic and ancient practice of mindfulness is composed of techniques that help keep us anchored to the present while gently noticing and allowing thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations to arise and then release with acceptance and kindness rather than judgment.
Cognitive therapy is a type of psychotherapy that helps to identify, explore and challenge patterns of unwanted thoughts, beliefs and perspectives about yourself and/or the world, which can then help to change behavior and improve mood.
This intersection of Eastern mindfulness practices with Western cognitive therapy was first developed by mindfulness expert, best-selling author and Professor of Medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who is attributed with bringing the practice of mindfulness to the West. Also known for his internally renowned Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program that launched in 1979, Kabit-Zinn’s work has been used as a blueprint to treat all kinds of mental, emotional and physical ailments, including depression and anxiety, which MBCT addresses specifically.
Since its onset, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy courses (generally completed over eight weeks) have helped thousands of people experience more peace, joy and ease while reducing the frequency and duration of suffering, especially in the treatment of recurrent depression and/or anxiety.
The MBCT course was specifically designed to help us identify, explore and reframe the self-limiting, negative, critical and shameful thinking patterns that cause suffering. When we are able to interrupt patterns and get off of autopilot and out of our own way, we create the space to develop and foster new, kinder and more empowered ways of thinking, caring for ourselves, and relating to the world around us.
8-Week Online MBCT Course: A Nurturing Exploration of Your Heart, Body & Mind
This small group, weekly online course is designed to help you tap into your heart, body and mind; learn how to really listen to your inner experience; and explore and utilize mindfulness and cognitive therapy techniques to reduce suffering, manage anxiety and depression, and experience greater ease and joy in life.
In a safe space with professional, compassionate support, you can begin to turn toward that which you have the tendency to avoid. You’ll learn specifically designed meditations and cognitive behavioral strategies, which we’ll practice over the course of the program, to help access inner wisdom and connect with and cultivate your inner nurturer. As you become friendly with your mind and kinder to your inner self, you’ll gain invaluable resources to navigate life’s inevitable challenges and become a trusted partner to yourself.
Integrating current developments in neuroplasticity with ancient wisdom, the MBCT course offers powerful mind-heart-body tools and techniques to break free from prolonged periods of suffering. You’ll learn how to turn your mind into a skilled ally that supports you in both immediate and long-term health and healing, while helping you manage the ups and downs of everyday life.
Over the course of eight 2 hour weekly sessions and one full day in an online retreat, you’ll learn, explore and develop new, empowering and effective skills. Some of the themes and topics covered include:
Awareness & Automatic Pilot
Kindness & Self-Compassion
Living in Our Heads & Gathering the Scattered Mind
Recognizing Aversion
Allowing & Letting Be
Thoughts Are Not Facts
Taking the Best Care of Ourselves
Maintaining & Extending New Learning
Mindful Practices
My Approach To MBCT
As a psychotherapist with almost 30 years in practice, a certified meditation teacher and a lifelong meditator with a strong interest in Buddhist psychology, compassion and befriending the self, I offer this course with a strong desire to help you gain freedom from negative thinking patterns and feel more stable, steady and comfortable within yourself and the world.
Over decades of work in psychotherapy, mindfulness and meditation, I have learned both personally and professionally that increasing our awareness—both of our inner and outer landscapes—is what leads to experiencing a greater sense of freedom. Most of us have an inner critic that lives within us and, for many, that critic is so ingrained that we might not even realize how much its judgements and unkindness affect all aspects of our lives.
However, once we become aware of this critic and learn how to befriend rather than berate ourselves—developing and fostering our inner nurturer—we become more able to offer ourselves compassion and grace. As we work to get out of autopilot through mindfulness practices, expanding our awareness and increasing our ability for acceptance of everything that is within us, rather than continually trying to push it all away, we can begin to release old patterns and grow new, more mindful and compassionate ways of being with ourselves.
As a therapist, meditation teacher and devoted practitioner, I’ll meet you where you are and intentionally designed my offering of this course to be done in small groups so that everyone feels heard, supported and seen. You do not need any experience in mindfulness or meditation to take the course, although it is important that you feel resourced coming into the program and can commit to 2 hours of live class each week, one full-day retreat and one hour of practice every day throughout the duration of the course.
MBCT Course Details
The next offering of this course will begin in February 2024. Dates and times for the classes and retreat are coming soon.
The cost of the MBCT course is three tiered - Benefactor is $700; Sustainer is $550; Scholarship: $350. As it’s important that all people have access to this valuable information, a sliding scale option is available. If you’re in need, please contact me directly. The cost of the course includes eight 2 hour weekly classes and one full day retreat, which will focus on learning and practicing mindfulness practices.
We’ll meet in a small group on Zoom. The class link and materials will be provided to you before the first class.
Also before the course begins, I’ll also meet with each of you individually over Zoom for us to get to know each other. This will also be a good time for you to ask questions and express any thoughts, goals or even reservations that you might have about the course.
Bring a friend -- taking this course with a friend or spouse is a great way to deepen your experience, and there's a 10% discount to both you and your friend, no matter what level of entrance you choose.
Contact me directly at kwalant@gmail.com to pre-register.
Live With More Contentment, Peace & Grace
If you’re looking for evidence-based techniques that weave together best practices from mindfulness and cognitive therapy, want to engage in a journey of self-exploration and begin making skillful choices in how you think and feel toward yourself and the greater world, I’d love for you to join the MBCT Course. The Nurturing Exploration of Your Heart, Body & Mind through the empirically-proven MBCT framework can help you explore, be with, and shift your thoughts and feelings so that you feel supported in new and kinder ways.
If you have any questions about the course and/or are wondering if this healing group work in mindfulness and cognitive therapy would be beneficial to you at this time, please feel free to contact me directly.
Dr. Karen Walant has been a practicing psychotherapist for almost three decades and holds a MSW and PhD in Clinical Social Work from New York University. Karen supervises other clinicians in private practice and has given lectures around the country on issues related to attachment, mindfulness, meditation, addiction and recovery; deepening the therapeutic relationship; parenting with kindness; and fostering compassionate relationships. She is the author of Creating the Capacity for Attachment: Treating Addictions and the Alienated Self. A long-time meditator, Karen is also a 2021 graduate of the 2-year Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training Program (taught by meditation experts Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield), is certified as a Mindfulness Meditation Mentor, and is certified as a Level I Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) Teacher through Brown University.
For more information on how to befriend your depression and/or anxiety—rather than continuing to try to suppress it—and how mindfulness and meditation can help, watch this Tedx Talk by Dr. Zindel Segal, The mindful way through depression.
Dr. Segal is a cognitive psychologist, specialist in mood disorders and one of the founders of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. His research examines the use of mindfulness meditation in promoting mental and emotional regulation skills in people suffering with anxiety and depression based disorders. An insightful, intelligent and informed teacher, Dr. Segal was one of the three teachers who facilitated the MBCT certification course I completed at Brown University.