Live Online Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Programs.

Find Inner Strength! Find the Friend Within!
Self-Compassion for better self-care!

“Unlike self-criticism which asks if you’re good enough, self-compassion asks what’s good for you?”-Kristin Neff

The power of being kind to ourselves
Mindful Self-Compassion is an empirically validated approach to reduce stress, burnout, anxiety and depression, while increasing resilience, well-being and better relationships. It consists of short and easy mindfulness and self-compassion practices to use in your everyday life, to calm and soothe, to promote balance, confidence, performance and satisfying relationships.

Making peace with the inner critic
Our inner criticism can sabotage our best efforts, contributing to our anxiety and depression. The harsh inner critic makes our life unduly difficult for ourselves. Harsh unrelenting self-criticism is debilitating. The constant judgements and criticisms contributes to increased difficult emotions, causing us to be unable to respond skilfully or to learn from our experience. We can make peace with our harsh inner voice, to find a friend within, our compassionate inner voice. When we make peace with our inner critic, we become our own best coach; we learn to motivate, to improve ourselves, not out of fear or anger but because we care, and we know our goodness and worth.

What is self-compassion?
Mindful Self-Compassion is the practice of mindfulness with self-kindness associated with the notion of common humanity. The motivation is to soothe and calm in times of stress to increasing the ability to resolve challenges and to enjoy life.  We can learn those skills for ourselves, so we can teach them effectively to others. Everyone will benefit!

Self-compassion has transformed millions of lives. It is redefined as the ability to care, to comfort, but also to strengthen the self when it is needed. It is revolutionising self-care and emotional coping skills in behavioural medicine and psychology. Self-compassion is a way to courageously attend to inner difficulties with understanding and kindness to empower the self. Developing self-compassion is to acquire an attitude of goodwill towards the self and to be able to skilfully attend to the self when times are tough to resolve challenges. In Mindful Self-Compassion we learn to be aware in the present moment of difficult feelings (mindfulness), to by-pass negative thinking bias or default mode, to attend to ourselves with comfort to encourage ourselves to respond more effectively.

Mindful Self-Compassion is not sainthood, self-indulgence, narcissism or self-pity but a way to relate to shame, inner criticism, anger, anxiety and distress by reconnecting with the self and others to ease pain and gain greater emotional strength, resilience and well-being. Training in the practice of self-compassion can create dramatic shift psychologically and behaviourally.

Can we have too much self-compassion?
Even though self-compassion is a powerful source of strength and healing, we have many misgivings about it. Many fear that self-compassion is about self-pity, self-indulgence, weakness, undermining motivation, being irresponsible or selfish. Research shows that individuals who are naturally self-compassionate or have learned to cultivate compassion are none of these. Rather than criticising our self harshly for making a mistake or indulge in pity when we fail, we can adopt a kind but realistic view of our experience. We find a healthy balance between self-acceptance and self-improvement. Self-compassion provides inner emotional resources, fostering a sense of connection with others, to promote genuine caring behaviours for ourselves and others, with the courage and motivation to meet our goals, acting on what matters.

Better relationships at home and in the workplace
Mindful Self-Compassion fosters a positive relationship with yourself as well as with others, at home and at work. In the various programs you will explore how to be a better partner, better parent but also how to be a more effective carer, co-worker, manager and leader in the workplace. Health professionals find new resilience to prevent burnout and caregiver fatigue.  When we become more self-compassionate, the people around us also gain. We become more understanding and compassionate with others.  Everyone benefits!

Mindfulness + Self-Compassion
Mindful Self-Compassion combines the skills of mindfulness and self-compassion to enhance our capacity for emotional wellbeing and happiness. Mindfully we turn with awareness and acceptance toward a difficult experience (emotions, sensations, thoughts), to then attend to ourselves with self-compassion, bringing caring attention to ourselves and our needs. Together, mindfulness and self-compassion create a powerful mindset where we find inner strengths and courage.  Mindfulness and self-compassion promote emotional strength and resilience, allowing us to accept ourselves as we are, to build on our resources, to engage in better self-care,  to motivate ourselves with encouragement, while we are caring for others.

Mindfulness and Self-Compassion aim to:

•     reduce stress burnout, anxiety, depression and caregiver fatigue
•     calm and soothe
•     motivate with courage
•     improve performance
•     manage difficult emotions
•     enable effective problem-solving
•     be more confident and successful
•     promote positive relationships
•     access intuition and creativity

Your most important relationship is with yourself
When we have a good friend to support us to the core, we are happier and stronger. When the friend is within this is even more true. In mindful self-compassion, we learn to become our own best friend by being kind to ourselves in bad and good times, in sickness and in health, when we make mistakes and when we succeed. We are in a relationship with ourselves for the rest of our lives, so we cultivate it to make it a good one!

Is Mindful Self-Compassion effective?
In the last ten years, research has shown that self-compassion promotes psychological and physical well-being. When we practice self-compassion, we are less anxious, depressed or lonely. We experience greater social connectedness, optimism, emotional intelligence, happiness, resilience, better relationships and overall life satisfaction. Being compassionate to our self helps us to carry this compassion towards others, so we can have more healthy and balanced relationships.  

Cultivating self-compassion does not require more time
We all have the capacity to learn self-compassion by cultivating new patterns of thoughts which initially takes an effort, but gradually will become easier and save us time. We focus on what is working in our lives and let go of what is not.  

Can anyone cultivate self-compassion?
 Self-compassion is a specific way of caring for ourselves. This is difficult to conceive if you were raised in a critical, abusive, neglectful or unloving home, where kindness and compassion were conditional or non-existent. Self-compassion can be learned by anyone, even if you did not receive enough affection in childhood or you find it embarrassing to be kind to yourself. It is a courageous mental attitude that stands up to harm, including the tension that we cause ourselves through self-criticism, self-isolation, and self-rumination when things go wrong. Self-compassion provides emotional strength and resilience, allowing us to admit our shortcomings, forgive ourselves, and respond to ourselves and others with care and respect, and be fully human (Kristin Neff and Chris Germer).

Self-Compassion is healing to our core as we learn to re-parent ourselves
The art of self-compassion is to transform our fears, hurts and resistances. We are finding new inner resources as we learn to re-parent ourselves to find a more secure attachment within.  We gradually let in, our own care and affection, to provide inner safety, to heal our emotional difficulties. We learn to respond to our suffering like a good parent would, the parent we wish we would have had. Self-compassion is healing us at the core. It is not therapy, but can it can be very therapeutic.

Who is it for?
Mindfulness and Self-Compassion training programs are for everyone, but they have been especially popular among professionals such as school teachers, counsellors, psychologists, social workers, nurses, medical practitioners, lawyers, occupational therapists, mindfulness/yoga teachers, coaches, managers, students as well as public servants and military/defence personnel. We welcome anyone who wishes to integrate mindfulness and self-compassion in their personal life as well as in their work.

We target a wide variety of professionals in our workshops and use a broad definition. Professionals are defined as anyone who is employed in some capacity to help others, such as in the health, medical, welfare, wellness, legal, business, defence, or environmental sectors. Students are also welcome and can apply for discounts.

We have seen how much this program help professionals in every field, by improving their relationships (with clients, patients, consumers, students and colleagues) as well as alleviate empathetic distress, fatigue and burnout, while increasing their resilience, satisfaction and well being.

Highly Qualified and Experienced Teachers, leaders in Australia in teaching mindfulness and self-compassion
Our main presenters Marie Bloomfield, Clinical Psychologist and John Julian, Social Worker are Senior Certified Mindful Self-Compassion Teachers who have received extensive specific teaching training in mindfulness and self-compassion programs by the founders of the Mindful Self-Compassion program: Christopher Germer,  Kristin Neff, Steve Hickman and others.  John and Marie are health professionals with 40 years each of extensive clinical experience in mental health in the public, corporate, academic and private sectors.

What is Mindful Self-Compassion training?
Mindful Self-Compassion is a program empirically validated, co-created in 2010 by two brilliant psychologists, leaders in the field of mindfulness and self-compassion: Dr Chis Germer and Dr Kristin Neff. This groundbreaking program is built from the findings of the last 30 years of research in mindfulness (including Mindfulness-based Stress-Reduction), self-compassion and neuroscience.

Mindful Self-Compassion presents psychological tools in mindfulness and self-compassion.  Most of the tools take only a few seconds to a few minutes to practice, aiming to ease the stress and difficult emotions during our daily activities. The program also includes guided meditation to better train our mind to be present and compassionate.

Previous experience in meditation is not required. We encourage and support taking time to meditate regularly, but we also understand that it may be difficult for some. The main focus is on applying the practices during the day when you need them.
 
Continued Professional Development (CPD)
A Certificate of attendance will be provided for the number of hours attended to professionals requiring evidence of Continued Professional Development training  (CPD), such as psychologists, social workers, teachers, medical practitioners, nurses, occupational therapists, physiotherapist etc.

Our mission
MindfulPath is committed to offering mindfulness and self-compassion training programs, live Online courses, retreats and workshops at an affordable price in the Gold Coast, Canberra, Sydney and elsewhere in Australia.

Concessions and discounts
Learning mindfulness, self-compassion and compassion can benefit everyone. Therefore, we would like to make the course available to everyone. We don't want finances to be an obstacle to your participation in this program.  We are open to discuss income-based reduction fees. For each workshop, there is a limited number of concessions and scholarships available for students and others involved in the educational, welfare, health and medical sectors.  If you would like to discuss these options further, please contact us via email.

Mindful self-compassion programs are not therapy
The Mindful Self-Compassion programs are educational and do not replace psychological and medical treatments or therapy.

Welcome to our Facebook group
You are also invited to join our community "MindfulPath  on Facebook " where we post daily inspiring quotes, blogs and resources in mindfulness and self-compassion.

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Live your life fully! Live kindly!