Ronald D. Siegel, PsyD
presented by
Leading Edge Seminars
YWCA Toronto – Elm St Location It’s now well-known that mindfulness and compassion practices can enhance virtually any form of psychotherapy and are effective in treating anxiety, depression, chronic pain, and other disorders. But in the wisdom traditions where they originated, they had an even greater potential—they were tools for challenging our usual view of ourselves and the world, for waking up from conventional beliefs about who we are and how to find happiness. This workshop will explore how to use these practices to cultivate psychological resilience and freedom. We’ll see how becoming less focused on judging ourselves and others, and less focused on trying to avoid emotional pain, allows us all to more skillfully handle life’s many challenges. We’ll also investigate how we might more clearly see our thoughts and emotions as automatic, impersonal responses. Rather than seeking a single, secure self, we’ll see how working with our different parts or sub-personalities can foster deep acceptance, so that we and our clients can relate to all experience—pleasant and unpleasant, every-day and traumatic—as opportunities to awaken, grow, and heal the heart and mind. You Will Learn • The core components of mindfulness and compassion practices and when to employ each.
• How to use mindfulness and compassion practices to foster resilience, cognitive flexibility, safe connection, and caring action.
• Ways to move beyond evolutionarily hard-wired concerns with self-esteem and personal comfort to respond to trauma and other challenges with a more open heart and greater psychological freedom.
• How mindfulness and compassion practices can be adapted to create the experience of secure attachment for people who lacked this as children.
• How to adapt mindfulness and compassion practices to treat anxiety, depression, chronic pain, addictions, and interpersonal conflicts
• Ways to use recent neurobiological discoveries to guide the clinical application of mindfulness and compassion practices. About the Author: Ronald D. Siegel, PsyD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychology, part time, at Harvard Medical School and serves on the Board of Directors and faculty of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy. He is author of The Mindfulness Solution ; coauthor of Sitting Together: Essential Skills for Mindfulness-Based Psychotherapy ; and coeditor, Mindfulness and Psychotherapy and Wisdom and Compassion in Psychotherapy: Deepening Mindfulness in Clinical Practice .
website: http://leadingedgeseminars.org | 
