This spring, I am excited to launch a new website, Mindful IN MoCo, to support the practice of meditation and to offer mindfulness programming in Montgomery County (MoCo) Indiana (IN).
I started practicing meditation in high school (back in the mid-90s) and was fortunate to have the chance to do an internship at the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School when I was in college. These were important experiences in my life, and I have found mindfulness practice to be an important part of how I manage stress in my own life. But, I had never thought that I would feel a need to teach mindfulness or meditation.
And, that was true for many years, until sometime in late 2022, and January of 2023. Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, I had seen many people around me (friends, family, students, co-workers) dealing with intense stressors, and a feeling of being overwhelmed. I found myself recommending the benefits of mindfulness, and especially mindfulness-based stress reduction (or MBSR). But, for people who were interested, I did not have a good answer if they asked, “where can I take an MBSR class?” Online options certainly existed, and had expanded and improved during the pandemic. However, for people who wanted an in-person option, I did not know of local options.
So, finding myself at a moment where I was reconnecting and deepening my meditation practice, I made the decision to become trained in teaching MBSR, in order to provide mindfulness instruction to my campus and local community, and to allow me to be able to incorporate MBSR into my own research studies.
Since I already had an extensive background in meditation, I was able to start training through the Global Mindfulness Collaborative in March of 2023, and I completed their first level of training in April of this year. At Wabash, I taught an introductory course on mindfulness (Psychology of Mindfulness) in the fall of 2023, and am finishing my first “cycle” of the MBSR class this month. Now, I’m looking forward to working to bring mindfulness practice, and especially the MBSR course, to our local community.
Our first event (outside of Wabash) will be a workshop at Aligned With Green, a local studio, on Wednesday, April 24th.
After this workshop, I am hoping to offer an MBSR class this summer, and hope to have more details to share soon! If you would like to hear more about upcoming events, please do join our newsletter mailing list! And please do contact me if you would like more information.