About Our Programs
Our Mindful Practice® programs offer a means to enhance your self-awareness, wellness, and resilience in your practice. We can help with addressing, and improving your relationships with patients and colleagues
We offer in-person and online retreat-like workshops designed to energize your clinical work while helping you find joy and resilience and address burnout and moral distress. Through honing self-awareness, deep listening skills, compassion, and community, our programs will help you to flourish at work and navigate the stressful and demanding situations you face daily.
Core Components
Formal and Informal Mindfulness Practice
Mindfulness, a naturally occurring human capacity, is the awareness that arises by paying attention, on purpose, to experience as it unfolds, with the goals of greater understanding, compassion, and wisdom. We believe that mindfulness is an essential quality of excellent health care. We are all endowed with the capacity for mindfulness, which can be further cultivated through various means, among them meditative practices, physical activity, conversation, poetry, music, and others.
We have designed the secular formal contemplative practices in the Mindful Practice in Medicine program to enhance your awareness of the stream of thoughts, the flow of feelings, and the current of sensations that usually go unnoticed yet inform action and behavior from moment to moment. Through regular practice, it becomes possible to step out of the “automatic pilot”, and experience and act with greater awareness.
Informal mindfulness practice refers to fostering the same quality of awareness during everyday life at work. We offer to “practice” informally during the entire Mindful Practice in Medicine program, including during meals, casual conversations, group discussions, and narrative exercises described below.
Narrative Medicine
Narrative Medicine provides a way to understand both the personal connections between clinicians and patients and the meaning of medical practice and experiences for individual physicians. The sharing of clinician narratives reflects clinicians’ values and beliefs, how these become manifest in the clinician-patient relationship, and the influence of the social and cultural environment that surrounded their creation.
Narrative medicine in the Mindful Practice in Medicine program involves sharing stories that arise from the participants’ professional experiences. These include reflection, dialog, and discussion in large and small groups, specific writing exercises, and journaling.
Program participants share narratives from their own personal experiences that have affected them on cognitive and emotional levels. Sometimes participants discover the impact of these experiences through the processes of reflection and recollection with a partner or partners engaged in the process of deep listening. We emphasize confidentiality and support; participants are encouraged to care for themselves, sharing narratives they feel comfortable with given the environment of the group.
Appreciative Interviews and Appreciative Inquiry
Appreciative Inquiry strives to foster growth and change by focusing participants’ attention on successes rather than problems and challenges. Much of medical training focuses on what is wrong rather than what is right. Patients are described in terms of problem lists, but there are no defined places to describe their strengths and resources. Morbidity and mortality rounds focus on analyzing bad outcomes, but there are few opportunities to explore effective teamwork and joint decision-making. Originally designed to build more resilient and vision-focused organizations, Appreciative Inquiry fosters imagination, innovation, and teamwork.
Appreciative Interviews use reinforcement and analysis of positive experiences. In that way, they build on individual strengths and positive behaviors, in comparison to a problem-oriented approach that focuses on negative experiences or failures. Appreciative interviews involve the art of asking questions that acknowledge, anticipate, and heighten positive potential.
Mindful Practice in Medicine guides participants in the application of Appreciative Interview techniques when engaged in dialogues, discussion, and reflection. With practice and support, this approach can become second nature.
Program Themes
Mindful Practice in Medicine programs consists of a series of educational modules, each thematically oriented around a particular topic relevant to clinical practice. A Mindful Practice in Medicine program includes one or more modules that we choose based on learners’ specialty, goals, level of training, and other factors.
In each module, we offer didactic, contemplative, and interactive elements, with detailed guidelines for each exercise. After each exercise, we have inquiry-oriented discussions and debriefings in which participants share experiences, insights, challenges, and questions. Our goal is to develop a learning community as participants see their expertise and the expertise of others as ongoing resources.
In the interactive didactic portion of each module, we outline the structure and purpose of the session and present material related to the theme of the module. Presentations are deepened by discussion and inquiry.
Guided contemplative exercises generally comprise about 1/3 of each session. These include meditative practices and other experiential exercises guided in a manner that weaves in with the theme of the given module.
Dialogue exercises (narrative medicine, appreciative interviews, insight dialogues, etc.) comprise about 1/3 of each session. Participants prepare narratives relating to the theme of the module and engage in dialogue with 1-2 other participants. We provide specific guidelines for deep listening, emphasizing that deep listening is as important as the sharing of stories; we integrate informal mindfulness practice into the listening experience. We also provide guidance regarding the use of reflective questions to encourage deeper inquiry into the experience of the storyteller.
Our Core Themes
Noticing – Our ability to notice, perceive, and discern
Teamwork – Our capacity to work effectively with others
Suffering – Our responses to others’ suffering, being compassionate while cultivating resilience
Conflict – Working more effectively in conflict with patients, peers, students, colleagues, and supervisors
Errors – How and why we make errors, and how to work more effectively with
Uncertainty in Medicine – Working with the inevitable dynamic of uncertainty in clinical practice and bringing awareness to the cognitive and emotional challenges that uncertainty entails
Compassion for others – Cultivating compassion for all others regardless of our feelings of worth or merit, including self-compassion, recognizing burnout, and enhancing personal well-being
Professionalism – Exploring how ethics and professionalism are functions of our mindful attention and awareness
Grief and loss – Investigating clinician grief and loss as an inevitable byproduct of empathy and compassion, and how to use this understanding to maintain personal and professional well-being
Resilience – The capacity to respond to stress healthily, bouncing back after challenges while growing stronger
Register now
Spots are filling-up for our next Mindful Practice Workshop. Register today to be sure to get your place.
