Online Mind Body Skills Group - 8 Weeks

Adapted from the Center for Mind Body Medicine (cmbm.org) website's description of Mind Body Skills Groups. See their website for more information about their mission, vision, online groups, and trainings:

Reduce Stress and Build Resilience. Develop Effective Coping Skills. Enhance Well Being. Increase Self-Awareness.

WHAT?

Mind-Body Skills Groups have been developed over the last 30 years according to a model created by The Center’s Founder and Executive Director, James S. Gordon, MD, and the Senior Faculty of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine. These highly experiential and integrative techniques such as meditation, guided imagery, autogenic training, breath work, movement, self expression and other approaches are taught in a supportive environment.

HOW & WHY?

An online Mind-Body Skills Group is grounded in self-reflection. Sharing with others in a structured and intimate group format affords a unique space to acknowledge, honor, and express the various aspects of your experience. Mind-Body Skills Groups support being witness to your own as well as other’s emotions and experiences. We find that sharing and connecting with others creates a wonderful learning and growth environment that supports individual and collective well-being.

Our groups emphasize a sense of community. They are small, with 7-10 people and will meet every Monday for 8 weeks from 6:30-8:30 PM EST starting January 18th, 2021. This format provides an opportunity to begin to integrate the mind-body skills into your life, in a real and practical way, with the support of the group to help you work through any difficulties along the way.

In this online format, you’ll practice the same Mind-Body Skills that we’ve used with hundreds of thousands of people around the world for almost 30 years, and you’ll benefit from the experience of this powerful small group support. Groups have been designed to be practical and grounded into your daily life. You’ll integrate what you’ve learned immediately into your daily life, maximizing your self-care and enabling you to deal more successfully with stress.

WHAT IS THIS NOT?

This is not a webinar nor an open or drop-in group. This is not a therapy group! Instead this is a highly-supportive educational group with a trained facilitator who is also an equal participant in the group.

WHO SHOULD JOIN AN ONLINE MIND-BODY SKILLS GROUP?

Everyone can benefit from a Mind-Body Skills Group. We bring together people of all ages and backgrounds and with a variety of concerns and goals. Everyone who joins should be committed to undertaking a journey – the process of understanding and promoting an innate sense of well-being regardless of the presence or absence of specific symptoms or challenges.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

The evidence-based skills that you will learn have been documented to help lower levels of stress, improve mood, enhance resiliency and optimism, and help prevent chronic health conditions.

These skills include:

• Meditation – Several different kinds, including concentrative, mindfulness, and expressive meditations – all of which promote relaxed, moment to moment awareness.
• Guided Imagery – To mobilize your imagination, to improve physiological functioning, and address concerns and problems that have previously resisted solutions.
• Autogenic training & Biofeedback – To develop control over autonomic system functioning, reduce stress, and bring mind and body into balance.
• Breath Work – Enhance your health through breath awareness
• Movement – To release stress and increase energy.
• Self expression – in words in journaling and drawing, to find solutions to previously insoluble problems

ARE THERE OTHER REQUIREMENTS TO REGISTER?

• Please be least 18 years of age
• Please bring a commitment to participate in all 8 online group sessions (unless unexpected circumstances arise).
• A desire to connect with, relate to, and understand others and their unique experience, equal to your own.