Mindfulness-Based Professional Training Retreats

It is ironic that in a land of plenty, people suffer from a disordered relationship to food. Our discontent with our lives is reflected in our dissatisfaction with our bodies and how we misuse food. "Eat when hungry, sleep when tired" is a simple, ancient Zen prescription for a satisfying and contented life. But for many people, simply eating is anything but simple. Using the tools of mindfulness we will explore ways in which we can begin to help our patients and clients to regain a healthy connection to hunger, food, and satisfaction.

This weekend program will be primarily experiential. It will include mindful eating- awareness exercises and basic mindfulness meditations that can help your patients reconnect with kindness to the process of eating and to their bodies. It will provide practical ways of integrating mindfulness and mindful eating in working with individuals or in a group setting. The program draws from current research and respected experiential hands-on applications in the field of mindfulness and mindful eating.

In this professional training we will explore the intersection of mindfulness, eating and our relationship to food. Mindfulness can deepen through the exploration of our relationship to eating and food and provide an opportunity to see more clearly the connection of body, mind and heart. It can also be a vehicle for bringing awareness to and through the senses as to how, when, where, what and why we eat.

Through experiential practices and discussion we will:

Review the Principles of Mindful Eating
Explore the components of eating mindfully
Understand the role of hunger and satiety cues
Practice mindful eating exercises
Discuss the role of the habituated mind in disordered eating
Practice loving kindness for body

Teachers

This program will be led by experienced clinicians, mindfulness teachers and retreat leaders, Jan Chozen Bays, MD and Char Wilkins, LCSW.

Jan Bays, M.D.
Jan Bays, M.D., received a BA degree with honors in biology from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, and an M.D. degree from University of California at San Diego. She has taught pediatrics as an assistant professor at UC San Diego and clinical instructor of pediatrics at OHSU. In the late 1980's she helped found the Child Abuse Response and Assessment Center (CARES NW) at Legacy Children’s Hospital in Portland, Oregon, where she served as medical director for ten years. Dr. Bays has written a number of articles for medical journals and also book chapters on aspects of child abuse. Her latest book, Mindful Eating: Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food (Shambhala Publishing, 2009), was inspired by the current epidemic of obesity in America. She currently works part-time for CARES NW as a consultant and lecturer for the Regional Training and Consultation Center in Portland. She lectures on child abuse and mindful eating both in the US and in Japan.

Char Wilkins, M.S.W., L.C.S.W.
Char Wilkins, MSW, LCSW is a psychotherapist who is trained to teach Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, and mindfulness-based eating awareness programs, and trains professionals in the use of mindfulness in psychotherapy, MBCT inquiry skills, and approaches to mindful eating. She specializes in working with women who have experience childhood abuse and trauma, and those who suffer with depression, anxiety and disordered eating. www.amindfulpath.com.

Objectives

At the completion of this activity, the participants should be able to:

Gain familiarity with the foundational components of the Principles of Mindful Eating.
Increase awareness of habituated patterns pertaining to their relationship to food through direct practice and discussion, and be able to differentiate and verbalize the experiences of mind and body.
Explore through informal awareness practices, the importance of physical and psychological hunger and satiety cues.
Understand the central role of mindfulness meditation practice in facilitating self-regulation with regard to eating and food.
Develop an understanding of the value of bringing kindness for the body into the practice of healthy eating and care of the body.

Target Audience

This 2-day workshop is intended for professionals wishing to explore the incorporation of mindful eating and supportive mindfulness-related practices into their one-on-one clinical practice and/or into group work in which eating, food and body are aspects or the central focus. The program was designed for clinicians in mental health or healthcare fields (including nutrition) and clinicians-in-training in these fields. This program can be useful to therapists and counselors not specializing in eating-related disorders as a way to understand experientially, through the lens of mindfulness, the unique opportunity that eating and food provide as gateways to self-awareness and understanding for those who experience anxiety, depression, abuse, stress and/or illness.