Each year the Midwest Alliance for Mindfulness offers a secular mindfulness retreat to the general public that also meets requirements for teachers of mindfulness based programs. Join Mindfulness and Somatic Self-Compassion Teacher Kristy Arbon for 5-days of companionate silence, guided practice and self-care. This unique retreat will offer skills and wisdom in service of resourcing ourselves for being the beneficial change we’d like to see in the world, such that our journey is sustainable, fulfilling and meaningful. A team of supporting teachers, including our partner organization, The Resilient Activist, will offer a variety of practices including mindfulness meditation, mindful movement, mindful eating, yoga nidra, nature connection, etc. Previous experience with retreat practice is recommended. This retreat is intended for the general public, but is also designed to meet requirements for ongoing practice for mindfulness teachers and 7.0 CEs are available for KS & MO licensed mental health providers who attend the entire retreat.

Themes/Practices:

• resourcing ourselves for sustainable engaged mindfulness
• being and supporting the change we’d like to see in the world
• cultivating compassion with equanimity
• working with grief, anger, despair and overwhelm
• contacting our deep interconnection with other beings and the planet
• finding balance
• empowering ourselves
• understanding the importance of embodied inner and outer activism

Learning Objectives for Continuing Education

Participants will be able to:

• identify and create a greater sense of self-compassion to support emotional resilience and help prevent compassion fatigue/burnout;
• identify and create a greater sense of compassion for others to support clear and non-judgmental perspectives of the mechanisms of suffering;
• build on existing meditation experience to better practice moment-to-moment mindfulness meditation and body awareness of thoughts, emotions, sensations, imagery and behavior to support self-awareness and self-regulation;
• identify and skillfully tend to one’s emotional and physical distress by developing kind attention and the ability to make meaning of and tend to suffering, which will assist in working professionally with the suffering of others;
• utilize a strong, developed quality of balanced observing awareness, which will support compassionate presence in professional settings with peers, clients, participants and patients;
• develop interoceptive awareness (identifying and interpreting body messages) to support authenticity and intuition, in order to help navigate ethical issues and emotional material in service of pragmatism, fairness, and justice;
• learn tools for embodied resilience – that can be taught to peers, students, and clients – through trauma-informed practices to calm or awaken the nervous system;
• identify resources in the natural world to support emotional resilience and help prevent compassion fatigue/burnout.

The Teacher: