Compassionate Mind Training
Would you like to learn how to live better in our complex world?
Compassionate Mind Training might be the answer.
What is Compassionate Mind Training (CMT)?
CMT is an innovative approach to wellbeing based in science and adapted from the ground-breaking work of internationally renowned psychologist, Prof. Paul Gilbert, OBE, creator of Compassion Focused Therapy.
This 8-week course offers the chance to understand why compassion is the answer to living well in a complicated world and offers you the opportunity to develop your own Compassionate Mind. Sessions will be informal and involve: taught content, group discussions, guided experiences, meditative practices, and writing tasks.
When is it?
Wednesdays, 6.30pm to 9.00pm on 8 consecutive weeks starting on 8th January 2020 and running through to the final session on 26 February. You’ll need to be available to attend all 8 sessions. To make the most of it you’ll also invited to set time aside for reading and practice between sessions.
Who’s behind it?
CMT was developed by Dr Chris Irons (clinical psychologist and best- selling author) and is being bought to Bristol by Will Devlin. Will is a clinical psychologist living and working in Bristol. He has a special interest in compassion and trained under Paul Gilbert, completing a post graduate certificate in Compassion Focused Therapy in 2017. Find out more about Will here: www.workinprocess.org.uk
Venue
The Connection Centre (Education Room), St Werburghs City Farm, Watercress Road,
Bristol, BS2 9YJ.
Cost
£30 plus a £2.93 booking fee. The ticket price has been set to cover the cost of venue hire only; if any profit is generated then the entirety will be donated to charity. The ticket price includes 20 hours of contact time, and a host of bespoke downloadable resources comprising an accompanying manual and various guided exercises.
Booking
Tickets are available online from 1 November until 9 December. To book on Eventbrite click here
Further information about the course can be found on this leaflet.
For further enquiries contact Clare at clares_post@hotmail.com
Clare explains the relationship between CMT and Insight Meditation
I am really pleased that Will Devlin is able to offer a training in Compassionate Mind Training and wanted to explain why I asked if he could offer this training to the BIM members.
I first became interested in Compassionate Mind Training (CMT) through reading Christopher Germer’s Book, ‘the Mindful Path to Self Compassion’ I felt there was so much shared ground with my understanding of Buddhism and Insight Meditation. It also seemed to offer me a real understanding of why it’s often so to be with my thoughts, emotions, feelings in a way which was free of blame and offered an evolutionary perspective on being human. That yes there are a ‘thousand joys’, but the thousands sorrows are no picnic, so being human and much of our experience is out of our control and seen through the CMT perspective not our fault. It also resonated with so many teachings from Insight Teachers like Tara Brach, and many others.
Essentially I suffer because I have a body that is raging with chemicals that send me into fight, flight or freeze and loops of fear, anxiety and self-criticism. That none of this is my fault, it’s a quirk if evolution and all of us have this. It seemed to offer understanding and compassion. I didn’t suffer because I wasn’t trying hard enough, or not meditating enough but because I was a human being with this brain evolved for survival just like everyone else.
For me the key was the recognition that part of what we struggle with, in meditation and life is the result of what Paul Gilbert, the founder of CMT calls our ‘tricky’ brains, evolved not for happiness but survival. Tara Brach calls the distress this gives us ‘lymbic looping’.
Paul Gilbert has differentiated CMT from Buddhist practice as being about ‘working with the poison (where are minds are water) and how to turn the poison into medicine, rather than an insight into the nature of water itself.’ But to me it doesn’t matter because it is about understanding why human beings struggle so much and why compassion makes sense. Paul Gilbert first worked with this approach because as a psychologist he saw a lot of people with high levels of self criticism that despite having some perspective on their ‘inner critic’ were still swamped with painful feelings of self -hatred and disgust.
To find out more about CMT see https://www.compassionatemind.co.uk
Will Devlin will be offering this 8 week CMT course, starting in January through BIM
and other networks.
Thanks Clare