This immersive program provides hands-on learning in a retreat format
People with PTSD, anxiety, depression or chronic pain often struggle with emotional regulation and distress tolerance. They have an impaired ability to access thoughts, and feelings and difficulty asking for help or navigating counseling. This can leave them and their helpers feeling stuck and repeating strategies and recommendations with no improvements. Helping people connect with their body and learn how to interpret its signals provides a pathway to learning a new therapeutic language.

Mindfulness, Biofeedback, and Compassion Approaches to Optimal Health

Participants will learn mindfulness, biofeedback, and compassion approaches to improving health for individuals with complex symptoms such as trauma, anxiety, depression, or chronic pain. Discussion will surround the purposeful use of therapeutic language to improve how individuals connect with their bodies and learn how to interpret its signals. Participants will explore ways to clarify treatment goals and measure improvement. Mindfulness, compassion, and biofeedback techniques have been rigorously studied and demonstrated to improve numerous physical and emotional health symptoms including those associated with chronic pain, anxiety, stress, and depression. In biofeedback treatment, individuals learn about their emotional state by taking biological/physiological measurements, such as temperature, respiration rate, or heart rate variability, and use that information to choose techniques to target and change symptoms of high stress or dysregulation.

Participants will learn about the research behind biofeedback, as well as use multiple biofeedback modalities to practice in real-time. Through learning and practicing with biofeedback, participants will review and “see” physiological functioning in real-time, while applying evidence-based relaxation and stress reduction strategies. Participants will explore and test relaxation strategies for improved physiological response (discover what really works on your nervous system and what does not).