Mindfulness-based Interventions With Children and Youth: CANCELLED

Mindfulness is the ability to willingly pay non-defensive and non-evaluative attention to present moment experiences, thus enhancing our ability to choose our reactions, and disengage from inflexible, avoidant and reactive thoughts and behaviours.

Originating from Eastern philosophies over 25 centuries ago, mindfulness has taken hold as a highly effective mainstream professional intervention approach. Its many applications are supported by a solid and growing evidence base and include a wide variety of easy to use exercises and metaphors that help people change.

Mindfulness interventions are particularly well suited to children and youth, as they prioritize direct experiencing rather than verbal understanding, and promote more engaged, lively and playful interactions with clients.

This 3-day workshop provides helping professionals of all backgrounds with the opportunity to develop their own mindfulness intervention skills with special attention to its successful use to help children (8 and over) and young people.

Some of the key content areas Koke will address include:
Practical and conceptual introduction to mindfulness including a simple and contemporary mindfulness-based behavioural model that will help you assess and formulate case plans and guide mindfulness-based interventions with children and youth.

Detailed overview of mindfulness-intense approaches - specifically Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) - including some of the growing evidence supporting their use with children and youth.

Specific Mindfulness based exercises will be presented and practiced to help attendees further develop their understanding and skills in the approach.

How to assist young people to be more mindful across a range of domains in their life. Practice materials and homework exercises will also be developed to help children and young people foster mindfulness in their own real life context.

Mindfulness based interventions that are useful when working with parents and/or families.

Traditional cognitive therapy interventions will be contrasted with mindfulness-based ones. Ways to seamlessly integrate with other approaches will also be discussed.

The focus of this workshop is experiential and attendance at one of Compass Seminars earlier one day introductory workshops is not a prerequisite. Attendees will leave with the confidence to immediately incorporate mindfulness techniques into their work with children and young people, and also in their own personal and professional lives.

Dr. Koke Saavedra (Doctorate in Psychology) is a US based Clinical Psychologist and mindfulness practitioner. He has previously worked in San Francisco for ‘Seeds of Awareness’, teaching mindfulness to children and young people both therapeutically and in the classroom.

He trained and practiced at Berkeley California and is the past Clinical Director of the Berkeley Cognitive Behavioural Therapies Clinic. Koke currently works clinically for the Kaiser Permanente Medical Centre in San Francisco Bay Area, ultilising mindfulness approaches with children and adolescents.

His vast knowledge and experience of mindfulness combined with his dynamic and thoughtful presentation style mean this is a training opportunity not to be missed for all professionals working with children and young people.