Skills for Living: Mindfulness and Meditation for Chronic Health Conditions
Living with a chronic illness and or pain can not only be debilitating but becomes the unrequested focal point of life.
Fortunately there are tools to support living with chronic pain or illness, many coming from the mindfulness and meditation traditions. Equally fortunate is that more teachers of meditation and mindfulness have utilized these tools to help themselves, so the skills have been personally tried and tested over time.
We are emphasizing the direct experience of living with chronic pain and illness because what each of us is teaching is not conceptual – it’s what has worked.
Developed and mentored by Jill Satterfield and Cynthia Wilcox PhD.
Cynthia Wilcox:
Cynthia Wilcox is a psychologist and a mindfulness and meditation teacher. Working from the wisdom of multiple traditions: embodied meditation, somatic therapy, and mindful awareness, she empowers students to navigate their way toward healing as they learn the skills to work with strong emotion and reactivity, as well as physical symptoms and pain. Her personal spiritual journey includes coming to live from embodied presence and listening to the wisdom of the body. Her health journey is lifelong, including symptoms and illnesses not identified or understood for many years, and a more recent significant and challenging diagnosis. Her aspiration is to live well with chronic illness, rather than framing the journey in terms of battling, winning, or losing. All of these experiences are teachers on the path of awareness, allowing, and deep compassion.
Jill Satterfield:
Jill sought out meditation after being repeatedly told that her chronic pain was all in her mind. Discovering that she indeed had choices about how her mind responded and related to her body, how her mind and heart could include physical (mental and emotional) pain not be ruled by it, and that she could cultivate a kinder relationship to her mind/body she was hooked.
She began teaching after years of retreat and living the benefits of meditation practice, somatic psychology and better understanding of the subtle body.
Together Cynthia and Jill have the passion and intention to share as much of their personal and teaching experience with others as they can so that many more might share tools to be of benefit to communities with compromised health.
Please join us in this series of online classes created to empower you in living with chronic health conditions. These specially chosen teachers have been trained in mindfulness and meditation, and are being supervised by Jill Satterfield and Cynthia Wilcox.
*Audio recordings of the practices you’ll be guided into will be sent to you each week
* Class size is limited to foster community
Leah Samaha
and Jessica Dixon
2022 Class Schedule:
2:00– 3:30 pm PT; 5:00-6:30 ET
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Leah Samaha
Jessica_Dixon
Jessica Dixon
Teacher Bios
Leah Samaha is a mindfulness and meditation teacher, educator, and facilitator. With a background in yoga and mindful movement and a deep interest in somatic psychology, Leah passionately explores embodied approaches to mindfulness and meditation. At the age of 28, she experienced her first ever migraine that quickly transformed into debilitating daily headaches. While the traditional medical model considered her a mystery, mindfulness and meditation offered a roadmap (though squiggly and not very linear) towards greater friendliness and compassion with her body and mind. Leah’s teaching style and practice interweaves curiosity, compassion, and embodied awareness. She is a current student in Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach’s Mindfulness and Meditation Teacher Training Certification program, and deeply honors her teachers Be Shakti, Jill Satterfield, Jonathan Foust, and Talya Vogel.
Jessica Dixon is a Mindfulness and Meditation teacher and coach, living in Chicago, IL. She specializes in working with clients with chronic pain, drawing on her own experiences with years of chronic daily migraines. She is a graduate of Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach’s Mindfulness and Meditation Teacher Training Certification Program, and has worked with Jill Satterfield as a mentor. Her teaching style emphasizes gentle experimentation and self-compassion.
jessicadixonmindfulness.com