Teaching Mindfulness in the Warfighter's Room
Speaker: Margaret Cullen, MA, MFT, Certified MBSR Instructor
Format: Audio & Slides

This presentation will describe the joys and challenges of teaching "Strong Spouses" (Mindfulness-Based Emotional Balance) to military wives on an army base in New York state in the spring of 2014. In collaboration with Amishi Jha's lab at the University of Miami, I conducted an eight-week pilot which combined MBSR with emotion theory, forgiveness, lovingkindness and compassion. Military families typically face an inordinate amount of stress and the participants in this pilot presented with multiple challenges including financial stress, infidelity and other marital problems, soldiers and children with both physical and mental disabilities, and many other difficulties. There were many novel aspects of this pilot: the population; the format (two weeks in person, six weeks via Skype classroom); the location (the warfighter's room and the hand-to-hand combat room); the intervention (mbsr plus other components). This presentation will discuss both the program content as well as the experience of teaching under these unique conditions.