Family Mindfulness Programs
Many of the teachers at InsightLA are parents, some with grown children, others with grandkids, and one has pre-school and school age children. Drawing on the personal experience of our teachers, InsightLA’s Family Mindfulness Program offers a comprehensive set of mindfulness classes for parents and children of different ages. Practicing mindfulness as a parent in everyday life brings amazing and often overlooked opportunities to grow into a more compassionate, flexible, and joyful human being. Our children will benefit from our mindful parenting, and can also learn mindfulness themselves from a very young age!
Parenting Classes
Our ‘Parenting from the Heart’ classes focus on mindful parenting. Mindfulness helps us to slow down, notice impulses before we act, really listen to our kids and to come from a more relaxed and peaceful state of mind, which in turn has a positive effect on our children.
Participants in the class are divided into groups based on the ages of their children because the challenges of being a parent vary with the age of their kids, and the group support and sharing is an important part of the class.
The classes are six weeks long and include meditation and mindfulness instructions, group sharing, some home reading and plenty of suggestions about how to implement what is learned into everyday life. Mindful parenting is a practiced skill!
Teen Class
It’s not easy being a teen: there’s the stress of school, pressure from friends and parents, sexuality …the list is endless. InsightLA’s Teen Class offers teenagers the tools of mindfulness and meditation to help them make better decisions during what is often a time of great change and confusion in their lives. These classes are available for groups of teens--there is a 6-8 person minimum (because of the hectic schedules of teenagers, we don’t offer open enrollment classes). To register a group, contact us at programs@insightla.org
Mindfulness –Based Childbirth and Parenting (MBCP) Class
The MBCP class is the “offspring” of the well-known Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) class developed by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn 30 years ago at the University of Massachusetts (go towww.insightla.org/mbsr/ for more information). The MBCP class format was developed by midwife and MBSR teacher Nancy Bardacke, and has been successfully implemented in the Bay Area for more than 9 years. Her program is now offered and scientifically researched through the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at UCSF.
We’re pleased to now offer this class in Los Angeles. The class meets for 2.5 hours per week for 8 weeks with a full practice day on a weekend. It combines mindfulness techniques like meditation, the body scan and gentle yoga with elements of a traditional childbirth education class. Beginning May 2009 we will offer the class in collaboration with the WellBabyCenter (/www.wellbabycenter.org).