Embracing Your Life

Embracing Your Life: An Online Course in Self-Compassion is an online course created specifically for young adults age 18-30. Recognizing that the emotional challenges of this age group are different from that of teens and older adults, we created this course to target the specific needs of young adults. For example, learning self-compassion can help young adults make healthy decisions about career or vocational choices, relationship issues, and living situations. The online format makes this course accessible to young adults everywhere who have internet access. The price of the course was intentionally kept low so that those in college or just starting out in their careers would be able to participate in the program.

Fee Schedule

$325 Young adult supporter fee – Opting for this fee will allow you to help support future programming for young adults and teens who would like to take self-compassion courses and may not be able to pay the full fee. Thank you for your support!

$275 Standard young adult fee

NOTE: No experience with mindfulness or any other meditation practice is necessary to take these courses!

No Courses Currently Scheduled.

Upcoming dates will be posted below when registration opens.

Content and Format:

Embracing Your Life contains material from both Mindful Self-Compassion and Making Friends with Yourself, both of which are evidence -based programs that have been linked to less anxiety, stress and depression. New exercises specific to this age group are also included. Embracing Your Life meets weekly for six weeks, for approximately 1.5 hours per session and is taught live by a certified Mindful Self-Compassion or certified Making Friends with Yourself teacher.

Like MSC and MFY, Embracing Your Life provides young adults with the opportunity to explore how they typically respond when difficulties arise in our lives and to learn tools for becoming a warm and supportive friend to themselves. Although Embracing Your Life offers conceptual learning, it is designed to be more experiential than theoretical.

In other words, Embracing Your Life is nothing like taking a college course, per se. It’s not a strain on your brain. In fact, after the class is over each week, you will likely feel more rested and more at ease. It is more of an experience, involving guided meditations and discussion about what the experience of the guided meditation was like.

Embracing Your Life is therapeutic, but it’s not therapy. We don’t talk about deep emotional issues you might have and we don’t try to analyze why you might feel the way you do. It’s about building resilience skills so that you can meet emotional challenges when they arise, as they do in life.

This is what you get if you take Embracing Your Life:

  • Live sessions once weekly
  • Optional small group meetings between classes
  • Email contact with the teacher (online one-to-one chats if necessary)
  • Opportunity to participate in a research study
  • Audiorecordings of meditations

Objectives of Embracing Your Life:

  • Develop self-compassion practices to motivate oneself with encouragement rather than self-criticism
  • Manage difficult situations with greater acceptance and less emotional pain
  • Respond to feelings of failure or inadequacy with self-kindness
  • Understand differences between self-compassion and self-esteem
  • Clarify one’s own core values and learn how to use them to guide decision-making
  • Deal with difficult relationships with strength, resilience, and kindness
  • Learn how gratitude and taking time to appreciate oneself lead to greater contentment and joy
  • Apply core mindfulness and self-compassion practices into daily life

Audiorecordings:

Platform

Zoom

Cancellation Policy

Course registration fees will be refunded or transferred to future Embracing Your Life dates if a cancellation occurs up to 2 weeks before a course begins. A 50% refund or the option to transfer to a future Embracing Your Life will be offered if cancelling up to a week before a course begins. No refunds can be offered if cancelling later than a week before a course begins (except on compassionate grounds for extenuating circumstances). To process any refund there will be a fee charged by the system: $45 for general admission and developing countries. The refund will only be for tuitions fee, and any miscellaneous expenses incurred related to this course will not be refunded.

If you have any questions about the program, please contact Maria at [email protected].

We hope to see you online soon, and we also hope that whatever your practice is, it leads to more mindfulness and more self-compassion in your day!

Teachers

Dr. Karen Bluth is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Research Fellow at Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, a certified instructor of Mindful Self-Compassion and co-developer of Embracing Your Life: An Online Course in Self-Compassion. Dr. Bluth’s research focuses on the roles that self-compassion and mindfulness play in promoting well-being in youth. She co-created the curriculum Making Friends with Yourself: A Mindful Self-Compassion Program for Teens, the teen adaptation of Mindful Self-Compassion for adults, and is author of the books “The Self-Compassion Workbook for Teens: Mindfulness and Compassion Skills to Overcome Self-Criticism and Embrace Who You Are” (New Harbinger Publishers) and The Self-Compassionate Teen: Mindfulness and Compassion Skills to Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice (to be released October 2020, New Harbinger Publishers) and Mindfulness and Self-Compassion for Teen ADHD: Build Executive Functioning Skills, Increase Motivation, and Improve Self-Confidence  (to be released May 2021, New Harbinger Publishers). Additionally, Dr. Bluth is Associate Editor of the academic journal Mindfulness, and founder and director of The Frank Porter Graham Program on Mindfulness and Self-Compassion for Families at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. 

As a mindfulness practitioner for over 40 years, a mindfulness teacher, and an educator with 18 years of classroom teaching experience, Dr. Bluth frequently gives talks, conducts workshops, and teaches classes in self-compassion and mindfulness in educational and community settings. In addition, she trains teachers in Making Friends with Yourself internationally.

Marissa C. Knox, PhD is a teacher, researcher, and writer focused on cultivating holistic wellbeing and resilience through self-compassion, mindfulness, and connecting to nature. In her work as a trained Mindful Self-Compassion teacher, certified Embody Love Movement facilitator, and Level 1 iRest® Yoga Nidra teacher, Marissa supports others to embody their values, remember their wholeness, and live with integrity. Marissa has facilitated self-compassion programs for educators, students, therapists, healthcare professionals, and parents. She also helped adapt the curriculum for the Self-Compassion for Healthcare Communities (SCHC) program. Marissa is currently teaching a course called Mindfulness, Compassion, and the Self at the University of Texas at Austin. You can learn more about Marissa on her website: https://marissa-knox.com/