Mindfully Resilient Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) - Therapy Group for Students

Mindfully Resilient is an 8-week in-person class focused on helping prevent relapse of depression and anxiety. You'll learn to identify your specific triggers for relapse, and will learn the skill of mindful awareness to cope with those triggers when they arise.

This class will teach you to:

• Be more aware of the workings of your mind and of unhelpful patterns in your thinking
• Recognize that you have choices other than slipping back into old patterns
• Refine the capacity to recognize warning signals and take helpful action
• Put less effort into ‘fixing' things by dwelling excessively on them
• Focus on the here and now. There is no requirement to explore the past.

When: This group will run on Tuesdays during Spring term from 4:00 - 6:00 pm, beginning April 9th, 2024, if there are at least 4 participants who have committed. The group is 8 weeks, so it will run from 4/9/24 until 5/28/24.

There is a significant out-of-class expectation for daily mindful awareness practice - usually about 30 minutes every day. Most of the gains from the class will take place during these periods of private individual practice. I recognize that this is a lot to ask - and the feedback from Caltech students has consistently indicated that it's both doable and worth the effort.

Where: In-person at Student Wellness Services, 1239 Arden Road

Who: Open to currently enrolled undergraduate and graduate students. Participants should have one or more previous depressive episodes, and / or people with previous experiences of significant anxiety.

Who should not attend?

• People with current substance abuse
• People who are currently too depressed to sustain active participation in the class
• People with a history of dissociation or psychosis should discuss this in the pre-screening. In rare situations, these people may sometimes find meditation destabilizing.
• Those who cannot commit to attending all of the classes or doing the daily home practice

Please use the Student Health Portal to send a message to the Counseling Center Front Desk and ask to set up a screening appointment. You can also call the Counseling Center at (626) 395-8331 to schedule the meeting. 

• Are you currently in individual therapy? 
  • If you are seeing a counseling at Caltech's Counseling Services, this class should probably take the place of your individual therapy this term. In cases where you and your therapist agree that it would make sense to do both concurrently, you will need to give consent for the class facilitator to communicate with your individual therapist for the duration of the class. If you're seeing a community therapist, you'll need to let them know that you plan to attend the group, and I'll need to ask for your consent to coordinate care with them.

About the Facilitator: 

• The sessions are facilitated by Lee Coleman, Ph.D., ABPP. Dr. Coleman is an experienced meditator and meditation facilitator. In 2015, he completed the one-year Certification in Mindfulness Facilitation training through the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. He has also trained with Dr. Zindel Segal, one of the creators of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. Dr. Coleman is a member of the International Mindfulness Teachers Association, and has completed over 2 months of silent meditation retreats both in the US and internationally.

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