8-Week Compassion Course

Cultivate a Compassionate Heart (CCH) is designed to help you develop the skills of (self)compassion, (self)awareness, reflection, meditation and more, skills that are anchored in evidence-based practices. Cultivating foundational contemplative practices and and connecting to your heart through Presence and Awareness is at the core of this 8-week online course.

There is a correlation between compassion and personal well-being. Research suggests that as we become more aware of ‘being’ with ourselves in a compassionate way, we gradually begin to recognize and experience a more fully integrated sense of connection with our deeper core values and intentions. To directly embody and experience the benefits of cultivating and anchoring attention in our body and heart, however, necessitates learning how to train and incline the mind towards a more compassionate, resilient, and authentic life. This requires a rebalancing of our over-developed habit of ‘doing’ with one of ‘being.’

Participants in this 8-week course work with contemplative practices for at least 20 minutes in each class session. By actively engaging in the practices to cultivate greater awareness and hone new skills for emotional self-regulation, we learn how to connect to ourselves first and drop from our head into our heart. As an entry point, CCH integrates the “Alphabet of the Heart,” created by Dr. James Doty, CCARE Founder and Director.

Questions?

If you have questions after reading our Compassion Courses FAQs, please email CompassionEducation@stanford.edu.

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Continuing Education (CE) Credits

If you are an LCSW, LEP, LMFT, LPCC, RN, or licensed psychologist, you can earn 14 CE credits for your Compassion Course for a fee of $175. It is the sole responsibility of the participant to attend the entire class meetings, always have their video on, participate in the class, and submit a separate course evaluation form at the end of the final class. No partial CE credit is available if more than one class is missed.

At the end of the course, you will be able to:

• Apply basic mindfulness skills and utilize mindfulness meditation to stay present and heartful to self and others
• Apply learned compassion skills as a response to everyday needs and demands in personal and professional settings
• Utilize compassion practice with oneself and others for emotional regulation in the face of distress
• Utilize cognitive re-framing with oneself and others from the compassionate stance of common humanity
• Explain the differences between empathic distress and compassion
• Describe the difference between compassion and empathetic distress, and how empathic distress leads to burnout
• Utilize evidence-based self-compassion meditation practices in the context of personal and professional relationships
• List three sources of resistance to the development of self-compassion
• Explain three ways to recognize resistance to compassion for and from others
• Describe physiological substrates of concentration and how this helps manage stress and anxiety
• Describe current research studies on the effects and effectiveness of compassion practices

Please review the following information for your profession

CE credits for psychologists are provided by the Spiritual Competency Academy (SCA) which is co-sponsoring this program. The Spiritual Competency Academy is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. Spiritual Competency Academy maintains responsibility for this program and its content. The California Board of Behavioral Sciences accepts CE credits for LCSW, LPCC, LEP, and LMFT license renewal for programs offered by approved sponsors of CE by the American Psychological Association. LCSW, LPCC, LEP, and LMFTs, and other mental health professionals from states other than California need to check with their state licensing board as to whether or not they accept programs offered by approved sponsors of CE by the American Psychological Association. SCA is approved by the California Board of Registered Nursing (BRN Provider CEP16887) for licensed nurses in California. RNs must retain their certificate of attendance for 4 years after the course concludes. For questions about receiving your Certificate of Attendance, email CCARE at CompassionEducation@stanford.edu. For questions about CE, email Spiritual Competency Academy at info@spiritualcompetencyacademy.com.