Mindfulness and Well-Being

Workshop Speakers

Professor Ewan Clayton

Ewan Clayton is a calligrapher and professor in Design at the University of Sunderland. For a number of years he worked as a consultant to Xerox PARC with an interest in digital communications technology and the concept of human presence. Ewan has exhibited and taught calligraphy in many parts of the world. His interest in the subject began because his handwriting was so bad, and at the age of twelve he was put back into the junior class in the school to re-learn how to write. He has had a life long interest in monasticism in various traditions and this experience has also fed into his work as a calligrapher.

Dr Rick Hanson

Rick Hanson, PhD is a neuropsychologist. A summa cum laude graduate of UCLA, he founded the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, edits the Wise Brain Bulletin (see www.WiseBrain.org), and writes for Tricycle Magazine and other publications. His latest book is Buddha’s brain: the practical neuroscience neural pathways to happiness, love, and wisdom (with Richard Mendius, MD; preface by Jack Kornfield, PhD and foreword by Dan Siegel, MD). He has taught at Stanford University, Sonoma State University, New York Insight Meditation Center and other organisations.

Pip Hardy

Pip Hardy is a director of Pilgrim Projects. In 2003 she founded the Patient Voices programme with the original intention of developing a resource that would carry the experiences of patients and carers into e-learning materials about clinical governance.

A degree in English Literature led Pip into education, educational publishing and the development of open, distance, work-based and e-learning materials across a range of professions, with a sideline in counselling, until her epiphany in relation to digital storytelling and its potential for transforming health and social care. An MSc in Lifelong learning gave her the opportunity to study the impact of the Patient Voices digital stories in healthcare education. Her longstanding interest in Buddhism has been brought to bear on the development of the Patient Voices digital storytelling methodology and she is currently studying for an MA in Buddhist studies.

Jane Hutton

Jane Hutton is consultant clinical psychologist at King’s College Hospital and works with people who are living with a variety of chronic medical problems. She is employed by South London and Maudsley NHS Trust and is an honorary tutor at the Institute of Psychiatry. She has a long-standing interest in mindfulness and has offered mindfulness-based cognitive therapy programmes for mental health professionals and for people experiencing cardiac and other physical health problems. She is particularly interested in the mechanisms through which mindfulness can be beneficial.

Helen Stephenson

Helen Stephenson has practised yoga and insight meditation since 1979. She attended retreats with Christopher Titmuss, Christina Feldman, Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Fred von Allmen and is the visiting yoga teacher at GAIA House in Devon. She was taught yoga initially by the late Robert von Heckeren and in 1981 she started to study classical/mindful yoga under the guidance of the Indian teacher Sri. S. Rajagopalan. She was until recently the Senior Pilates teacher with the pilates advanced training school and studio in Milton Keynes and will incorporate some of the fundamentals of Pilates, if appropriate and helpful. She taught retreats in Germany and Russia and had her own yoga school in the city of Hamburg, Germany until she moved with her family to Milton Keynes.

Helen teaches yoga as a tool towards inner stillness and ease. The movements will be slow, precise and in accordance with the breathing. We will explore the inner movement of the body and as we stay attentive to our present experience and we will become more able to relax, to calm the mind and to restore our energy, so that we can relate to life with courage, compassion and joy.

Henry J. Whitfield

Henry J. Whitfield has a background in trauma. He supervised a Brief therapy for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder project for Victim Support Lambeth 2005–2008, and has regularly worked as a trauma counsellor since 2003. He is now doing empirical research for City and Hackney Mind, comparing outcomes for differing trauma interventions for refugees and other trauma survivors. Henry also teaches widely on the mindfulness-informed approaches and is particularly experienced at training Traumatic Incident Reduction (TIR) practitioners. Being a qualified Rational Emotive and Cognitive Behavioural therapist, has greatly contributed to Henry’s research interests in the theoretical and practical integration of mindfulness with cognitive behavioural theory, and in case-formulated cognitive–behavioural applications of mindfulness. Henry is also director of Mindfulness Training Ltd, based in Primrose Hill and Kings Cross, London, an organisation running comprehensive training programmes in Traumatic Incident Reduction (TIR), Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) (see www.presentmind.org for more).

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© 2009