Essential Change


Transformative Mindfulness 6 Week Course, January 30-March 6th, 2017

Transformative_Mindfulness_for_peace_health400px

It’s the new year! Time to shift the barriers that are holding you back! Time to grow your full potential! Time to heal in dead of winter….

This 6 week course will teach the core tools of Transformative Mindfulness Methods so that individuals can heal and practice techniques that will help to reduce suffering.

Week 1 – Exploring Challenges – learn how to turn with compassion towards where suffering is held.

Week 2 – Intuitive Body-Scan – explore the whole body through mindful visualization and exploration, document images, wisdom and insight.

Week 3 – Transforming Challenges – learn to ask for help to transform the many aspects of suffering and root causes of challenges.

Week 4 – Enhancing Positive Qualities – build your strength and resilience by connecting with positive attributes that are present but in need of growth and grounding.

Week 5 – Transforming Inner Conflict – explore how two, or more, opposing situations are in conflict and experienced through sensation, body, thought and emotion.

Week 6 – Integration – begin to integrate the core tools of Transformative Mindfulness Methods.


Mondays, 6-8pm, January 16-February 20th, 2017.

Fee for course: $500 (covered by most extended health benefits – check with your insurance)

Location: Ottawa Mindfulness Clinic, 595 Montreal Rd, suite 301

To register email: craig@essentialchange.net or call: 613-316-9181


If you have practiced mindfulness and are looking for a set of tools that will help you address specific challenges in your life, whether they are physical, psychological, relational or personal challenges, then Transformative Mindfulness can help.

Once a practice of mindfulness begins to slow down and stabilize the mind a lot can come up. As awareness increases the ability to notice more clearly one’s experience arises. This course can help address those challenges mindfully and skillfully. Using mindfulness to notice thoughts, feelings and emotions related to suffering is an essential step to reclaim the power of the mind and body.

Transformative Mindfulness Methods is a specific form of guided receptive meditation that is used to get to the root causes of suffering. In this method we use the following tools to help bring healing and well-being:

  • Training open, focused attention
  • Developing a compassionate stance towards the self and others
  • Cultivation of insight through guided visualization

Throughout the course participants are guided towards psychological, physical and emotional suffering that is held in the body. Once an area of suffering is identified, further exploration for images, feelings, words and colours helps to understand the nature and origins of suffering. Finally, with the application of self-compassion, pain and suffering change in such a way that is beneficial, leaving insight and wisdom.  The whole process combines mindful noticing as well as cultivation of a connection to ones’ highest sense of self or inspiration. By asking for help from our own most insightful and inspirational connection we become our own helpers. This process also uses external expression of words, colours and images as therapeutic tools for insight and transformation.

If you have practiced mindfulness, or simply have a deep wish to change how you relate to suffering, this group will help to build tools that you can use throughout your life. These tools work especially well for those who have started to develop a relationship with their bodies to notice where and how the body reacts to situations by which they are challenged.


This group is facilitated as a private psychotherapy practice by Craig Mackie, MSW, RSW (#819225) and is supervised by Dr. Lynette Monteiro, C.Psych. (lic. # 2956). Please check with your insurance company to see if supervised psychotherapy is covered.

For more information about Transformative Mindfulness: www.transformativemindfulness.com

The Ottawa Mindfulness Clinic: https://ottawamindfulnessclinic.wordpress.com/