Mindfulness, Compassion and
Mental Health
Series 1: Finding Stability in Difficult Times
A four-week live online series to help you understand your mind, navigate difficult emotions, and cultivate greater calm, resilience, and hope.
Life can feel overwhelming.
Perhaps your mind rarely slows down. You find yourself worrying about the future, replaying the past, or feeling weighed down by anxiety, self-doubt, or low mood. And, perhaps you’ve tried different approaches to change this, yet still find yourself in a negative loop too often.
The good news is that these patterns aren't fixed. They are more like mental and emotional habits.
Mindfulness and self-compassion won't remove life's challenges, but they can transform the way you meet them and engage with them.
In this four-week live online series, you'll discover practical ways to better understand your mind, respond more skillfully to difficult experiences, and cultivate greater inner stability.
Drawing on mindfulness, compassion, psychology, neuroscience, and extensive clinical experience, Alfie Wishart will guide you through practices and insights that you can continue using long after the course has ended.
Is This Series Right For You?
This series may be right for you if you would like to:
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Feel less overwhelmed by anxiety and stress.
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Better understand why your mind gets caught in worry or low mood.
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Respond more calmly during difficult moments.
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Develop a kinder relationship with yourself.
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Deepen your mindfulness practice in a practical & meaningful way.
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Build resilience for life's inevitable challenges.
This course is designed for people with some experience of mindfulness who are looking to deepen both their understanding and their practice. It is educational in nature and is not intended as a substitute for any therapy or medical treatment.
What You'll Take Away
By the end of the series, you'll:
Better understand why anxiety and emotional suffering arise.
Learn practical ways to interrupt cycles of worry and reactivity.
Discover how mindfulness and self-compassion work together to support emotional wellbeing.
Develop greater awareness of the habits that shape your thoughts and emotions.
Learn simple practices for cultivating greater calm, resilience, and hope.
Leave with a stronger foundation for your ongoing mindfulness practice.
Your Journey Through the Series
Week 1: Understanding Your Mind
Learn some of the history of mindfulness and compassion practices. Discover why mindfulness is better understood as mind training, and how mindfulness and compassion work together to support emotional wellbeing. You'll begin building a strong foundation for the rest of the programme.
Week 2: Finding Stability in Anxiety
Why does anxiety feel so overwhelming? Learn how anxiety develops, how your nervous system responds to stress, and practical mindfulness skills that can help you find greater steadiness during challenging moments.
Week 4: Cultivating Hope and Resilience
Hope is more than optimism. Discover practical ways to strengthen resilience, cultivate hope, and develop the inner resources needed to navigate life's inevitable challenges.
Week 3: Understanding Depression, Low Mood and Self-Criticism
Explore how habitual patterns, shame, and self-judgment influence emotional wellbeing. Learn a more compassionate way of relating to yourself during difficult times.
A Practical Learning Experience
Each session includes:
Guided mindfulness and self-compassion practices
Practical insights from psychology and neuroscience
Gentle reflection and group discussion
Tools you can use in everyday life
Resources for continued learning and practice
This is a course designed not just to deepen your understanding, but to help you bring mindfulness and compassion into your daily life.
About the Programme
Finding Stability in Difficult Times is the first series in Mindfulness, Compassion and Mental Health, an ongoing programme exploring how mindfulness and compassion can support emotional wellbeing and psychological resilience.
Each future series explores a different aspect of emotional wellbeing while building upon the same core principles of mindful awareness and compassionate responding.
Participants are welcome to attend individual series or continue through the wider programme as it develops.
Meet Your Teacher
Alfie Wishart is a Licensed Professional Counselor, Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor, and Certified Rehabilitation Counselor based in Dallas.
A trained teacher in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC), Alfie integrates mindfulness, positive psychology, and evidence-based therapeutic approaches to support emotional healing and psychological wellbeing.
He works with individuals, couples, and groups on challenges including anxiety, depression, trauma, addiction, narcissistic abuse recovery, and shame-based responding. Through his teaching, counselling, and retreats, Alfie has helped thousands of people cultivate greater stability, resilience, and self-understanding through mindful awareness and compassionate practice.
This course is part of, and supported by, the
Dallas Center for Mindfulness & Compassion (DCMC)
DCMC is a 501c3 nonprofit organization devoted to bringing the contemplative practices of mindfulness and compassion into our modern world.
All registrations will go through the DCMC website. Click the button below to be taken to the registration page.
Cost and registration
The suggested cost for this 4-week series is $200.
If you would like to discuss series pricing or if you would like to attend only one or two of the sessions, please contact me directly at Info@WishartCounseling.com to make futher arrangements.
Schedule & Format
Sessions will be held live via Zoom on Tuesday evenings at 6:30pm CST, on the following dates:
13th October
20th October
27th October and,
3rd November
Each session will include a blend of guided meditation, instructional content, discussion, and time for reflection.
Session Recordings & Missed Sessions
All participants will receive access to the full session recordings—whether attending live or not.
If you register for the full series and miss a session, you’ll still receive the full replay and resources for that session.
Please note: No refunds are available for missed sessions.
This format is designed to give you flexibility and ongoing access to revisit the material in your own time.
Join Us
You can't always change what life brings.
But you can learn a different way of meeting it.
If you're ready to cultivate greater calm, resilience, and inner stability, we'd love to welcome you.
FAQs
For Lay Participants
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These courses assume that participants have some experience and training in mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness meditation is generally considered as a foundation for compassion exercises. It can provide mental and emotional steadiness, a greater capacity for insight, and an increased tolerance for difficult emotions.
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Yes, each course can be taken separately. However, the interior workings of the mind are often interconnected in many ways. For instance, anxiety and depression are the most commonly co-diagnosed mental health conditions. Therefore, it would be helpful, if one is primarily interested anxiety, for example, to also take the class on depression. It can be very helpful to see a particular condition viewed from different angles.
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No… but with these caveats. If you’ve experienced trauma, or severe symptoms in the past, this may not be the right environment for you at this time. The consideration is mental and emotional stability. Therefore, it is advisable to have some experience with mindfulness and compassion exercises: be true to yourself and go with your intuition.
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These classes are designed for professionals as well as non-professionals. And yes, would probably be helpful for your therapist to have the same information you have in the sessions, but that would be up to your therapist.
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Yes. Each participant will have access to each class they register for and can access it, along with the transcript, for as long as they want. Please be aware that all the information from the classes, the audio and the transcripts, is copyrighted material. If you would like to use this material in some way, feel free to contact me to make arrangements. However, we honor the Fair Use guidelines of the US Copyright office. You can find that information here… https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/
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Please see our sheet on the class structure that was sent with registration. If you didn’t receive it, please let me know and I will send.
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Yes. We can compensate with access to the materials of that class or apply your registration to another class of your choice.
For Therapists and Other Professionals
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Yes. There is an additional administrative fee of $7 for each CEU certificate
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Yes, but, it would be good to refer to the Fair Use guidelines of the US Copyright office. You can find that information here… https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ Also, be advised that there is a written works under way based on these materials.
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The central determining factor is you’re client’s overall stability and their capacity for distress. tolerance. When a recollection is part of an exercise, it is emphasized that participants pick something mild or moderate. That is, on a scale of 1 to 10, nothing more than a 4 out of 1.
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In one word: Practice. In order to be of best benefit to our clients, we need to be further down the road in order to help bring them along. These practices cannot be employed in the same manner that other frameworks can, such as CBT, or in a workbook style only.
When working with mindfulness and compassion with clients, we have to generate that space and invite them in. This is very similar to Carl Roger’s suggestion to create an atmosphere of unconditional positive regard for the client. We have to create the space of mindfulness and compassion for them first.
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Yes, and no. The overall process is to present the exercises as designed, but then follow however the client responds to the process. Using meditation in particular, but also with the compassion exercises, the exercises can provide valuable diagnostic information as well as accurate data with which to measure progress.
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Yes. Please contact me directly; I’d be happy to provide detailed information on these processes.