Bringing Compassion into Therapy

Tara Brach, PhD, is a meditation teacher, psychologist, and author of several books including international best-selling Radical Acceptance and Trusting the Gold. Her popular weekly podcast is downloaded three million times a month. Tara is founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington and has been active in bringing meditation into schools, prisons, and underserved populations. Along with Jack Kornfield, Tara leads the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program (MMTCP), serving participants from 70 countries around the world.

Kristin Neff, PhD, is currently an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a pioneer in the field of self-compassion research, conducting the first empirical studies on self-compassion nearly twenty years ago, and is the author of the best-selling book Self-Compassion. She has been recognized as one of the most influential researchers in psychology worldwide. Along with her colleague Chris Germer, she developed the Mindful Self-Compassion program, taught internationally, and co-wrote The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook. Her newest book is Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thrive. 

Chris Germer, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He co-developed the Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) program with Kristin Neff in 2010 and they wrote two books, The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook and Teaching the Mindful Self-Compassion Program. MSC has been taught to over 200,000 people worldwide. Dr. Germer is also the author of The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion; he co-edited two influential volumes on therapy, Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, and Wisdom and Compassion in Psychotherapy; and he maintains a small psychotherapy practice in Massachusetts, USA.