Mindfully Well
Friday, December 10 at 11 am EST
Presenter: Helena Stevens, PhD, LPC, LSC
Description:
The wellness movement has become an explosive trend in society. The messages and ideologies about what wellness looks like and how to live a life of wellness are varied and mixed. A critical, and often missing component, is the importance of practicing mindfulness when considering holistic wellness. Individuals can be plagued with all the varied mindsets, advertisements, and promotions about wellness that can be too challenging, incongruent, or even damaging to the self. Humanism reflects individuals' right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their lives and unfortunately values for wellness can be convoluted by others' biases and judgments. Humanism will be used as a foundation for using mindfulness to actualize with one's own belief systems about how to live authentically well. This presentation will focus on using mindfulness to address attachments, assumptions, and anxieties that individuals might have about wellness, that prevent them from living a life of wellness. The presentation will utilize the Meyers and Sweeney holistic model of wellness to highlight the domains of wellness as well as how they are interconnected and how change in one domain can cause change in the others.
Learning Objectives:
1. Participants will learn a holistic model of wellness.
2. Participants will articulate systemic barriers that impede an individual's abilities to live authentically well.
3. Participants will apply humanistic and mindfulness principals towards wellness planning in a method that can be utilized in different counseling settings.
Presenter Bio: Helena Stevens, PhD, LPC, LSC is a counselor educator at Minnesota State University. She also currently practices in both school and mental health counseling. She was the AHC sponsored session on mindfulness and wellness at the ACA national conference in 2018. She has presented at state and national conferences on mindfulness and wellness in k-12 and post-secondary settings as well as addiction treatment settings. She teaches wellness and runs wellness supervision groups for internship students every year. She has provided wellness based group therapy in in-patient treatment facilities, delivered multiple webinars on mindfulness, and delivers psychoeducation on mindfulness and wellness to 7th-12th grade students each year.