Mindful Hearts

Mindful Hearts offers mindfulness programs to help people manage the stresses of daily life, cope with difficult emotions, and deal with chronic pain and illness. The classes are taught by Maheen Mohammed, who is a Certified Mindfulness Instructor (CMI) through Mindful Schools, an accredited Breathworks Mindfulness Teacher (Breathworks Mindfulness, UK), a Trained Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) Teacher, and a Certified Mindfulness Meditation Teacher after completing the two-year Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program taught by renowned meditation teachers Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield. Maheen also holds the designation of Certified Mindfulness Teacher - Professional Level through the International Mindfulness Teachers Association (IMTA CMT-P). Maheen is currently completing Gabor Mate's year long Compassionate Inquiry professional program. Maheen came across mindfulness practices in 2008 during a particularly turbulent time in her life, and found this way of meeting her experiences to be life changing. Maheen experienced such profound shifts, she was inspired to integrate mindfulness into her work as a school psychologist, and to pursue further training to learn how to share these practices with others. Maheen has been teaching mindfulness and self-compassion workshops, courses, and retreats since 2013, and is passionate about guiding and accompanying people as they learn to befriend themselves and their experiences with kindness and curiosity. Maheen remains committed to her own personal mindfulness practice, and considers herself to be a life-long learner. Mindfulness means to deliberately pay attention to your experience in the present moment (your physical sensations, thoughts, and emotions) with kindness and curiosity. In this modern, fast-paced life, we tend to operate on "automatic pilot" a lot of the time. Our minds are often disconnected from our bodies, and rather than bringing attention to our present moment experience, we get lost in thought - thinking and worrying about things that have already happened; or planning, thinking, and worrying about what may happen later. When we operate like this, we miss out on many of the moments of our lives. Additionally, not only do a lot of our routine tasks become automatic, even our emotional responses become automatic and habitual. We end up not having the presence of mind to respond thoughtfully and carefully to situations, and when we think about them later on, we may regret our instant "knee jerk" reactions. Mindfulness practice strengthens our ability to be more fully present in our lives, and to become aware of our experiences in difficult moments so that we may have a choice in how to respond to them.