Using Your Mind and Body to Cultivate Compassion

Monday, April 14. 6:00-7:30pm. Olympic Room.

Description 

Learn how compassion for ourselves can help us navigate the stressful times we live in and extend true compassion to others. To reduce our own stress is an exercise in self-compassion; it is also highly likely to reduce the stress of those around us (students, children, co-workers). Learn powerful stress reduction techniques through a guided imagery exercise and a shaking meditation, followed by gentle rhythmic movement… to sooth the mind as well as the body.

Presenter Bios 

Claudia Finkelstein, MDCM, Harborview Medical Center

Claudia Finkelstein, MDCM, is a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Washington. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and raised in Montreal, Canada, Claudia attended medical school at McGill University and did an Internal Medicine residency at the Montreal General Hospital. She spent a year on faculty in Montreal then moved to the University Of Vermont School Of Medicine. Since 1996, she has been a faculty member of the University Of Washington. Claudia is based at Harborview Medical Center in the Adult Medicine Clinic. She was interim director of this clinic for a year and stepped aside to focus more on patients and less on administration. In addition to caring for her own patients, she teaches medical students, residents, and other faculty. She has had training in Mind Body Medicine as well as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. She teaches in the conventional curriculum for clinical medicine and runs an elective in Mind Body Medicine and a Faculty Development Program in Integrative Health. She is confident that increased exposure to Mind Body therapies will optimize the health of both care providers and recipients. 

Cora Collette Breuner, MD, MPH, Childrens Hospital & Regional Medical Center, Department of Adolescent Medicine

Dr. Breuner attended Medical School in Philadelphia at Jefferson Medical College with a Residency in San Diego at the Balboa Naval Hospital. After serving as a transitional intern and the general medical officer on a destroyer tender, she entered a 3-year pediatric residency and became Chief Resident. Dr. Breuner was a general pediatrician in Japan, volunteering as a pediatric consultant in Navy clinics throughout Japan. She also cared for Afghan refugees in Pakistan, where she taught soldiers to be medics to their military and local communities. In 1991, Dr. Breuner began a two-year fellowship in Adolescent Medicine followed by six years at Swedish Hospital teaching in the family medicine residency. She received her MPH from the University of Washington with a thesis on complementary medicine use in homeless youth. She returned to the University of Washington and Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center (CHRMC) as the medical director of the Adolescent Clinic. She has been the West Seattle High School football team physician and taught in homeless youth night clinics. Her research focus has been on the education of medical students and residents on the integration of complementary medicine into allopathic care and on the use of yoga as an adjunctive intervention for the treatment of eating disorders.