Bringing Resilience and Emotional Awareness Training to Healthcare Education (BREATHE)

Bringing Resilience and Emotional Awareness Training to Healthcare Education – BREATHE – is a CEB-based training tailored to medical students, residents and healthcare professionals. BREATHE promotes healthy emotional boundaries conducive to living an empathic, compassionate life, while avoiding burnout. Emotions season our lives, shaping and bringing interest to our relationships. Emotions may save our lives, but they may also cause a lot of suffering, to self and others, when experienced with disproportionate intensity and duration. Emotional awareness is therefore central to well-being. Most importantly, emotional awareness is a skill that can be developed.

BREATHE cultivates skills for better communication, for reduction of implicit biases, for increased awareness of how we feel and express our emotions, for responding with discernment rather than reacting impulsively, for recognizing that we have choices even when it might feel there is none. Underlying all our actions and the choices that we make is the fact that we care, and central to this training is the cultivation of a genuine sense of caring for self and others. Caring to flourish!

Audience

BREATHE is tailored to medical students, residents and healthcare professionals.

Since this is an educational – not a therapeutic – intervention, this course is NOT recommended for anyone who is currently struggling with depression, PTSD, or any other diagnosed psychiatric condition that requires professional help.

Meeting Times

BREATHE is a short (6 hour) course that may be offered in different formats to accommodate the demanding schedule of medical students and healthcare professionals. BREATHE is available as an intensive one day/6 hour retreat format, or presented over four sessions of 90 minutes, either in four consecutive days or over a 4 week period.

Instructor

Marcelo Bento Soares, Ph.D. is a certified Instructor of CEB, a certified Senior Instructor of CBCT® (Cognitively-Based Compassion Training), and the developer of BREATHE; he serves as Head of the Department of Cancer Biology and Pharmacology and Senior Associate Dean for Research at the University of Illinois College of Medicine Peoria. Dr. Soares has been working to bring emotional awareness, resilience and compassion training to medical education, to healthcare providers, to educators and to cancer survivors.

Literature Cited