Culturally Grounded Mindfulness for Therapeutic and Coaching Practice

LIVE Workshop: Wednesday, August 27th, 2025

Helping professionals often face the challenge of making mindfulness and contemplative practices feel authentic, inclusive, and culturally relevant—especially when working with clients from diverse cultural and spiritual backgrounds. Many established mindfulness frameworks (such as MBSR and MBCT) are rooted in Buddhist or Western psychological traditions, which may not resonate with the lived experiences of all clients.

Likewise, clients may struggle to connect with conventional mindfulness tools that feel overly clinical, abstract, or disconnected from their cultural identity and ancestral wisdom. These approaches, while beneficial, can sometimes unintentionally overlook the powerful role that lineage and collective identity play in healing.

This workshop introduces culturally attuned contemplative practices and cultural grounding for practice. Together, we will explore what it means to offer mindfulness-based principles and practices in ways that can resonate across cultural and spiritual contexts.

One example is the African wisdom of Sankofa (“go back and get it”), which will be offered as a culturally-congruent frame for mindfulness practice.  Sankofa is an Akan adinkra symbol of ancestral wisdom that represents the interconnectedness of past, present, and future (ancestors-ourselves-descendants). 

This workshop invites helping professionals to reimagine the potential of mindfulness, to open an inclusive spaciousness for culturally resonant paths to healing, transformation, and liberation.

Live Workshop: Wednesday, August 27th, 2025 - 4:00 - 5:30 PM ET. Zoom. In your timezone: 1:00 PM PT / 9:00 PM BST / 10:00 PM CEST.

In this workshop, you will:

• Gain an introduction to culturally attuned contemplative practices.

• Experience the Sankofa Inner Community Meditation practice

• Explore how this and other culturally grounded practices can support clients’ healing and how to adapt and tailor these practices with cultural humility and clinical integrity.

This workshop includes on-demand CE learning and resources:

• A PDF Guide: Culturally Grounded Mindfulness for Therapeutic and Coaching Practice
• On-Demand learning on:
  
  • Foundations of Culturally Grounded Mindfulness
  • Sankofa Inner Circle Practice
  • Culturally Grounded Mindfulness in Client Work
• Professional transcripts for easy reference.
• A replay of the live workshop.

CE Hours = 1.5

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Featured Instructor: Dr. Shelly Harrell

Born and raised in Detroit, Dr. Shelly Harrell is an award-winning Harvard-educated and UCLA-trained psychologist, as well as a certified meditation teacher. As an experienced psychotherapist, mentor, and professor she has been helping, healing, teaching, and training for over 30 years. She is a researcher and published author in the areas of culture and psychotherapy, sociocultural and sociopolitical aspects of stress, racism and mental health, and psychological well-being among Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). Her soulfulness approach to wellness and resilience represents an integration of her work that is informed by cultural, African-centered, and liberation psychologies, contemplative practices, and stress science.