At Applied Mindfulness, our mission is to develop evidence-based translational research and clinical applications of mindfulness and neurophysiology for healing.  Applied Mindfulness is a think tank, intervention design, training, and consulting firm that developed the Applied Mindfulness modality for context-specific applications in medical, mental health, and other sectors.  We have to-date developed two mindfulness-based interventions that are being piloted or are poised for piloting as new national models, one in juvenile justice and rehabilitation, and one in adolescent trauma recovery.  We have authored two books on our methodology: Transformation through Feeling: Awakening the Felt Sensibility (Applied Mindfulness Media, 2010), and Inner Life Skills for Youth (Applied Mindfulness Media, 2011).  We are advised by an international board of experts in mindfulness, its clinical application to working with youth and other populations, applied neurophysiology, medicine, evidence-based mental health, and systems theory.  Our clients include medical clinics, mental health providers, social service and government agencies, educational institutions, youth development providers, and companies.

APPLIED MINDFULNESS FOUNDER

GABRIEL KRAM has a deep and abiding interest in and practice of mindfulness, emotional self-awareness, and somatics work.  Over the past sixteen years, these modalities have transformed his life, and he is committed to training organizations and individuals in these tools to transform quality of life and organizational culture.  He is the founder of Applied Mindfulness, Inc. He previously directed The Mind Body Awareness Project, whose innovative mindfulness-based interventions for incarcerated youth are being scaled into new national models of rehabilitation, and are the subject of both dissertations and forthcoming peer-review journal articles.  He studied neurobiology at Yale College, and narrative at Stanford University.  He brings a reverence for indigenous culture, sixteen years of mindfulness practice, ten years of mindful movement, and a lifetime of wilderness exploration, nature awareness, and creative expression to his work.  He is the author of the Inner Life Skills Curriculum for Youth and Transformation through Feeling: Awakening the Felt Sensibility.

APPLIED MINDFULNESS ADVISORY BOARD

DR. NADINE BURKE, MD, MPH is the Chief Executive Officer of the Center for Youth Wellness in San Francisco, and the former Medical Director of the CPMC Bayview Child Health Center.  The Center for Youth Wellness is a wrap-around, full-service trauma-focused pediatric clinic developed in partnership with the San Francisco Child Abuse Prevention Center, and the Early Life Stress Research Program at Stanford University set to open in June 2012 in San Francisco.   The Center for Youth Wellness is envisioned as a new national model site for the development and provision of trauma-focused pediatric medicine, and will offer universal screening for ACES (adverse chidlhood experiences), and co-locate medical, mental health, and evidence-based supplementary therapeutic modalities for trauma recovery and resilience.  In her previous role as Medical Director of the Bayview Child Health Center, Dr. Burke oversaw the operations of the health center and provided care to children and youth living in the Bayview Hunters Point Community of San Francisco. She is also the Medical Director of Pediatric Health Parity Programs at California Pacific Medical Center, which focuses on decreasing child health disparities throughout San Francisco County.  Dr. Burke also sits on a committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics tasked with developing policy recommendations for treatment of pediatric trauma.  Dr. Burke studies the impacts of early childhood trauma on development, and the manner and mechanisms whereby early childhood trauma creates differential health outcomes.  She is dedicated to understanding the biological roots of trauma, and to developing identification and treatment modalities that restore health and functioning in the wake of trauma.  Her work at the Bayview Child Health center was the subject of a The New Yorker profile by Paul Tough called 'The Poverty Clinic.'

SUSAN KAISER GREENLAND, JD is the co-founder of the Inner Kids Foundation, which brought mindful awareness to under-served schools and neighborhoods in Los Angeles from 2000 until 2009, in conjunction with which she was a co-Investigator on a multi-year, multi-site research study at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center/Semel Institute on the impact of mindfulness in education.  She is the author of The Mindful Child, a book for parents and professionals about how to teach the transformative techniques of mindful awareness to children and teens, now in its ninth printing.  In 2006, she was named a “Champion of Children” by First 5 LA, the largest and most influential children’s advocacy group in Los Angeles. She was a member of the clinical team of the Pediatric Pain Clinic at UCLA’s Mattel’s Children’s Hospital for many years, and a Collaborator on an investigation of mindful eating for children and their caregivers at the University of California, San Francisco.   Her work has been covered by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Public Radio, various yoga journals, and The CBS Morning News.  She trains teachers internationally in methods of using mindfulness with children.  You can learn more about here work at susankaisergreenland.com.

STEVEN HOSKINSON is Senior International Instructor for the Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute, where he was personally mentored for years by Dr. Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing ^TM: a short-term naturalistic approach to the healing of trauma.  Over a decade of teaching, he has developed a uniquely integrated ‘organic intelligence’ approach to the Somatic Experiencing ^TM modality, drawing on diverse perspectives including: Evolutionary, Developmental, Narrative, Cognitive-Behavioral and Systems approaches within a mindfulness framework.  He has trained many hundreds of professionals internationally, and has become known for his personal integration and embodiment of the principles he teaches.  Mr. Hoskinson’s work understands the fundamental nature of human disturbance in nervous system dysregulation, and explores creating conditions to support the organismic process of self-organization through increased nervous system coherence.  He is also the founder of Hoskinson Consulting.

FLAVIO MESQUITA DA SILVA has 32 years of international business experience specializing in strategic planning and human, social, and organizational development for non-for-profit organizations, governments, and corporate businesses in the United States, Brazil, Canada, Spain, and Mexico.  With backgrounds in human resources planning and development, as well as whole systems design, Flavio focuses on the evolutionary design and development of social systems, cultural change process design and management, conflict management and mediation, transformative learning and conversational leadership - especially utilizing the World Café process, and strategic relationship alignment.  His consulting praxis integrates extensive work in whole and living systems theory with deep inner and inter-personal change work to develop organic systems and processes that facilitate transformative change in organizational systems, maximizing stakeholder input and distributing leadership to create robust, functional, and effective vision-driven organizations. 

MELISSA MOORE, PHD is the director of the San Francisco Family Service Agency’s Felton Institute. The institute is a think-tank and training forum to disseminate the use of Evidence-based and Strengths-based practices throughout the mental health field.  Since heading the Institute she has developed and implemented a NIMH-funded training and research Institute dedicated to the implementation and research on dissemination of evidence-based practices in community behavioral health.  In addition, she holds the Community Academic Research and Training Alliance (CARTA) Post Doctoral Agency Fellow seat at the University of California, San Francisco. Previously, Dr. Moore served as director of the Karuna Training, a contemplative psychology professional development training program that she co-founded in Europe.  She is a long-time student and teacher of mindful awareness.

EMILIANA SIMON-THOMAS, PHD is the Associate Director of the Center for Compassion Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University, and a Senior Research Scientist at Stanford University. CCARE has been established within the Stanford Institute for Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neurosciences at the School of Medicine to support and conduct rigorous scientific studies of compassion and altruistic behavior. Drawing from several disciplines including neuroscience, psychology, economics, and contemplative traditions, the research at CCARE also examines methods for cultivating compassion and promoting altruism within individuals and society-wide. Dr. Simon-Thomas earned her doctorate in Cognition Brain and Behavior at University of California, Berkeley studying the interplay between emotional and cognitive processes with Dr. Robert Knight. Using behavioral, EEG and fMRI methods, her dissertation research investigated the effects of negative emotion on higher cognition, and highlighted the important influences that negative states can have on thinking. Transitioning towards a focus on how thought processes affect emotion (appraisal; self-regulation) and on the biological underpinnings of positive and pro-social states, Dr. Simon-Thomas studied love of humanity and compassion during her postdoc, mentored by Dr. Dacher Keltner. From emotion signaling, perception and self-report to peripheral autonomic and neural activation during induced emotion, Dr. Simon-Thomas' research with CCARE continues to examine the conceptual nature, experiential properties, biological correlates, and cultivation potential for pro-social states like compassion, as well as related acts of altruism.

APPLIED MINDFULNESS VALUES

Applied Mindfulness, Inc. has a four-factor bottom line.  In all of our decisions– from determining which projects to engage, to allocating resources, to deciding how we develop our processes and products– we operate from a non-externalizing transactional framework that considers ecological sustainability, social justice, and human meaning in addition to traditional monetary factors both as inputs and as results.  These four factors shape how we work, and how we evaluate our results and allow us to attach concrete value to 'intangibles'.  Our goal is to live an organizational culture that models what we teach: sustainable, compassionate, feeling good, and prosperous– and to be able to pass this forward.