Mindfulness

Action Plan for Smart Goals
As part of the program, you will develop your own set of personal SMART goals, in essence personal goals that are smart, measurable, action-oriented, realistic and timely.

Assess Your Stress
This workshop helps you identify the sources of your stress─physical, mental and spiritual─ and helps you learn how to create a wellness map towards healthier living. You’ll learn new techniques that can be used daily to help you find the balance you need to live a healthier life.

Body Image for Beginners
You’ll learn about body image, how it develops and the myriad (and often negative) influences it can have on our culture, society and family. You will learn about the "phantom fat" syndrome and the psychological pitfalls of body dissatisfaction. You will learn why body dissatisfaction must change in order to achieve healthier living. Finally, you’ll learn behavioral practice strategies that can overcome thoughts and emotions related to your body dissatisfaction.

Breaking the Cycle of Addiction 
If you are trapped in a cycle of overeating or substance use that feels beyond your control, you will learn how to break the cycle in five different ways. You will learn active strategies and effective skills to plan for triggers without engaging in addictive behavior. You will learn distraction and affirmation techniques to check obsessive thoughts and techniques that will help you gain freedom from compulsive behavior.

Challenging Self-Defeating Behaviors
In the past, self-defeating behaviors may have resulted in a short-term pay-off that felt good, but at what long-term price? This lecture helps you to identify these self-defeating behaviors and to understand the short-term gain vs. the long-term loss. Here, you’ll learn to overcome these self-defeating behaviors and to change them for a long-term, healthy lifestyle change.

Creative Journaling
In this workshop you will learn how to make creative journaling part of your journey to optimal health. Here, we will explore the use of collage, drawing, painting and writing techniques to promote physical, mental and spiritual well being. Several art and writing tools will be provided to aid your creative journey to optimal health.

Discovering the Healing Potential of Art
Experience first hand the power of the creative process to reveal underlying issues and provide eye-opening solutions to resolving them. Here, you will learn the healing power of art and how it can be used to reduce stress and express and contain emotions.

Identifying Supporters and Saboteurs
This workshop will help you identify those people in your life who will help you along the road to optimal health and those who will hinder it. You’ll learn to be accountable to yourself and those who are your supporters, and you’ll learn how to deal effectively with saboteurs. You’ll gain valuable insight to your own efforts to sabotage your success, and you’ll learn new techniques on how to overcome them and how you can better support your new lifestyle.

Journal to Optimal Health
A journal can be an impartial sounding board, a confidant and a companion on the journey to optimal health. Not all journaling strategies work for all people. In this workshop you will learn ten different methods of journal keeping to help support you in clarifying your values, setting goals and keeping records of your success. You will learn journaling strategies to motivate, dispute cognitive distortions and support your body image changes.

Making Peace with the Inner Critic 
This focused group exercise will help you to understand the importance of emotions and the origin of your critical inner voice. You’ll learn how to make peace with your emotions and inner voice so that it doesn’t undermine your success in changing to a healthier new lifestyle.

Mindfulness & Plans
In this group activity you will explore the stages-of-change model and apply it to your personal situation. You will create a plan for returning to your daily life at home, and you will make a commitment to the SMART goals you developed during your stay.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Fittest of Them All
Body image is a multifaceted aspect of our sense of self. Without active attention to changing body dissatisfaction, it can haunt you and hamper successful lifestyle change. In this lecture you will learn effective techniques to improve your body image through visual, cognitive and behavioral changes that will help you sustain optimum health for long-term success.

New Appreciation of the Body
In this workshop visual means are used to help you develop a new appreciation of your body. You will celebrate coming closer to your "ideal" body image. Through discussions we will focus on active strategies to obtain and maintain this ideal. You will be asked to make a commitment to a new level of activity that will help you reach your ideal.

Relapse Prevention
This lecture helps you to identify the red flags of “a slip” vs. a “relapse”, and it provides techniques to help you get through these crucial periods in order to get back on track. 

Sensational Stress Management
In this workshop you’ll learn how acute stress response is linked to your five senses. You’ll learn new strategies to reduce stress in each of the five areas and how it can fit into your overall wellness map. Participants leave this weekend experience feeling refreshed, rejuvenated and full of energy.

Society and the Individual
You will discover ways that society influences body image through examples found in film, music, television and print media. You will discover how we all become critical consumers of body-related messages and you will develop a confident sense of self that is independent of the influences found in the media.

Spa Visit
Join us at a local area spa where you will relax, restore and rejuvenate while you receive a spa treatment of your choice.

Stand Up for Your Health─Increasing Assertiveness
During this workshop you will learn and practice new ways of saying “no” to unhealthy behaviors. You will learn to set new limits and boundaries, and you will learn the importance of making yourself and your health a top priority in your life.

Stress Inoculation
Living with stress can undermine physical and mental health as well as erode happiness and well being. This workshop helps you to recognize sources of stress in your life and teaches you healthy ways to prepare for and vent stress. The curriculum focuses on learning how to live your life in balance─body, mind, and spirit─and how it can inoculate you from the damaging effects of stress that will inevitably enter your life.

Tools Not Rules─What Works for You?
One tool does not necessarily fit all, and more than one tool can be used at a time. In this workshop you will learn how tools like counting carbs, using the glycemic index and glycemic load and counting fiber grams can help in your long term success. You will also be introduced to valuable web-based tracking tools that can help you track your way to optimum health.

Transformation Wrap-Up Session 
This is a private, individual session where you can get answers to your questions, learn about tapering off of medications and discuss how to apply your aftercare plan.

Triggers Workshop
This lecture will help you define the many different types of triggers associated with smoking and provide you with strategies on how to deal with them.

What Is Creativity?
Learn about creativity, the creative process and how it has been used for centuries to heal the mind, body and spirit. In this workshop you will discover your creative potential and will learn new ways to embrace creativity in every day activities.

Wisdom of the Body
Actively listening and responding to physical concerns is a skill that can be applied any time. Through art and writing, you will develop the ability to dialogue with your body, discover the potential meaning behind physical bodily concerns, discover new solutions and develop a new appreciation for the wisdom of your own body.

Yoga
Stress is known to deteriorate the body and it contributes to many chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and irritable bowel syndrome and it causes increased levels of the hormone cortisol, which stimulates eating and signals the body to store fat, particularly around the abdomen resulting in increased weight gain. Yoga, a 5,000 year-old philosophy and science, not only is powerful in reducing emotional and physical stress, it offers techniques to strengthen muscles, increase flexibility, increase the production of endorphins, the "feel good hormones", and circulation, deepen breathing, reduce muscle tension and improve lymphatic flow. Yoga also improves mindfulness and the ability to have a clearer mind and “be in the moment.”

Yoga can be practiced by anyone, and so the journey of yoga begins at a different place for each of us. At the Center for Health we offer a variety of yoga levels to accommodate your individual needs. We also offer private yoga sessions for those who wish to deepen their practice. If you have never done yoga, a skilled instructor will guide you through the basics. For those who already practice yoga, this is a change to deepen your experience. Postures are adapted to your individual level of fitness, and you can even participate in a chair.