How to Be a Good Friend to Yourself
An eight-week online course that puts self-compassion at the heart of your life
Current research is showing that self-compassion is a vital resource for our wellbeing. It helps us to worry less, cope with our challenges more effectively and feel more satisfied with our lives.
Ask yourself these questions
Putting self-compassion at the heart of our lives helps us to:
Understand how to work with suffering and pain
Experience inner peace
Develop more compassion for other people
How do you feel when you are supported and cared for?
With self-compassion you can learn to support and care for yourself in all situations, whatever is going on
How does this online course work?
- The 8 lessons of How to Be a Good Friend to Yourself: making self-compassion part of your life are all online with easily downloadable reflections, exercises and quotes.
- There are 2 bonus sections to help you work your way into the material and plan for how to continue with it when the course ends.
- As long as you have an internet connection you can access the content anywhere and at any time.
- Lessons will be delivered to your inbox each week giving you plenty of time to work with the material
- This is self-paced course, so you can catch up and review past materials at any time.
- You can add comments and ask questions as you go through the materials. Maureen, your course facilitator will be available to answer questions and guide you through the materials.
Would you like to try the first lesson of the online course for free?
Sign up through this link and you will have access to all four activities in Lesson 1
Meet Maureen,
your course facilitator
Hello there
Thanks so much for checking out this online course. I came across self-compassion after I had been meditating for many years. It really helped me to put together how my habit of always beating myself up when things went wrong was really not working for me. It dawned on me that self-compassion is a natural expression of the benefits of meditation. This online course highlights how meditation and self-compassion go hand-in-hand.
I am the founder-director of Awareness in Action. We focus on supporting people to make meditation, kindness and compassion part of their everyday lives. It’s one thing to take a course but it’s another to bring what you learn into what you do each day. If you are interested to see what I mean you might like to read this article that I wrote for Tiny Buddha, How to Make Vulnerability Your New Superpower.
Hope to see you on the course!
Enrolment is open now
You can join the course whenever you are ready!
Bonus starter session
How to get the most out of the course and the qualities of a good friend.
Lesson 1: What is self-compassion?
We will explore how self-compassion works, and the role played by our brain systems. We’ll also look into why happiness is more elusive than we thought and difficult stuff is inevitable.
Lesson 2: How our inner critic works
This is where we will go deeply into where this inner critic comes from and what it is trying to do. We’ll see how we can change the harsh critic into a good friend.
Lesson 3: Meditation: the basis of self-compassion
This lesson is all about how meditation can help and how to set about making it part of our lives..
Lesson 4: The three elements of self-compassion (i) Self-kindness
We know it is important to be kind to other people but in this lesson we see how it is also important to be kind to ourselves
Lesson 5: The three elements of self-compassion (ii) Common Humanity
We live in an interdependent world, in which we all have to deal with very similar worries and concerns, whoever and wherever we are.
Lesson 6: The three elements of self-compassion (iii) Being mindful
If we can learn to be more present to what is happening to us and the people around us, we can find some space to choose how we want to react.
Lesson 7: Some challenges with self-compassion
It is easy to misunderstand self-compassion and to think it is indulgent, or showing weakness. In this lesson we will examine how we can misunderstand and what to do about it.
Lesson 8: The benefits of self-compassion
The course ends with looking again at how self-compassion can help us to be stronger and happier.
Bonus concluding session
We will finish up the course by making a plan for our path to self-compassion. There is also a helpful list of resources for further study.
OPTION 1
Course
Course fee $ 95.00
This includes:
• Access to content, activities and exercises for 8 lessons and 2 bonus lessons.
• A variety of downloadable reflection and meditation exercises in written and/or audio format
• Unlimited interactive emails with the course facilitator throughout the course
OPTION 2
Course + coaching option
Course fee ¢180.00
This includes:
• Access to content, activities and exercises for 8 lessons and 2 bonus lessons.
• A variety of downloadable reflection and meditation exercises in written and/or audio format
• Unlimited interactive emails with the course facilitator throughout the course
• 2 individual coaching sessions by SKYPE with course facilitator during the course and/or within one month of completion of the course. (Normal price for coaching alone $155)
What people have said about the course
Maureen has succeeded in developing a very logical, practical, evidence based and fun course to help people train in self-compassion, a key element in wellbeing. It will help people to feel happier and to be more compassionate to themselves and others regardless of their profession, gender, religion or previous experience with meditation. I’m very pleased that this online course will give easy access to these valuable lessons and I hope many people will benefit from them!
Peter Vermeiren, Founder of Health Leads and
President of Compassion for Care
Being a working mum with a 9-month-old son I have very little time to dedicate to ‘me’. Maureen’s course is perfectly designed to allow busy people to digest the lessons in their own time, and each lesson is short and focused. The course has armed me with tools to help me deal with life’s pressures and I feel great for having invested a little time in my own personal growth.
Lucy Thornton
I booked on to this course looking to find ways to support myself after a particularly difficult time, and was not disappointed. I really appreciated the flexibility of completing the course in my own time and encountered many useful pieces of information and practices. I found Maureen warm, supportive and understanding, and can recommend the coaching option which helped me work through my specific struggles. Finding the time to look after ourselves is often hard these days and this was a great option for me.
Dr Carole Francis-Smith CPsychol
Whether you are an “expert” on the matter, or a lay person wanting to deepen your knowledge and understanding of meditation and compassion, this course will not disappoint you. The course is very well structured, and Maureen Cooper is impeccable in providing constant encouragement, guidance and support. Throughout the course, there is a genuine concern of linking learning activities with updated scientific evidence, in a way that is widely comprehensible. I definitely recommend it as a worthy opportunity for personal and professional development.
Carlos Carona