DEER PROGRAM: Developing Emotional Embodied Resiliency. "Learn to be a creative partner in your life versus a reactive participant."

one-of-a-kind program and training designed to support participants towards developing emotional-body stress resiliency, working with attachment difficulty, personal boundary awareness, understanding the practices of mindfulness and coming into a richer sense of wholeness.
"Learn to be a creative partner in your life versus a reactive participant."Attendees gain the capacity to unwind and begin dissolving long-held stressful and/or traumatic anxieties. Acquire new tools of understanding that offer release from worn-out negative habits and beliefs that hold us back from living a more balanced life.
"Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, everything shifts." - Bessel van der Kolk. We ask that participants bring a willingness to look at long held "defense mechanisms and habits" that do not work and may often cause more suffering.
Each class builds on one another. We incorporate into the program an understanding of “The Seven Aspects Of Human Experience” that create a new healing paradigm back into resilience. The 7-classes build on themselves with a theme for each class that helps people move through the energy of fear.
Program training includes: • Experiential exercises • Group discussions • Didactic teachings  • Guided meditations • Somatic Experiencing Support • This training also addresses compassionate self-care, boundaries, and effective communication.
1. Gain new tools that support release of dysfunctional physical/emotional anxieties that often overtake our lives.2. Obtains new skills in how to dissolve stress.3. Learn how to set down unwanted beliefs systems that keep us wrapped up in a daily life of stresses.4. Build in a mindful-somatic approach that offers more kindness and compassion towards ourselves and how to discharge long held anxieties.
Registration is Required:The 6-Week DEER Program Training Begins Thursday May 2nd thru June 6th 7:00pm - 9:30pm.One daylong session: Saturday, June 1st 10:00am - 5:00pm.Course Investment Fee $380: $350.00 plus $30 materials. Materials include Mindfulness Care Center workbook and two meditations to practice with.Partial and full scholarships available to approved applicants.CEU’s are available.
LOCATION: 2041 Larkin Street at Vallejo on Russian Hill in San Francisco, facilitated through the Mindfulness CareCenter a 501(3)(c) charitable organization. The Mindfulness Care Center was recognized by San Francisco Magazine and Voted The Best Of 2018 in "Mindfulness and Meditation."
The DEER Program has been developed by Rik Center through the Mindfulness Care Center as a Mindful-Embodied Experiential & Educational Training towards dissolving the emotional and physical pain of overwhelming stresses and unresolved anxieties.
"You don't have to live constantly on guard, overly anxious and unable to mobilize yourself in not being able to connect to your supportive physiological response reflex." Rik Center
Mindfulness is the doorway to working with a body and mind that has feelings and sensations that many people have spent their life avoiding. Our lives are a string of experiences that arise from "little incidents" to "large painful unresolved experiences" that often continue to produce stress responses that no longer serve us in our present day-to-day life.
Facilitated by Rik Center, Cofounder of the Mindfulness Care Center. Rik is a SEP, Somatic Experiencing Stress and Trauma Counselor/Practitioner, Mindfulness Meditation Teacher, and has served as a Buddhist/Interfaith Chaplain at San Francisco General and CPMC Hospitals. He is a member of the USABP/United States Association Of Body Psychotherapy. Rik has a private practice working one-on-one with his clients that focuses on healing high levels of unresolved traumatic anxiety and PTSD along with offering grief and spiritual counseling. He began a meditation practice in the late 80's and leads a weekly Tuesday Evening Meditation Class.
Information For Continuing Education Units/ CEU's:The Mindfulness Care Center is approved by CAMFT/California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists to sponsor continuing education for The DEER Program. The Mindfulness Care Center maintains responsibility for this program/course and its content. This Course meets the qualifications for 19 hours of continuing education credit for licensed Marriage and Family Therapists (LMFT), Licensed Clinical Social Workers (LCSW), Licensed Professional Clinical Counselors (LPCC), and Licensed Educational Psychologists (LEP) as required by CAMFT/California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists.
TESTIMONIAL: I never thought I could treat and understand my depression without depending heavily on traditional therapy and drugs. However, I made the decision to leave those treatments and seek a more holistic understanding of my dis-ease with meditation, somatic experiencing and acupuncture, and in so doing, I believe I have reached a new phase of healing. Rik's "Mindfulness and Trauma" class was a key part of this change and I will be forever grateful. In the six months since taking the class and working with Rik, I have gone from seeing my depression as a life sentence, to seeing it now as a coping mechanism that I learned as a young child in difficult circumstances. I now bring compassion and kindness to my difficulty regulating my mood, and believe that if I was smart enough to learn to cope as a young child, I'm smart enough now as an adult to see whether or not those behaviors are continuing to serve my present life. I also see how my body desires to heal itself, if only I give it the time to speak and be heard rather than move to shut it down as soon as I feel difficult emotions. Thank you, Rik, for doing this work. I really cannot thank you enough for guiding me toward a deeper belief in love, and my place in the world. -MH