Glens Falls Area
Stress Reduction
ProgramFacing a chronic, repetitive use, stress injury in her body, Brenda finds that mindfulness practice, defined as paying attention on purpose non-judgmentally to moment to moment experience, helps her in developing her capacity for greater awareness of the body's distress signals. This awareness, along with practicing a quality of kindness that is inherent in mindfulness practice, is allowing her to respond with greater care and compassion toward herself and other beings. Healing of her injury and enhancement of her sense of well-being seem to be fruits of her commitment to regular mindfulness practice.
Meet the MBSR Instructor!
Brenda Arley
2008
It is Brenda's experience and understanding that the wisdom inherent in mindfulness practice helps us to see more clearly the interconnectedness of life.
Brenda graduated from the University of Vermont with a degree in professional nursing, from Antioch/New England Graduate School with a master's degree in counseling psychology and completed a Marriage and Family Therapy residency program with the Adirondack Samaritan Counseling Center. Since July 1993, she has maintained a private practice working with individuals, couples and families seeking assistance with their life challenges. In addition to being guided in her psychotherapeutic work by family systems theory as a way to understand relational processes, she is also guided by Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT). Informed by RCT, it is her experience that when we experience relational connection, that sense of presence with ourselves and others, we thrive and grow. When we experience relational disconnection, we experience pain and limited growth. Learning relational awareness, moving toward relational connection and working skillfully with relational disconnection can be informed by mindfulness meditation practice as well. She enjoys living in the Glens Falls community with her husband, loves sharing life with him, their family and their Mozambican family of the heart. She also enjoys nature, friends, group meditation, reading...living a mindful way of life...as best as she can.
Brenda Arley, M.A., RNCS, LMFT is the instructor for the MBSR course. By profession, she is a licensed Marriage (Couples) & Family Therapist in private practice in Glens Falls since 1993. Her interest in mindfulness meditation practice seemed to come naturally to her given her personal and professional interest in individual and relational healing.
Meet the Marriage (Couples) and Family Therapist
What she experiences in her own mindfulness meditation practice helps her to see more clearly the limitations in living when the mind is mostly operating on 'autopilot' and living at a distance from the body.
When we deveolp our ability to skillfully care for ourselves, the positive effects ripple out from ourselves into ever widening circles in the world. When we don't take such good care of ourselves, those effects ripple out as well.
Out of Brenda's experience with mindfulness meditation practice arose a natural desire to transmit these practices to others who desire and feel ready to learn mindfulness meditation practices for their particular and personal reasons. She completed the two foundational training courses in MBSR, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, in 2008 at the Center for Mindfulness in Worcester, MA. She began offering MBSR classes in the Spring of 2009. She has been practicing daily mindfulness meditation for three years.
