Mindfulness Dr. Caroline Hoffman

Dr Caroline Hoffman OAM, PhD, RN, BSW is a certified Mindful Self-Compassion MSC) Teacher and is currently teaching online courses from her home in Hampshire. She also teaches the Live Online MSC course for the world-wide Center for MSC in the USA. She has been teaching mindfulness-based approaches since 2005. She is also a Mindfulness Based Interventions Supervisor with the UK Mindfulness Network.

An Australian, Caroline did her degree in Social Work at the University of Melbourne in the 1970s and then became a specialist Intensive Care Nurse for nine years. She has a long history of working in acute health and psychological care. She has been teaching the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme since 2005, following her training at The Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts, near Boston, USA in 2004.

She has taught many mindfulness courses to people affected by breast cancer and other cancers as well as for healthcare professionals caring for people with cancer. For her PhD studies, she performed a large randomised controlled trial evaluating the psychological and physical benefits of the MBSR programme which was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology in April 2012. This is followed by other research in this field and she is currently writing up a service evaluation of the MSC course for people affected by cancer.

She runs regular practice groups of mindfulness and self-compassion in addition to the eight-week programmes.

She also supports newer mindfulness and mindful self-compassion teachers.

Caroline has been a pioneer in the field of integrated medicine since the 1980s, with professional level training in many touch therapies including Traditional Chinese Acupuncture and Shiatsu and was Clinical and Research Director of the national breast cancer support charity Breast Cancer Haven providing psychological support and complementary therapies for over 21 years.

She started practicing mindfulness under Sonia Moriceau at The Orchard Dharma Centre in Herefordshire in 1992. She is a long-term student of Iyengar yoga and started practising meditation in the 1970s. She completed the two-year Committed Practitioners Programme with Bodhi College in 2019, exploring the early Buddhist teachings. She has a keen interest in the understanding and meeting of Buddhist and western psychology.