Cultivating your ideal compassionate self

This research project aimed at developing a protocol for a relatively brief (two weeks) Compassion Mind Training (CMT) intervention that provided psycho-educational materials and audio CMT exercises. This study aimed to test this CMT intervention in a randomized controlled trial exploring its impact on self-report variables including compassion, fears of compassion, shame, self-criticism, self-reassurance, types of positive affect, and depression, anxiety and stress. In addition, the current study aimed to investigate the impact of this CMT intervention on Heart Rate Variability. This study also explored indicators of practice quality of the brief CMT intervention and their impact on the development of an inner sense of one’s compassionate self and a range of self-report measures. Finally, this study examined the processes of change that mediate the impact of the CMT intervention on self-evaluative processes, and negative and positive affect.