Webinar - Live - Cultivating Compassion: Nurturing the Inner Caregiver

Caring for Caregivers: A webinar series on building resilience

Caregiving can be a uniquely rewarding experience, while at the same time mentally and physically exhausting. Without proper support, it can take a toll on your health and your psyche. This series of four short webinars will cover key skills such as self-care, mindfulness, self-compassion and assertive communication that you can use to better support yourself through the day-to-day challenges that arise in caregiving.

Session 3 of 4

Parents and caregivers are all too used to giving care and compassion to others but may often forget to redirect some of that to themselves. This workshop will talk about what self-compassion is (and what it is not), why it is worth trying to cultivate in your daily life, and then provide some tips for how to actually do that. We will also work through an exercise together that has been shown by research to help people begin to practice self-compassion.

REGISTER HERE: https://bit.ly/AOMentalHealthSeries

Speakers:

Dr. Sivapalan

A family doctor by profession, Dr. Sivapalan believes in the potential for change to the current diagnostic landscape for children with Autism. After six years of a busy and fruitful family practice, Dr. Sivapalan left his practice to help facilitate this change. With an interest in child development, Dr. Sivapalan has worked collaboratively with multiple stakeholders to design the M-DOC, a unique developmental screening initiative whose goal was to increase access to diagnosis and intervention support for newcomer communities. In addition, Dr. Sivapalan helped develop the CARES initiative, which employed a task-shifting model to provide mental health support for caregivers and siblings of children with autism. As a social doer, Dr. Sivapalan has initiated and managed various social impact projects both at the local and global level. Most recently, Dr. Sivapalan became the chief operating officer for “The Dunya Project”, a Canadian agri-tech start-up that is building a connected, climate-controlled modular hydroponic habitat to alleviate the devastating gap in access to affordable foods irrespective of climate conditions.

Kiruthiha Vimalakanthan

Kiruthiha Vimalakanthan, MA, is a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Waterloo. She is currently completing her pre-doctoral residency at Surrey Place. Driven by her passion to improve access to mental health supports in diverse communities, Kiruthiha has consulted on various projects at the South Asian Autism Awareness Centre (SAAAC). Kiruthiha’s primary role at SAAAC is the development and supervision of the CARES initiative, which employs a task-shifting peer-based model to provide mental health support for caregivers of children with autism. Preliminary outcomes of this program were recently published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.