This year's BC Mindfulness Summit has a great lineup of presenters, each offering wisdom and practical skills for participants to use in their everyday lives. We recently had the opportunity to have a conversation with Dr. Maia Love to ask a few questions about her professions, interests and more.

Dr. Maia Love

Dr. Maia Love is a wellness consultant and psychiatrist with a specialization in mindfulness-based strategies for happiness and success. She has consulted and helped to build several wellness programs that use mindfulness for greater well-being—most recently a program on developing resilience in the face of vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue.

Having led many mindfulness groups over the last eight years, contributed to neuroimaging research on motivation and reward, and now specializing in outpatient mindfulness-based psychotherapy for health care providers and first responders, Maia brings her clinical experience, knowledge and training to her passion for positive psychiatry to create measurable change in individuals and in organizations.

How did you become interested in mindfulness?
I became interested in meditation when I was 17 years old, and met a lovely woman from India who taught me meditation as a way to calm the mind. Since that time, I have practiced many different approaches to meditation, all of which I both found useful and enjoyed. When I first learned of mindfulness during my medical training, I was delighted to learn of an approach that could be used in both wellness and prevention, as well as therapy, that is related to meditation.

What do you like about teaching?
I love hearing people's interpretations of the teaching. Discussing the principles and practice brings me joy. I truly adore neuroscience and love discussing the nervous system and brain in a way that people can begin to perhaps understand the difference between themselves and what their brain is doing due to stress or other unpleasant states. Discussing how to cultivate positive states of mind and heart then becomes the next step, and hearing people's insights into positive states of being always gives me hope for a new way of living where we together, as human beings, support a practice and living of positive states despite the challenges that can arise.

My proudest professional moment is…
I think my proudest professional moments really happen on a day to day level when clients face challenges and then have a breakthrough when they discover how to use a tool for inner work and inner wisdom, that they can then use repeatedly to exit states of feeling trapped and uninspired and suffering, and instead open doors within themselves to states of liberation and choice and other positive and useful states of being.

If you could have a super power, what would it be?
I sometimes feel like I do have a super power, in that I get to help others find more space within for calm and peace and bliss and other positive states.  

Your main go-to is: desktop, tablet or phone?
My main go to is meditation.

Which talent would you most like to have?
Creating beautiful spaces for healing and calm reflection. 

 

BC Mindfulness Summit

The BC Mindfulness Summit is a weekend educational event for community members and professionals to develop and enrich their personal and professional mindfulness practices. It is developed in partnership with the British Columbia Association for Living Mindfully (BCALM).

 

  • Posted May 3, 2021