A New Approach to Mindfulness, Personal Growth & Community for Gifted Adults

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The Gifted Mindfulness Collective was founded in 2019 by Kelly Pryde, PhD in partnership with InterGifted with the aim of exploring mindfulness as a transformative path to wholeness of gifted being. We began with the question: How might mindfulness practices be adapted to support the intensity, complexity and entelechy of the gifted and twice-exceptional (2e) experience? This question, combined with a commitment to offer safe, compassionate spaces in which gifted adults could explore their uncommon experiences together, led to deepened perspectives and approaches to meditation, gifted growth, and community connection.

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Connection Centered on Complexity, Curiosity, Creativity & Compassion

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Like the gifted adults from around the world who join us for these explorations, our offerings are centered on complexity, creativity, curiosity and compassion. While we are guided and inspired by Buddhist and mindfulness practices, as well as a holistic model of giftedness, we also weave in other wisdom traditions and have developed a number of our own practices and frameworks. These include: LACE, FLOW and Compassionate Alchemy. Integrating ancient wisdom with modern science that includes trauma healing, interpersonal neurobiology and depth approaches is fundamental to our approach, not only to ensure a balance of psycho-spiritual gifted growth, but also to facilitate the restoration of right relationship... 

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The Path of Right Relationship

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Inspired by the Buddhist eightfold path, the Indigenous notion of "all my relations", depth psychology and gifted entelechy, the path of right relationship is a guiding tenet of our approach and practice. This path encourages us to cultivate wise

respect, accept responsibility and restore reciprocity within the collective family by living our gifted lives in an integrous way that includes inner and outer, conscious and unconscious aspects of being. In this way, embodying right relationship involves the inner work of deep listening, insight and integration, as well as the outer work of compassionate action. It is the remembrance of our soul nature, or "smriti" ~ the etymological root of the word mindfulness.     

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Community, Courses, Workshops & Personal Support

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 We have created a n umber of online offerings to support mindfully embodied gifted growth and right relationship:

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• Community of Practice - a weekly contemplative gathering space for gifted and 2/multi-e women

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• Courses and Workshops for gifted adults, including - 

  • The Art of Mindfulness for the Gifted Journey - the evolution of our classic Foundations program, a 6-session course to cultivate gifted-sensitive mindfulness skills & concepts with like-minded peers​

  • Healing Gifted Shame - a workshop for women to name and transform toxic feminine shame using imaginal mindfulness​

• Embodied Depth Work - a personally guided process using mindfulness, embodied active imagination, and dreamwork to support gifted adults in getting in touch with and actualizing the deeper parts of themselves

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• Mindfulness Coaching & Mentoring - 1:1 guidance for developing and deepening mindfulness skills to support gifted growth and experience 

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• Community Dreamwork - new in 2025, a monthly community group for exploring the embodied richness and life-forward potential of gifted dreams  

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Contemplations & Conversations on the Gifted Feminine

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Early in 2020, we were drawn to explore feminine psychology through a gifted lens. These explorations have led to numerous insights around gifted sensual, emotional, intuitive, embodied, and imaginal intelligences that are woven into our current offerings and practices. Our community writing and art projects centered on these themes have resulted in two compilations available as ebooks in the GMC shop: Emergence: Contemplations & Creative Expressions of the Gifted Feminine and Retrieving the Bones: Restoring & Re-Storying the Gifted Feminine. Our new Embodied Depth Work offering has also emerged from this work and engages these often repressed intelligences to support gifted adults in moving their lives forward in aligned ways. 

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Community, Connection and Belonging       

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In the spirit of right relationship, community is integral to the GMC. We know that wholeness of gifted being unfolds in communion rather than isolation, and that connection with like-minded, like-hearted peers is vital for restoring our sense of belonging and our capacity to connect deeply and meaningfully. We embrace community as refuge x laboratory x playground in that we learn in curiosity with one other – sharing, witnessing, mirroring, and compassionately fumbling our way to more authentic gifted being. In turn, this process supports us in being able to go forth and engage more (skill)fully in our lives and the parts of the world in which we find ourselves.

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Acknowledgment and Gratitude

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The GMC is based near Toronto, Canada which is traditional territory of many First Nations Peoples including the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, as well as the current treaty holders, the Mississaugas of the Credit. We acknowledge that Anishinaabe means "Good Humans" when translated to english and commit to using our engaged practice to be good humans and contribute to the restoration of the whole our indigenous ancestors have always known. 

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We also offer our respect and gratitude to the Asian lineages and cultures in which contemporary mindfulness practice is rooted. We are committed to practicing appreciation, acknowledging our influences, and offering respect to the contexts from which they emerged.

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