The GMC Story
Since 2019, the GMC has been curating and crafting contemplative practices to meet the joys and challenges of gifted living in today's world.
A New Approach to Mindful Connection for Gifted Adults
The Gifted Mindfulness Collective was founded in 2019 by Kelly Pryde, PhD in partnership with InterGifted to explore mindfulness as a path of gifted becoming. We began with a question: How might contemplative practice be adapted to support the intensity, complexity and entelechy of gifted and multi-exceptional adults? This question, together with a commitment to create compassionate spaces where gifted adults could explore their uncommon experiences with their peers, became the ground from which the GMC's practices, frameworks, and offerings developed.
Deepening Pathways
Over the years, sustained practice and exploration with gifted adults from around the world has continued to deepen this inquiry. Rooted in contemplative practice and a holistic understanding of giftedness, our work has expanded to include embodied, creative, and depth approaches to gifted development. Along the way, we developed LACE, FLOW, and Compassionate Alchemy as foundational practices for living well with gifted intensity and complexity.
Beginning in 2020, our explorations of feminine psychology through a gifted lens brought a unique focus to sensual, intuitive, embodied, and imaginal ways of knowing that had often (and long) been unacknowledged and unexpressed. Community writing and art giving voice to these intelligences became two collaborative e-books: Emergence: Contemplations & Creative Expressions of the Gifted Feminine and Retrieving the Bones: Restoring & Re-Storying the Gifted Feminine. The important insights from these explorations are woven into our current offerings and practices.
More recently, these explorations opened a pathway into depth work as our practice organically shifted toward imaginal, symbolic, and mythopoetic ways of knowing. Jungian and post-Jungian depth approaches, including dreamwork and embodied active imagination, are now woven into our contemplative foundations supporting and guiding the unfolding of the gifted psyche.
Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.
bell hooks
Connection, Belonging + Becoming
One of the guiding tenets of our work is that the wholeness of gifted being unfolds in communion rather than isolation. Connection with like-minded, like-hearted others is essential to restoring a sense of belonging and our capacity to relate more (skill)fully with ourselves, one another, and life itself. Over many years of shared practice, we have learned in curiosity with one another through witnessing, mirroring, creative exploration, and compassionately fumbling our way toward more authentic gifted being. These experiences have shaped our understanding that belonging is not an end in itself, but part of the ground from which becoming is possible. As the GMC has evolved, our work has increasingly turned toward supporting gifted adults not only in remembering the wholeness of who they are, but in discovering how their gifts are asking to be lived. Mindful inner and outer relationship remains fundamental to this process.
GMC Founder
I'm Kelly, a Jungian depth practitioner, educator, and mindfulness facilitator specializing in adults with uncommon intensity and complexity (giftedness, twice/multi-exceptionality, neurocomplexity, high sensitivity). I work from a holistic, integrative orientation drawing on embodied mindfulness and depth psychology to support gifted adults in coming home to the fullness of their lives.
I bring together 30+ years of transdisciplinary study and experience centered in compassion, curiosity and creativity. I received a PhD in Psychology from the University of Waterloo and teaching transmission in Zen and mindfulness meditation from the Awakened Meditation Centre in Toronto. For the past decade, I have trained in and studied giftedness and twice-/multi-exceptionality with InterGifted, exploring the transformative possibilities of embodied contemplative practice for gifted development. Much of this work has developed through years of facilitating groups and communities of practice where shared inquiry, witnessing and relationship have been central to gifted growth.
More recently, my approach has expanded through Jungian and post-Jungian depth psychology engaging with imaginal and symbolic ways of knowing. I am currently a Jungian Analyst candidate, deepening the soulful lens I bring to my work with gifted adults.
Acknowledgment + Gratitude
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 offer our respect to the peoples who have cared for these lands across generations and recognize our responsibility to live in reciprocal relationship with these places and communities of which we are part.
We also offer our respect and gratitude to the Asian cultures and lineages from which the contemplative practices at the heart of our work have emerged. We are committed to acknowledging our influences, understanding their contexts, and engaging these traditions with care and respect.