Caring with Awareness
Caring With Awareness is a 6-week mindful self-care course Dr. Rashmi has tailored for patients with cancer, survivors, and caregivers. It integrates mindfulness, yoga, and compassion-based practices along with lectures, reflections, partner work, and group discussions to cultivate a relationship with innate awareness and our innermost ways of knowing and caring for ourselves and others. The course meets weekly for six 2-hr sessions and incorporates home practices, optional readings, and journalling.
Caring with Awareness came together in 2017 when Dr. Rashmi was approached by colleague Dr. Elizabeth Gage Bouchard, PhD to help create mindfulness programming for community members at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. After meeting with key stakeholders, the program was tailored to meet the needs of the community. Caring with Awareness was successfully piloted at RPCCC in summer 2017 and results were shared in a poster at the International Mindfulness Research Conference in Amsterdam in July 2018. Dr. Bismark moved to the UK with her family and continued to refine the course while facilitating it at MacMillan Cancer Support in Jersey, Channel Islands for patients, caregivers, and Hospice clinicians.
Caring with Awareness came together in 2017 when Dr. Rashmi was approached by colleague Dr. Elizabeth Gage Bouchard, PhD to help create mindfulness programming for community members at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. After meeting with key stakeholders, the program was tailored to meet the needs of the community. Caring with Awareness was successfully piloted at RPCCC in summer 2017 and results were shared in a poster at the International Mindfulness Research Conference in Amsterdam in July 2018. Dr. Bismark moved to the UK with her family and continued to refine the course while facilitating it at MacMillan Cancer Support in Jersey, Channel Islands for patients, caregivers, and Hospice clinicians.
After moving back home during the pandemic, Dr. Rashmi and Dr. Bouchard renewed their collaboration - this time to provide mindful self-care programming for the Roswell community virtually. Thanks to a generous research grant from the Roswell Park Alliance Foundation, Caring with Awareness was made available again, free to patients, survivors, and caregivers in the broader Roswell Patient Care Network, spanning NY and regions of PA.
Through 2022, Dr. Rashmi was able to facilitate six virtual courses for the Roswell community and one in-person course at her local Oneida Roswell clinic. Participants on average experienced a 48% decrease in anxiety and reported meaningful transformations in mood, perspective, attention to self-care, and connection. In an interview with Roswell Park, cancer survivor Jim Bojanowski credits Dr. Rashmi's mindfulness sessions "for helping him recognize and appreciate more in his life." |