Awaken Pittsburgh launches trauma-sensitive mindfulness course for teachers, practitioners

Meditation teachers who assume stillness is automatically safe are the audience Awaken Pittsburgh is aiming at with Mindful Connections for Trauma Sensitive Practices, a nine-session online course that runs from Saturday, May 2 through Saturday, June 27, 2026.

The program is built for professionals and experienced practitioners, including people who already teach meditation or work with others in a care role. Awaken Pittsburgh says the course is meant to help participants hold space, offer support, and guide practice in ways that are sensitive to trauma, a distinction that matters in a field where inward attention can sometimes open the door to intrusive thoughts, physical dysregulation, flashbacks, or old memories.

That is the practical problem trauma-sensitive mindfulness tries to solve. David Treleaven, whose work has shaped much of the conversation around this approach, says sustained inward attention can unintentionally trigger traumatic stress symptoms such as flashbacks, dysregulation, or dissociation. In other words, the same meditation instruction that calms one person can leave another feeling flooded or shut down if the teacher does not understand how to adjust the frame.

Awaken Pittsburgh’s curriculum leans hard into those details. The 13.5-hour course, spread across nine 1.5-hour Zoom sessions, will cover where mindfulness and trauma intersect, the window of tolerance, how to create safety while facilitating practice, interoception and exteroception, social context, resilience, resources, and self-compassion. Participants are also expected to purchase Treleaven’s Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness, a sign that this is being treated as serious retraining rather than an introductory webinar.

Treleaven’s book was published in 2018, and Penguin Random House has since published The Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness Workbook, which extends the same approach with practical exercises and guidance for bringing trauma sensitivity into mindfulness settings. That progression mirrors where the field is heading: less hype about meditation as a universal fix, more attention to how practice actually lands in the body and nervous system.

The instructor is Sheba Gittens, whom YogaRoots On Location describes as a Compassionate Joy and Liberation HeArtivist and co-director of YogaRoots On Location Yoga Teacher Training. YogaRoots On Location also says Gittens holds a BA in Africana Studies from the University of Pittsburgh and works in embodied antiracism, social justice, and community organizing.

Awaken Pittsburgh frames Mindful Connections™ as an evidence-based series for people who teach, help, and care for others. In trauma-informed terms, the window of tolerance is the sweet spot where regulation holds, and this course is built around helping facilitators keep students there with the right mix of mindfulness, grounding, movement, breathing, and care.