All of the group meetings are recorded and posted to the private community space that’s only accessible to your class cohort. The Weekly Office Hours are not recorded. 

Most of the 2-hour class meetings will be Keith’s teaching about that week’s concepts. You’ll be asked to shut off your camera during exercise or discussion breaks to interact with your partner. There will be several opportunities each week for you to speak for your reaction to the concepts or exercises, or ask questions, in front of the group. Speaking for your experience can be a key to learning and everyone is encouraged to participate as much as possible. No one is ever put on the spot to share information about themselves they don’t want to share with the rest of the group. Short and structured breakout discussion rooms are a part of most classes, where you’ll be paired with one or two other couples in the course. This is optional but highly encouraged and one of the highest-rated elements of the course from graduates). 

It’s best if you’re in same room as your partner and on-screen as much as possible. Of course if you are geographically separated, being on two separate cameras is no problem.

I’d like this group to resemble an in-person meeting as much as possible and it makes a HUGE difference to me as your teacher and to see each other’s faces and feel the energy of the group. Talk to me ahead of time if you have concerns about this. There will be times when I ask everyone to shut off their cameras and mute themselves so that you can complete an assignment or discussion with your partner. If you have to take care of a personal matter or tend to children during the meeting, it’s no problem to turn off your camera, but otherwise I’d ask for everyone to participate and be a full part of the group, on camera.

Participating in the private Facebook Group that’s exclusively for the participants of your live course is highly encouraged, but is not necessary, unless you want to access a replay of a class that you missed. Working through the concepts and exercises in this course can be REALLY challenging. I encourage you to use the private forum to get to know each other and learn from each other’s wisdom and sharing about where you’re getting stuck and where you’re making strides. A central concept in the course is “speaking for your parts,” and learning to separate your own feelings from your automatic assumptions (projections) about your partner. The form is NOT a place to voice frustrations with your partner or speak for your partner. I’ll help make this distinction clear and offer guidance.

You have lifetime access to log in to the Mindful Marriage online course material.

Yes. A little secret behind Mindful Marriage is that it was designed specifically to be done solo. The fact that partners take the course together in my live teaching of this course is a huge bonus. This is one of the few relationship enrichment programs that asks people to seriously focus on and improve their relationship with parts of themselves before trying to improve their relationship to their partner.   

IFS stands for Internal Family Systems, a popular evidence-based psychotherapy and spiritual tool that views the mind as naturally multiple and uses compassionate exploration of parts of you to befriend rather than berate or exile some of the most perplexing or difficult emotional states that many of us have learned to feel shame and fear toward.

Mindful Marriage does not explicitly teach IFS but is strongly influenced by it and can be seen as an introduction to basic IFS concepts such as Parts, Self, Protectors, Exiles, and the You-Turn concept, which was first introduced to me by IFS founder Richard Schwartz and IFS Lead Trainer Toni Herbine-Blank.   

No. Mindful Marriage was designed for people new to mindfulness and/or meditation. However many lifelong meditators have found the meditations in this course to be novel and helpful to deal with emotional states that traditional meditation does not address.