Our panel
Maria Paula (moderator)
María Paula works as the Membership Development Coordinator of the Global Coalition for Compassion. She is also a Senior Instructor and Teacher Trainer in Spain and the United States of the Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) program developed at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University. She is also a trained instructor of the Mindful Self Compassion (MSC) program and is a teacher and Teacher Trainer for the Mindfulness Based Emotional Balance (MBEB) program. Maria Paula focuses her career on Compassion Education and works as a speaker, coach, organizational consultant, and adviser to groups and individuals on issues related to wellness/wholeness, contemplative practices, mindfulness, and compassion. María Paula trained as a therapist at the Universidad de Los Andes. She is also an expert in Corporate Social Responsibility at the Sergio Arboleda University, and in Alternative Therapies at the Faculty of Medicine of the Universidad del Rosario.
Gonzalo Brito
Clinical Psychologist from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and PhD in Psychology from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, United States. Interested in the integration between meditation and psychology since 1999, he made a 3-month retreat in Plum Village with Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh in 2000 and numerous meditation retreats and training since. Gonzalo completed his doctorate in psychology in the United States on the effects of compassion training on a personal and relational level. He studied at the Stanford University School of Medicine’s Center for Research and Education in Compassion and Altruism (CCARE), becoming the first certified instructor of Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) and later director of the training of instructors of this program for Spanish-speaking countries, training more than one hundred CCT instructors in more than twelve Spanish-speaking countries.
Catherine Andreu
PhD in Neurosciences from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. In her doctoral thesis, she investigated the effect of meditation practice on cognitive control using electrophysiological measures. Subsequently, she was the winner of the Francisco Varela award from Mind and Life Europe, where she carried out research on mindfulness in education. She is a Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) instructor. She currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Valencia. Her current research focuses on the effects of Tonglen practice on psychobiological measures in helping professionals.
Karma Tempa
Karma Tenpa received in India and in the years 2005 and 2007 the ordinations common in the Tibetan monastic tradition. As an Instructor he teaches teachings in various Buddhist Centers and offers teachings on philosophy Buddhist and meditation in various fields.
His interest in the encounter between Buddhism and contemporary sciences led him to train in Mindfulness and emotional management, neuroscience of meditation and accompaniment in the process of dying.
He is a teacher trainer of volunteers in spiritual accompaniment in the dying process of the Metta Hospice Foundation and as a volunteer joins the activity of said Foundation in accompaniment in the process of dying. For two years, he developed a program of meditation, mindfulness and emotional management, with patients from the pain unit of the Huesca hospital He has founded and manages the NGO “Creciendo en Nepal” (creciendoennepal.org) whose activity focuses on accompanying girls and adolescents in Kathmandu, Nepal, providing the necessary resources for their growth, education and personal development.
Edgar Gonzalez Hernandez
Edgar González-Hernández holds a PhD in Psychology from the Universitat de València, where he specializes in Advances in Research and Treatment in Psychopathology and Health and Sports Psychology. In 2011-2013 he participated in a multicenter and multidisciplinary research project entitled “Benefits of a support program for family caregivers of patients at the end of life”.
His thesis entitled “Efficacy of the Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT) Program for the Improvement of Quality of Life and Fear of Cancer Recurrence in a Sample of Breast Cancer Survivors” received an outstanding grade with mention cum laude. Part of his PhD work was published in the international journal Integrative Cancer Therapies as a controlled clinical trial.
He is especially interested in implementing CBCT for populations that have experienced psychological trauma, adapting the resources of contemplative psychology to modern psychology and neuropsychology and the role of contemplative practices as a resource to prevent psychopathology.
He is a member of the Certified Instructors Team of the CBCT Program at Emory University under the Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics.
He is currently a collaborating professor at Valencian International University where he performs teaching and research. In addition, he has performed teaching and research as a visiting professor at the University of the Americas Puebla (UDLAP)