Catherine L. Phillips, MD, FRCP(C)

Founder and Director, The Mindfulness Institute.ca

Catherine L. Phillips, MD, FRCP(C), is an Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, where she teaches seminars in mindfulness, is a psychotherapy supervisor, and offers an elective in Mindfulness in Psychiatry. Through this affiliation and her clinical work as a psychiatrist, she also provides electives in military psychiatry. She is a Scholar with the Integrative Health Institute, University of Alberta.

Dr. Phillips received her MD through the U of A and completed her training in Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. She has extensive experience offering individual psychotherapy to people with personality disorders or a background of early life trauma. Over the past 15+ years, she has extended her practice to working with combat-related trauma. 

Dr. Phillips has had a lifelong interest in what is now commonly referred to as mindfulness. She considers her childhood musical studies to have played an important role in developing her mindfulness aptitudes; she is an accomplished musician, and is an Associate of the Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto, in piano performance. She has practiced Hatha Yoga and other mind-body work for over 30 years, and was first introduced to formal meditative techniques in 1982. During personal psychoanalysis, her passion became an inner exploration and understanding of the similarities, differences, and overlap between traditional western psychotherapies and meditation. Since that time, she has integrated mindfulness into psychotherapy and her clinical practice. Her chapter, "The Mindful Psychiatrist: Being Present with Suffering" was published in Dr. Patricia Dobkin's Mindful Medical Practice: Clinical Narratives and Therapeutic Insights (2015).

Dr. Phillips is a Certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Teacher through the Oasis Institute, Center for Mindfulness (CFM), University of Massachusetts Medical School (2016). The certification process included trainings with Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn (Founder of MBSR), Saki Santorelli (Executive Director, CFM), and Florence Meleo-Meyer (Director, Oasis Institute). Dr. Phillips is a MBSR Teacher Training Certification Mentor with UCSD CFM, and excited to be mentoring MBSR teachers in training. Since 2006, Dr. Phillips has run over 40 MBSR programs for clinical populations, including MBT-M (Mindfulness-Based Therapy for Military modelled on MBSR), and three programs for youth in a residential psychiatric treatment setting (a pilot research study on MBSR for teens with a psychiatric diagnosis).

Dr. Phillips was honoured with being nominated as the Canadian representative on the First Working Group of the International Mindfulness Integrity Network to establish integrity guidelines for teaching Mindfulness-Based Programs. The guidelines were published in 2020, “Tending the Field of Mindfulness-Based Programs: The Development of International Integrity Guidelines for Teachers and Teacher Training.”

Dr. Phillips is an advocate for bringing mindfulness to schools. She has completed a training with Mindful Schools (Kindergarten to Grade 5), and co-organized and hosted the International Conference on Mindfulness with Youth (2011). She also co-authored a paper on integrating mindfulness into K-12 classrooms (Mindfulness, 2012).

Dr. Phillips speaks and provides workshops on mindfulness for healthcare and other professionals as well as the general population. She provides mentorship in teaching MBSR, offers supervision for integrating mindfulness into psychotherapy, and consults on the integration of mindfulness in education, the workplace, and other medical and non-medical settings. 

You can reach Dr. Phillips at catherine@mindfulnessinstitute.ca