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Rochelle McLaughlin, the founder of Ways of the Rising Woman, is a teacher, facilitator, mentor, and speaker. She has spent nearly two decades guiding women to identify, honor, and heed their inner wisdom. As a survivor of destructive, systemic gendered patriarchal oppression, Rochelle speaks with sensitivity, intimacy, and authority about what it takes to live a well-nourished, embodied, purposeful, and interconnected life in the modern world. She has traveled both nationally and internationally, speaking and teaching about how we can all find fulfillment in our lives by honoring our deepest values for ourselves, one another, and the Earth, by reweaving ourselves into the animate world, healing ancestral trauma, living in solidarity, and inhabiting our bodies.

Rochelle holds a Masters Degree in Occupational Therapy, is a certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction teacher, and has advanced studies in Humanistic Psychology. She draws from an extensive background in lifestyle redesign, somatic embodiment-based practices, food-as-medicine, ancestral healing, mythology, alchemy, indigenous cultures, equine-assisted modalities, and poetic traditions. Her work is trauma- and culture-sensitive and embodies love of soul, the more-than-human world, the arts, ritual, and devotion to bringing all of these into a thriving and sustainable community as a kind of activism. She is the founding director of SJSU’s Advanced Certificate in Applied Mindfulness. Since 2004, she has taught at Saint Mary’s College, Dominican University, as well as San Jose State University. 

In addition, Rochelle is on the board of directors of Dragonfly Healing Center (www.dragonflycenter.org) a 501c3 nonprofit seeking to foster global healing through integrative, paradigm-shifting approaches for personal, social, and ecological justice. 

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Rochelle McLaughlin has spent nearly two decades guiding hundreds of women to identify, honor and heed their deepest values for themselves, one another, and the planet. Through Ways of the Rising Woman, she is empowering modern women through vision, education, and inspiration to rise rooted as agents for meaningful change for the evolution of humanity in right relationship with the earth.

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Rochelle McLaughlin is the founder and lead instructor for the Advanced Certificate in SJSU’s Advanced Certificate in Applied Mindfulness a program open to all healthcare and human service practitioners worldwide. Rochelle received her certification to teach Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) from the Massachusetts Medical School's Center for Mindfulness and has completed advanced studies in Psychology and is a certified yoga instructor. She has taught mindfulness and MBSR to several hundred participants nationally and internationally for people all age ranges experiencing a broad range of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual challenges. Rochelle has personally and professionally experienced and witnessed the integration of mindfulness meditation practice as an extraordinary healing balm for the heart, body, mind, and soul as well as a practice of transforming relationships to self and others. She has woven mindfulness into patient care settings such as mental and physical disabilities, pediatric care, cancer care, grief and loss, equine-assisted modalities, chronic pain as well as in corporate wellness programs, academic settings, and social and ecological change work.

Rochelle’s teachings are rooted in her own embodied experiences of the transformative power of mindful awareness practices and she is inspired by the collective and collaborative journey weaving mindfulness into our lives and work through our unique experience and expression of these profound practices.