Joan is the Principal Consultant for Mindful Leadership at Centred Performance. She is also a physician and Founder of Learn, Grow, Heal Mindfulness; a business dedicated to training people in mindfulness practices. (Mindfulness is awareness training. Awareness is the engine behind making and sustaining change.)

As a physician, Joan has 25 years of clinical experience. For over 20 years, she worked as a family physician in a variety of settings, including the Tweed Community Health Centre, private family practice in Kingston, and Queen’s University Student Wellness Services. Her medical practice has included caring for people of all ages with complex psychological, social and physical health issues.

Over the past six years, Joan has deepened her mindfulness practice and as a result, transformed her own life. She successfully transitioned her career from traditional family medicine to solely providing mindfulness training. A career and life path she loves! She has been teaching mindfulness programs in Kingston since 2013 and founded Learn, Grow, Heal Mindfulness in 2017. She has served Queen’s University students and staff, community members and military personnel, in a variety of group formats and individually.

Training others to practice mindfulness has many rewards, one of her favourites being witnessing personal growth and transformation one individual at a time. To further support this transformational process personally and professionally Joan completed training to facilitate Mindful Self-Compassion groups. Joan’s sensitivity, caring, dedication and professionalism enables her to create a safe and warm environment for the hard work of personal growth. Improved mindful awareness enables one to connect with your inner resources harnessing this power when you need it most, whether that is at work or home and once learned it can be for used for the remainder of ones life. It truly is good medicine!

Joan holds a Bachelor of Science, Honours from Queen’s University, a Doctor of Medicine, from the University of Toronto, and completed her Family Medicine residency at McGill University. She is a fully qualified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher through the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts (where MBSR was founded by Jon Kabat-Zinn.) She is also a trained teacher of Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) through the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion.

Joan continues to immerse herself in trainings, retreats, daily mindfulness meditation, and yoga to strengthen her embodiment of mindfulness as a way of being and living. She resides in Kingston with her husband, teenage son and family dog. She can often be found practicing mindfulness in her living room or while walking with her dog near the shores of Lake Ontario. She also enjoys kayaking, cross-country skiing and simply being in nature. She is honoured to share these valuable teachings with others including partnering with Larry, Glenn and Paul at Centred Performance.