Margaret Cullen is a licensed psychotherapist and was one of the first ten people to become a Certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher. For over 25 years, she has pioneered secular contemplative programs for a wide variety of populations including physicians, nurses, HIV positive men, cancer patients, overweight women, military spouses college students, clinicians and educators.
She has developed and taught contemplative interventions for research studies at Stanford, UCSF, Portland State, Penn State, University of Michigan, and University of Miami. In 2013, she developed a mindfulness and compassion program (MBAT – Spouse) for military spouses that she piloted at Ft. Drum, Maxwell Air Force Base, and Joint Operations Special Command. In 2015, she co-authored a book on Mindfulness-Based Emotional Balance (MBEB), an evidence-based program that she piloted across the US and Canada. She has also designed and co-delivered teacher trainings for both MBAT-Spouse and MBEB.
As a clinician, Margaret has been a facilitator of support groups for cancer patients and their loved ones for 30 years. In 2010, she was invited by Thupten Jinpa to contribute to the development of the Compassion Cultivation Training, first through the Center for Compassion, Altruism, Research and Education at the Stanford School of Medicine and currently as Founding Faculty for the Compassion Institute. Margaret is also the founder of Compassion Corps, a program offering grants to support compassion teachers to offer free programs to under-resourced communities and a Founding Board Member of the Compassion Education Alliance.
