About
Margaret Cullen is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and a Certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Teacher and was one of the first ten instructors to be Certified by the Center for Mindfulness. For 30 years she has been pioneering mindfulness-based programs in health care, education, business and academic settings. In 1995 she helped launch the first MBSR program at Kaiser in Oakland, and later collaborated on a revised manual for the entire northern California region. She introduced MBSR to the Cancer Support Community (CSC) in both Santa Monica and Walnut Creek, California where it still thrives, 30 years later. In 2009 she was invited by Thupten Jinpa to help develop the Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) at Stanford University. From 2009 through 2021 Margaret taught CCT and trained teachers from around the world.
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Pioneering mindfulness and compassion based programs in health care, education, business and academic settings for 30 years.
In 2005, she worked on the development and the teaching of “Cultivating Emotional Balance”, a research project at UCSF, teaching emotion skills and meditation to educators in collaboration with Paul Ekman and Alan Wallace. Also at UCSF, she collaborated with Elissa Eppel on “CALLM”, a research study combining meditation with nutrition education for overweight women. In 2007, she created a program for educators called “Stress Management and Relaxation Training” (SMART) which is also named “Mindfulness-Based Emotional Balance” (MBEB). As of 2021, seven research studies have been published in peer-reviewed journals on the efficacy of MBEB. The program was summarized in a chapter of The Handbook of Mindfulness-Based Programs (Routledge, 2020) here. In 2015, the program was published as a workbook by New Harbinger: The Mindfulness-Based Emotional Balance Workbook: An Eight-Week Program for Improved Emotion Regulation and Resilience. Along with her co-author, Gonzalo Brito Pons, Margaret has trained MBEB teachers in the US and abroad.
Margaret has been the lead trainer and curriculum developer for numerous research studies at Stanford University, Portland State, Penn State, UCSD, UCSF and University of Miami. Through these studies, she has taught a wide range groups including physicians, educators, lawyers, prison inmates, overweight women, HIV positive men, law enforcement, non-profit executives, military spouses and elite military command both in the US and around the world.