Nicholas is the Director of CompassionLA, a Los Angeles-based providing compassion and mindfulness trainings to the public and within organizations. He has been trained to teach Mindful Self Compassion (MSC) by founding teachers Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer. He also teaches the researched Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program and is a Certified Mindfulness Facilitator by UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. Through the Center for Compassion, Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University School of Medicine, he is a teacher of their Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT).
Nicholas is a perennial student of wisdom and compassion practices. He combines his own practice with curiosity about current research and has been cross-trained in multiple arenas with compassion at their core such as mindfulness, Internal Family Systems psychotherapy, somatic-based trauma resiliency, nonviolent communication and end of life presence. He has practiced Vipassana meditation intensively in the U.S., Burma and Thailand and is a graduate of Spirit Rock’s Dedicated Practioner’s Program.
Having earned a Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology from California Institute of Integral Studies he is in private practice in Los Angeles. Nicholas has a keen interest in offering compassion-based practices and has found that they are transformative in BIG and small ways.