About Karen
For more than 30 years, Karen Sothers has dedicated her life to teaching the art and science of conscious living. She blends transformative mind-body practices with the most current research in mindfulness, resiliency and compassion to empower people to live more fully. Karen is highly regarded for her down-to-earth teaching style and wise, compassionate presence that makes stress mastery, mindfulness and other mind-body practices accessible to everyone.
Karen earned a Bachelor of Science in Life Sciences from Kansas State University and her Masters in Health and Exercise Science from Vanderbilt University. She completed the MBSR teacher development intensive offered by the UMASS Center for Mindfulness. Karen is an Experienced-Registered Yoga Teacher (E-RYT) with over 30 years of experience teaching stress mastery, mindfulness, resiliency, meditation, yoga and other mind-body practices.
Karen was the program director and teacher for the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) In-Person Program offered at the Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine (SCIM) from 2004 – 2020. She was teaching other mindfulness and stress mastery classes at SCIM since 1996.
With the onset of COVD in-person group restrictions in March 2020, Karen created a highly beneficial online version of MBSR that she has been leading for the past 3 years. She also develops and leads the MBSR 2.0 Online – ReNew, ReFresh, ReInspire Program for graduates of the MBSR Program.
Karen also specializes in offering the One-on-One Mindfulness Training for those that need an individualized program for stress, pain, anxiety, sleep, and other mind-body challenges.
Karen is well known for creating unique and engaging guided meditations and reflections that inspire people to live with greater ease and vitality. Her most popular guided mindfulness practices, Sacred Pause and Invitation to Relax, are widely used by corporations, hospitals and individuals. She created and produced the “Invitation to Relax” CD in 2011 for the Scripps Wellness Program that was distributed to 9000 Scripps employees system wide. For more information on Sacred Pause and Invitation to Relax, click here.
A milestone creative project for Karen in 2015, along with renowned photographer Londie Padelsky, was the design of a Mindfulness Yoga and Meditation Calendar. The calendar was a synergy of her years of practicing and teaching mindful yoga and meditation – both the physical expression of yoga and the meditative aspects. Karen created written meditations for each month as a way to inspire people to live mindfully and heart-fully on and off the yoga mat. This calendar once available globally through Tide-mark Press and Amazon, is now unfortunately sold out.