Andre Mech, P.Eng., MBA, CMVP

Certified MBSR Teacher

Andre started on the MBSR teacher path after personally experiencing the stress reduction benefits of his dedicated daily meditation practice and after attending a number of mindfulness and yoga retreats.

Over the years Andre has attended formal intensive meditation training courses led by Jon Kabat-Zinn, and numerous MBSR Teacher Training courses (such as Mind-Body Medicine) led by Florence Meleo-Meyer, Lynn Koerbel, Rob Smith and Judson Brewer at the Center for Mindfulness (CFM), University of Massachusetts Medical School.  He continued his meditative studies for personal growth and professional development under the individual supervision of Colleen Camenisch, MBA, an affiliate of UMass, at the University of Nevada School of Medicine.  During these studies he developed a keen interest in the neuroscience of mindfulness that resulted in additional studies, the most recent being Neuroscience, Mindfulness and Mindfulness Meditation under Robert McFadden at the University of Toronto.

Andre completed the training required to become a Certified MBSR Teacher and was granted the prestigious status of “Certified MBSR Teacher” following rigorous review by Erin Woo, Mindfulness Centre, at Brown University, department of Public Health, Rhode Island.  Andre is honoured to join the Clinic Founder, dr. Susan Williams, as a Certified MBSR Teacher, and be invited into the small group of 15 Certified MBSR Teachers in Canada.

Andre’s intensive studies have included week-long silent retreats led by Beth Mulligan (Mindful-Way) and Jon Aaron (New York Insight Meditation) at Copper Beech in West Hartford, Connecticut, Janet Solyntjes (The Center for Courageous Living), Jim Colosi (CFM Meditation Guru) at Shambala in Colorado, Jon Kabat-Zinn (UMASS and Brown University) and many week-long silent retreats with Winnie Nazarko (Barre Insight Meditation Center) through dharma Retreats in Toronto, Ontario.

In parallel he completed an Observership of MBSR for Pain at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, in the Technical Academic Medicine for Pain Institute, under the guidance of dr Orit Zamir.

Andre was Qualified by the University of Massachusetts Medical School Centre for Mindfulness (CFM) and Certified by Brown University, Rhode Island, to teach the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course.

Most recently Andre completed MBSR training for Certified MBSR Teachers to deliver MBSR on line through East Coast Mindfulness under Rebecca Eldridge and Margaret Fletcher and has attended Global Teacher development sessions with Jon Kabat Zinn through the Centre for Mindfulness, Ireland.

Andre has taught more than 30 MBSR courses and has delivered numerous Introduction to Mindfulness courses and Mindfulness Seminars to a multitude of corporations, SMEs and Volunteer Organizations for the purposes of stress reduction and well being, creativity enhancement and performance improvement. Andre especially enjoys bringing mindful practices to forward looking, high performance engineering organizations to foster creativity and innovation. Andre looks forward to teaching the next series of MBSR classes at The Halton Centre and looks forward to working with more corporations to help them reduce stress in parallel with increasing the functionality, effectiveness and innovative creativity of their high performance teams.