Martin Thomson-Jones Ph.D.

Martin is a Certified Teacher of Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC). (You can see his profile on the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion's website here. Certification is granted by the Mindfulness-Based Professional Training Institute of the U.C. San Diego Center for Mindfulness.) He first encountered loving-kindness meditation, one of the core elements of MSC, when he took the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 2010, and from there he gradually found his way to Kristin Neff's and Christopher Germer’s work. He took MSC from Chris and Kristin as a five-day intensive at Esalen, in California, in January 2013, and was invited to be part of the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion's first teacher training course—led by Chris Germer, Kristin Neff, and Michelle Becker and Steven Hickman of the UCSD Center for Mindfulness—in Barre, Massachusetts in March 2014. He has been teaching the eight-week version of the course in Oberlin and the Cleveland area since then, and has taught the five-day intensive version in the US, Canada, and Israel.

Martin is English, but he has now been living in the U.S. for more than half his life. He is Professor of Philosophy at Oberlin College, and has also taught philosophy at Princeton University and U.C. Berkeley. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University, and a B.A. (Joint Hons.) in physics and philosophy from Oxford University. Most of his research so far has been in the philosophy of science. You can read more about his work as a philosopher here.