Dr. Rahmat’s teaching style is inclusive, compassionate, intentional, and joyful. She strives to center online and in-person classroom engagement on the lived realities of learners, co-creating learning conditions by working alongside learners and supporting them in revealing their potential through equitable, affirmative, and accessible learning. Dr. Rahmat teaches through the lens of compassion-focused pedagogy (CFP), a relational approach to learning, fostering well-being, resilience, and flourishing. She has specialized training in trauma-informed organizational systems, advanced trauma-sensitive mindfulness, yoga therapy, mindfulness, and compassion-based psychotherapeutic interventions and self-compassion in psychotherapy through the Center for Mindful-Self Compassion and the Cambridge Health Alliance, affiliated with the Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry. She is a certified trauma-sensitive mindfulness (TSM) teacher, mindful self-compassion (MSC) teacher, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR-T) teacher for teens and young adults, and certified yoga teacher.
Dr. Rahmat’s professional and research interests focus on compassion-based pedagogy, professional development, programs, initiatives, and therapy to promote well-being. Her doctoral research, Compassion-Based Professional Development for Educator Well-Being, focused on developing a school-based professional development program for promoting educator well-being. Dr. Rahmat’s current research agenda includes a mixed methods project implementing a compassion-based professional development program to support educator well-being in a primary school. Among her current research priorities is a project under the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Great Lakes Liberal Arts Alliance, focused on faculty-led experiential research on community well-being in a multi-sectarian community-based mindfulness center. Dr. Rahmat is an Assistant Psychology at Antioch College and an adjunct professor at the California School of Professional Psychology at Alliant International University. Dr. Rahmat is the founder of a successful health and fitness startup, Breaking Muscle, and has worked as a certified yoga, mindfulness, and meditation instructor for over twenty-five years. She earned her doctorate from Alliant International University and also holds a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Marshall University. She is currently writing a book about compassion-focused pedagogy for social-emotional learning.