about me

Dr. Laura Feagans Gould, Founder of allighten.com is passionate that mindfulness and kindness practices can help us connect more authentically with ourselves and those we care about and live with more ease, purpose, and in alignment with our own truth/values. As a long-time mindfulness practitioner, teacher, and researcher whose own mediation practice and life have been significantly transformed by the power of mindfulness and compassion practices, she loves sharing practical and embodied “kindfulness” practices to help transform one of the most important and long-standing relationships we will ever have: the one with ourselves! As a working parent of young children, she is also committed to introducing practices of presence in an accessible and practical way that are soul-nourishing and not just one more item on our to-do list.

Dr. Gould has been studying and bringing mindfulness into communities and schools for almost two decades, serving as a co-investigator on several nationally funded grants and as the Director of Research for both Minds Incorporated and A Mindful Choice. She is currently a co-investigator on a Mind & Life Institute PEACE grant led by Dr. Sharon Lambert to study the impact of the Peace of Mind (PoM) program -  a school-based mindfulness, compassion, and conflict resolution program -  on middle school students’ awareness and agency to act against racism and injustice. She received her PhD in developmental psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed her post-doctoral training at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is a certified Mindfulness Instructor through The Awareness Training Institute and the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley.