Pause, Breathe, Continue: Mindfulness Skills for the Advocacy Journey
April 23, 2026
2:00 pm to 4:00 pm
The Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) is pleased to announce that registration is now open for the webinar “Pause, Breathe, Continue: Mindfulness Skills for the Advocacy Journey.”
Participant Cost and Registration: This training is free for victim-serving professionals. Advanced registration is required. Please click here to register.
Who Should Attend: Law enforcement, prosecutors, medical providers, victim advocates, and other allied professionals.
Session Description:
This two-hour, practice-centered workshop supports advocates who devote significant emotional energy to others and may experience the cumulative impact of that work. While advocacy is meaningful, it can also lead to secondary trauma and burnout. This session offers space to slow down, reconnect with your own well-being, and build skills that help you remain steady, grounded, and present in challenging environments.
Through guided exercises, participants will learn to recognize how stress, secondary trauma, and burnout show up in the body and mind. The workshop includes accessible, experiential practices such as brief meditation, gentle movement, grounding techniques, and moments for personal reflection. Throughout the session, participants will engage directly with mindfulness and compassion-based tools that support emotional regulation and resilience.
By the end of the workshop, participants will have practiced multiple techniques they can immediately apply in their advocacy work and will walk away with a personalized plan for integrating short, sustainable well-being practices into their daily routine.
Learning Objectives:
- Participants will be able to identify the common signs of secondary trauma and burnout and understand how they show up in the body and mind.
- Participants will learn and practice three or more mindfulness and grounding techniques that support emotional regulation and sustained presence during challenging interactions.
- Participants will develop a personal plan for integrating short, practical resilience practices into their daily workflow to strengthen long term wellbeing.
Presenter: Carolina Bautista-Velez
Carolina Bautista-Velez is a Certified Professional Coach, Diversity Consultant, and mindfulness teacher with over 17 years of professional experience. She is the owner of CVelez Consulting and Metamorphosis Coaching. As a Certified Life Coach, Carolina offers a space to cultivate reflection, resilience, autonomy, and strength, where her clients can focus on learning sustainable tools to navigate desires, societal conditioning, goals, and difficulties.
Carolina has been an advocate for survivors of domestic and sexual violence for many years providing direct services, creating programs for human trafficking survivors, and training organizations across the country on how to provide social justice and culturally informed services to survivors.
Carolina holds a degree in clinical psychology with a specialization in social psychology.
DCJS Contact Information:
Tricia Everetts
Tricia.Everetts@dcjs.virginia.gov