Mindfulness Chaplain - Dr Kitty Wheater

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Dr Kitty Wheater is a mindfulness practitioner, social and medical anthropologist, and writer. She began practising mindfulness in 2009, and trained to teach Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy at the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, where she also spent some years training mindfulness teachers in the UK and internationally as an Associate. Kitty has a DPhil in Anthropology from the University of Oxford, where her doctoral and postdoctoral research focused on embodiment and ethics in mindfulness-based interventions. Kitty joined the University of Edinburgh in 2019. 

As a practitioner focusing on mindfulness in higher education, Kitty is particularly interested in supporting ongoing practice for students and staff, and the evidence-base for mindfulness in university settings. She specialises in trauma-sensitive mindfulness and mindfulness for pain and chronic illness. 

At the University Chaplaincy, Kitty runs the Mindfulness Programme of courses, workshops, retreat days, and twice-weekly lunchtime drop-in sessions, open to the whole University. Kitty is the author of the weekly MindLetter, which has over 700 subscribers across the University, been picked up by the BBC, and been viewed thousands of times. She edits the Chaplaincy blog, For Times Like These, and co-hosts PhD Book Club with Rev’d Dr Harriet Harris. 

Kitty founded and hosts Why Don’t You Write Me, a postcard-writing, art and connection project, designed to connect the UoE community to each other and the people they care about across distances of place and (head)space. Since December 2020, hundreds of WDYWM cards have been sent by UoE members each month across the University and all over the world.

Kitty is on the steering group of Edinburgh Academics for Academic Freedom, and is particularly interested in the relationships among academic freedom, freedoms of speech and assembly, and mental health and wellbeing in universities. 

For information on the Mindfulness Programme or Why Don’t You Write Me, email Kitty directly, or for mindfulness contact mindfulness@ed.ac.uk.

Selected writing and publications

Self-Care and Wellbeing in the Face of COVID-19: Multidisciplinary perspectives and interprofessional experiences. Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, April 2023. (first author)

Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness for Students: an overview. BACP Journal of University and College Counselling, November 2022.

No Time Like the Present: Mindfulness, temporality and the therapeutics of kairos. Anthropology Today, April 2022. 

A Trauma-Sensitive Approach to Teaching and Learning. Times Higher Education, March 2022.