Nancy Bardacke

Nancy Bardacke, CNM, MA, midwife, mindfulness teacher, founder of the Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting program (MBCP) and the Mindful Birthing and Parenting Foundation (MBPF) has been assisting birthing families since 1971. A meditation practitioner of almost 4 decades, Nancy began her professional training in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) with Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD in 1994. After teaching MBSR for a number of years, Nancy began adapting the program to meet the needs of pregnant women and their partners, creating the MBCP program. Nancy has taught MBCP to more than 1500 expectant parents and has trained hundreds of MBCP teachers across six continents. Nancy was an Assistant Clinical Professor in the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) School of Nursing and served as the Director of the MBCP program at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at UCSF until 2017. Nancy and her colleague, Larissa Duncan, PhD, Director of the Center for Child and Family Well-Being, School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have developed a robust research program to study the impact of mindfulness skills in reducing stress and anxiety during pregnancy, pain during childbirth, and enhanced attunement between parents and their infants after birth. With its highly skilled international faculty, the MBPF continues to train MBCP Instructors worldwide. It also works in collaboration with colleagues globally to develop MBCP Instructor Training Courses in their own countries. In addition, the MBPF enthusiastically supports the work of researchers throughout the world who are studying the impact of the MBCP program on expectant parents and their babies. Nancy's book, Mindful Birthing: Training the Mind, Body and Heart for Childbirth and Beyond (Foreword by Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD) was published by HarperCollins in 2012. It was named Best Book of the Year by the American College of Nurse- Midwives in 2014. Mindful Birthing is now available in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Romanian, Turkish, Chinese and was release in Spanish in November 2023. The English edition is available as an audio book. The Mindful Birthing and Parenting Foundation offers the 9-week MBCP course and the 3-day MBCP Intensive online for expectant parents.