Kimberly Middleton
Ayurvedic Health Counselor (AHC), Pathwork Helper, Mindful Self-Compassion Teacher, RYT500-Kripalu Yoga Teacher, and Ayurvedic Yoga Teacher (AYT500)
Path of Compassion, LLC
Path of Compassion, LLC is a mind-body-spirit wellness practice serving clients online and in the Greater Washington, DC area through group classes and 1:1 consultations. Also offering collaborations with community organizations, yoga studios, and wellness collectives to offer workshops to members.
My offerings combine integrative credibility from a clinical perspective (RN/research background) with training in complementary modalities (Pathwork, yoga, Ayurveda, meditation, and mindful self-compassion) to facilitate and support self-inquiry practices to help clients build self-awareness, strengthen self-esteem, create sustainable self-care routines and more satisfying relationships. Using a culturally responsive approach to wellness, which invites heritage foods, family traditions, and intergenerational wisdom into the wellness plan.
- Core Values: Compassion; cultural humility and respect; evidence-informed practice; accessibility and practicality; integrity; lifelong learning; community and intergenerational wisdom.
ABOUT KIMBERLY MIDDLETON, FOUNDER
My path into wellness work didn’t begin with a single moment of clarity. It unfolded — practice by practice, decade by decade — through a genuine desire to understand myself more deeply and to share what I was discovering with others.
My yoga journey began in the 1990s during graduate school, at a time when I was learning to hold a great deal — academically, personally, and professionally. Yoga offered something I hadn’t found elsewhere: a practice that met me in my body and asked me to listen. That early relationship with the mat eventually led me to train as a Hatha Yoga teacher (RYT 200) and later as a Kripalu Yoga teacher (RYT 500). What I love about Kripalu in particular is its emphasis on inner listening — using posture and breath not to perform, but to reveal.
Ayurveda came next, and it felt like the missing piece. What I appreciate most about Ayurveda is that it doesn’t separate the practices I already loved — yoga, meditation, pranayama — from the rest of life. Instead, it weaves them into a daily rhythm, a way of moving through each season with awareness and intention. As an Ayurvedic Health Counselor (AHC) and Ayurvedic Yoga Teacher (AYT 500), I now help clients discover their unique constitution and build self-care practices that feel natural, sustainable, and deeply personal — including drawing on heritage foods, family traditions, and intergenerational wisdom.
My meditation practice began around 2008 through the Insight Meditation Community of Washington (IMCW), where I attended residential retreats and completed the Year of Living Mindfully with Jonathan Foust in 2011. Those years of sitting with myself — of learning to be present without immediately fixing or fleeing — laid a quiet foundation for everything that followed.
Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) built on that foundation in a way I didn’t expect. It taught me self-kindness and compassionate self-talk — not as affirmations or surface-level positivity, but as a genuine shift in how I relate to my own suffering. MSC showed me that the inner critic is not a motivator; it’s a wound. And that the antidote is not self-indulgence, but the same warmth we so readily offer to others. I am now a trained MSC teacher and also teach Self-Compassion for Healthcare Communities (SCHC) — because I know from my own nursing and public health background how much caregivers need this permission to turn inward with kindness.
Pathwork arrived as the spiritual counterbalance to my work in therapy — and it changed how I understood everything else. Where therapy helped me identify patterns, Pathwork helped me see the bigger picture: why we do this work at all, and what it means to move toward wholeness rather than just symptom relief. As a Pathwork Helper offering individual sessions and group classes, I support people in doing what Pathwork calls “inner work” — meeting the parts of ourselves we’ve pushed away and, with honesty and compassion, beginning to integrate them. I am also the founder of the BIPOC Pathwork Affinity Group, a space created for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color to explore this psychospiritual path in community, with cultural responsiveness at the center.
My clinical background as a registered nurse with a Master of Public Health and Master of Science grounds everything I do in evidence-informed practice and a deep respect for the complexity of human health. But it also taught me something that credentials alone cannot: that healing is relational, contextual, and always, at its heart, personal.
Path of Compassion, LLC is the integration of all of it — the clinical and the contemplative, the Eastern and the Western, the universal and the deeply particular. I work with adults who are ready to explore their inner lives and build a relationship with themselves that is honest, kind, and alive.
SPEAKING/TEACHING
To see additional videos on this an other topics please visit our YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@Pathofcompassion
PUBLICATIONS/BLOGS:
The Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) Pathwork Affinity Group. July 2024 InConnection International Pathwork Foundation. https://mailchi.mp/pathwork/in-connectionjanuary-919877?e=75c0463394
Middleton K August 2023. Diversity and Inclusion. InConnection International Pathwork Foundation. https://us5.campaign-archive.com/?u=149b578a83345b140d3028616&id=ea3bb5c043
Middleton K June 2023. Celebrating the Feminine. InConnection International Pathwork Foundation. https://us5.campaign-archive.com/?u=149b578a83345b140d3028616&id=f51fd2bc30
Middleton K Feb 2023. Being Black and Traveling the Pathwork Psychospiritual Path. InConnection International Pathwork Foundation. https://us5.campaign-archive.com/?u=149b578a83345b140d3028616&id=c971dde8c8
Middleton KR 2021. Seasons of Change (blog) https://dcpathwork.wordpress.com/2021/12/05/seasons-of-change/
Middleton KR 2020. Difficult Conversations- Racism and Spirituality (blog) https://dcpathwork.wordpress.com/2020/11/09/difficult-conversations-racism-and-spirituality/
Middleton KR 2019. Sister Circle- A Time for Women to Gather (blog) https://dcpathwork.wordpress.com/2019/04/14/sister-circle-a-time-for-women-to-gather/
Middleton KR 2019. Boundaries in Relationships (blog) https://dcpathwork.wordpress.com/2019/03/04/boundaries-in-relationships/
