Esther Estey, Dr. Esther Estey, PhD, is a bilingual rehabilitation psychologist, certified yoga and meditation teacher, and former Advanced Clinical Mindfulness Fellow at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance. Raised in a highly religious Hispanic household in a rural mountain community, her early experiences with trauma, adversity, and marginalization profoundly shaped her commitment to contemplative, trauma-sensitive, culturally responsive, and disability-informed approaches to healing. Her work is grounded in the belief that individuals can reclaim resilience, agency, and embodied wellbeing even in the aftermath of trauma, illness, and injury.
Dr. Estey serves as faculty in psychiatry (part-time) at Harvard Medical School and the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion (CMC), where she is Associate Director of Mindfulness-Based Training Operations. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy. Clinically, she provides neuro- and disability-informed rehabilitation psychology services at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System (Stanford University School of Medicine affiliate), working with Veterans, active duty service members, and individuals recovering from brain injury, neurological illness, PTSD, chronic pain, sleep disturbance, and complex medical conditions.
Her research, teaching, and clinical work focus on mindfulness, compassion, embodiment, yoga-based interventions, and high-performance mental skills training for health and rehabilitation populations. Her award-winning doctoral research examined the efficacy of yoga- and mindfulness-based interventions for individuals with PTSD, disordered eating behaviors, and mood symptoms across communities in the United States and United Kingdom. She later developed BRIDGES, a mind-body rehabilitation program for Special Operations Forces that received national recognition, including NIH-affiliated awards for innovation in integrative rehabilitation and whole-person care. Her ongoing scholarship and program development also explore mindfulness- and compassion-based approaches for chronic pain, PTSD, wellness, disability, and culturally responsive interventions for Spanish-speaking communities.
Dr. Estey has trained extensively in contemplative, cognitive, and somatic approaches through institutions including Oxford, Brown, UC San Diego, and the University of Massachusetts. Her clinical background integrates Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC), Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, EMDR, Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), Prolonged Exposure Therapy (PE), hypnosis, CBT-I, MBTI, and ACT-based approaches for insomnia and nightmares, as well as performance psychology approaches including mPEAK and Mindful Sport Performance Enhancement.
She is particularly recognized for her expertise in adapting mindfulness-based interventions for individuals with neurological, medical, and psychological complexity, as well as for training clinicians in inclusive, accessible, and neuro-informed contemplative care. Informed by both professional and lived experience, Dr. Estey is committed to helping individuals restore resilience, embodied freedom, and the capacity to thrive in the face of adversity.
