Petrina Barson lives in inner Melbourne and besides being a CCT teacher, she is a mother, a doctor, a poet and an activist on issues of climate change and refugee rights. The thread that runs through all these domains is her passion for compassion, and her deep conviction that we have more in common than divides us.

She loves teaching the CCT curriculum because it provides a practical pathway for cultivating the compassionate part of our nature, while fully apprehending the barriers to compassion and helping to dismantle them. She has been teaching CCT to medical students at the University of Melbourne, and to health professionals, since 2014. She is a long-term member of a progressive Christian community, which inspires, supports and tunes her understanding of compassion. She understands compassion as an innate human capacity which transcends all religious and cultural divides.