Kalda’s online group sessions bring queer people together for guided mindfulness, therapy exercises, and breakout-room connection in real time. This post explains how the sessions are structured, who runs them, and how we handle crisis disclosures safely.
What are the sessions?
Live online sessions, led by a trained therapist and supported by facilitators. Participants join from wherever they are; the format is designed to feel intimate even at scale. A typical session involves:
- A therapist-led opening. The therapist runs an exercise or teaches a short skill (mindfulness practice, grounding, self-compassion work). This sets the tone and gives everyone a shared starting point.
- Breakout rooms. Participants are split into smaller groups for discussion or paired practice. The breakouts are where most of the connection happens.
- Facilitators dropping in. Trained facilitators move in and out of breakout rooms, supporting conversations, holding space, and being available if anyone needs them.
- A close. Back together as the full group at the end, with space for reflection and signposting.
The sessions complement the self-guided courses: the courses are the structured solo work, the sessions are the live in-community work.
Who runs the sessions?
Sessions are led by qualified therapists and supported by trained facilitators. The therapists are the same clinical community involved across Kalda’s other work, all part of the LGBTQIA+ community themselves.
Our most intensive period of group sessions was 2021-2022, when we ran them weekly with Uz Afzal as part of her incredible work at Rainbow Mind. We hosted over 100 group mindfulness and therapy sessions in that period. The format we use now grew out of what we learned then.
Sessions still happen at a lower cadence now and remain part of how Kalda holds space alongside the app courses.
What’s the format good for?
Live group sessions do a few things solo course work can’t:
Real-time co-regulation. Sitting in a session with other queer people, even silently, brings the nervous system down in a way reading or watching alone doesn’t.
Felt sense of not being alone. Hearing other people speak about what they’re working on, in real time, with the same trained guidance, dissolves a kind of isolation that’s hard to dissolve any other way.
Practice in queer company. Practising self-compassion or mindfulness in a room of queer people, with a queer-affirming facilitator, is different from practising the same skill solo. You build muscle memory for queer-context use.
A regular rhythm. Anchoring a date in the calendar for mental-health work helps people who struggle to fit it in solo. Showing up to a session is sometimes easier than showing up to your own self-guided practice.
How do you handle crisis in a session?
A session has multiple people in it, and sometimes someone arrives, or surfaces during the session, in crisis. Our approach is:
- A facilitator reaches out privately. Not in front of the group. Direct message, private breakout room, or a separate call as needed.
- The follow-up happens during the call, separately away from the main group. The person gets attentive support without becoming the focus of the wider group.
- Safeguarding procedures are followed. Signposting to crisis services (Samaritans, Shout, Switchboard LGBT+, NHS 999 / 111), checking in on next steps, escalating to clinical team where appropriate.
- The main session continues with the rest of the group, held by other facilitators, so the person in crisis isn’t carrying the weight of the room.
Kalda is not a crisis service. Sessions are not a substitute for emergency support. What sessions do offer is a setting where a crisis can be noticed quickly and supported privately while the wider work continues. Our safeguarding page has the full set of 24/7 crisis routes.
Why hold live sessions at all?
A reasonable question for a platform that has a strong self-guided library. A few reasons we keep them:
Some things only happen in live company. The real-time presence of other queer people doing the same work, at the same moment, has effects that asynchronous content can’t reproduce.
They complement the courses. Many Kaldans use both: courses for structured solo work between sessions, sessions for in-community practice and connection.
They’re how we learned what works. The sessions in 2021-2022 directly shaped how we make courses now. Live work with the community taught us what queer people actually need from mental health support.
Community spaces matter, structurally. Queer mental health is partly about being held in queer company. Live sessions are one of the ways we offer that holding.
Where to next
- Browse the course library for the self-guided side of Kalda
- Why we started Kalda for the founding story (group sessions are part of how Kalda started)
- Safeguarding page for crisis routes
- Meet the Kalda clinical team for who runs the work
- Read more from Inside Kalda
If you’re interested in joining a future session, drop us a line. We send out details when sessions are happening.