Skip to main content

Home/ zenwrit/ Group items tagged center

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Alyssa Lau

West Meets East - 0 views

  • The new centers often were staffed by Western teachers,
  • many of whom had first encountered meditation in the Peace Corps and later trained in monastic settings in the East
  • Creating a new wisdom tradition
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • None of us wanted ou
  • supervisors or clinical teammates to think of us as having unresolved infantile longings to return to a state of oceanic oneness
  • how radically meditation practices could transform the mind. Therapists of the day typically viewed meditation as either a fading hippie pursuit or a useful means of relaxation, but of little additional valu
  • mindfulness meditation was making inroads into the medical community.
  • Jon Kabat-Zinn, who, beginning in 1979, had adapted ancient Buddhist and yogic practices to create Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester.
  • MBSR was used primarily to augment the treatment of stress-related medical disorders, and was of particular interest to clinicians working in behavioral medicine.
  • The first use of mindfulness in psychotherapy to capture widespread attention among clinicians was Marsha Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), introduced in the early 1990s to treat suicidal individuals with complex disorders for which little else seemed to work.
  • he central dialectic in DBT is the tension between acceptance and change.
  • In searching for a means of helping therapists and their clients to experience what she called “radical acceptance”—fully embracing helplessness, terror, losses, and other painful facts of life
  • Because she empirically demonstrated that DBT could help challenging and volatile patients, the method rapidly became popular
  • he next big development came from Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, and John Teasdale, cognitive psychologists in the tradition of Aaron Beck, who were working on treatments for depression in the 1990s
  • They came across mindfulness practice through Jon Kabat-Zinn and MBSR
  • Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), which combined elements of an 8-week MBSR course with cognitive therapy interventions designed to help patients gain perspective on their thinking and not identify with their depressive thou
  • ghts.
  • This standardized, 8-week course couched meditation practices in Western, scientific terms
  • “the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, and nonjudgmentally, to the unfolding of experience moment to moment
  • Steven Hayes and his colleagues had
  • radical philosophical orientation that they called “relational frame theory.”
  • Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which they describe as a psy
  • chological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies, together with commitment and behavior change strategies, to increase psychological flexibility
  • ACT doesn’t teach many formal meditation practices, but uses imagery, metaphor, and brief exercises to cultivate awareness of the present, loosen identification with thought, and increase openness to the experience of moment-to-moment change
  • ACT encourages clients to identify and pursue activities that give life meaning.
Brian Walsh

The Zen of floating - The Week - 0 views

  • were frightened of contracting HIV from infected water in float-tank centers. The business dried up.
    • Rebecca Lurie
       
      Even when a product is doing great in sales, it can plummet because of a specific even that changes everyones view.
  • creativity in artists.
  • brain's focus from its dominant to its non-dominant hemisphere
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • can improve
    • Paul Brahan
       
      Very interesting article about the benefits sensory deprivation chambers provide. 
  • The saturation of Epsom salts in the water made me unnaturally buoyant — my face, stomach, and knees an archipelago of islands amid the tub's ocean.
    • Brian Walsh
       
      So you go from bored, to anxiety, to peace?
  • For a tank newbie like me, the more intriguing aspects of floating include 1) its possibly imagined, Lilly-esque potential to reveal hidden layers of consciousness within, and 2) its proven capacity to chill people out. Suedfeld happily acknowledges point two. "Anything related to psychological stress," he says, "whether it's chronic tension headaches, insomnia, things with no known physical cause…after several floats, they really seem to improve."
    • Brian Walsh
       
      Are Epsom salts supposed to give a more relaxing feeling? Could it be the salts helping or just the actual floating?
  • There was no clear line between consciousness and unconsciousness. (I had no fear of drowning, as my buoyancy was such that it would be nearly impossible to roll over accidentally.)
kurt stavenhagen

Mindfulness-based stress reduction and health benefits: A meta-analysis - 0 views

  • Our findings suggest the usefulness of MBSR as an intervention for a broad range of chronic disorders and problems. In fact, the consistent and relatively strong level of effect sizes across very different types of sample indicates that mindfulness training might enhance general features of coping with distress and disability in everyday life, as well as under more extraordinary conditions of serious disorder or stress.
    • kurt stavenhagen
       
      "broad range" is pre-frontal cortex the main center and improvement upon its functioning most responsible?
  • improvements were consistently seen across a spectrum of standardized mental health measures including psychological dimensions of quality of life scales, depression, anxiety, coping style and other affective dimensions of disability. Likewise, similar benefits were also found for health parameters of physical well-being, such as medical symptoms, sensory pain, physical impairment, and functional quality-of-life estimates, although measures of physically oriented measures were less frequently assessed in the studies as a whole.
  • a recent randomized study of depressives in remission found one-year relapse rates of major depressive episodes to be halved when conventional treatment was supplemented by a mindfulness program [3]. Another investigation of mindfulness training among anxiety and mood disorder patients showed pre- to postintervention improvements in mental health outcomes with an effect size of 0.7 [10].
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Mindfulness training may be an intervention with potential for helping many to learn to deal with chronic disease and stress. Nevertheless, we now need to test these claims more thoroughly by using well-defined patient populations, applying more stringent methodological procedures, and assessing objective disease markers in addition to self-reported psychosocial and functional indicators of distress.
joshua gallo

How to Practice Mindfulness Meditation | Psychology Today - 0 views

  • Cultivating mindfulness is the key to overcoming suffering and recognizing natural wisdom: both our own and others'.
  • Mindfulness meditation is unique in that it is not directed toward getting us to be different from how we already are. Instead, it helps us become aware of what is already true moment by moment.
  • Instead of struggling to get away from experiences we find difficult, we practice being able to be with them.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Perhaps surprisingly, many times we have a hard time staying simply present with happiness. We turn it into something more familiar, like worrying that it won't last or trying to keep it from fading away.
  • When we are mindful, we show up for our lives; we don't miss them in being distracted or in wishing for things to be different.
  • So, how do we actually practice mindfulness meditation? Once again, there are many different basic techniques. If you are interested in pursuing mindfulness within a particular tradition, one of the Buddhist ones or another, you might at some point wish to connect with a meditation instructor or take a class at a meditation center. Still, I can provide one form of basic instructions here so that you can begin.
Paul Brahan

Mindfulness in Life and Leadership: An Exploratory Survey - ProQuest - 0 views

    • Paul Brahan
       
      Good source from the Syracuse Library Database about mindfulness in Life and Leadership
aldi gjoka

The Power of Concentration - NYTimes.com - 0 views

    • aldi gjoka
       
      important note about how we're more likely to engage the world rather than withdraw from it through meditation
  • As little as five minutes a day of intense Holmes-like inactivity, and a happier outlook is yours for the taking
  • Multitasking
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • is a persistent myth.
  • The concentration benefits of mindfulness training aren’t just behavioral; they’re physical. In recent years, mindfulness has been shown to improve connectivity inside our brain’s attentional networks, as well as between attentional and medial frontal regions — changes that save us from distraction.
  • the core of mindfulness is the ability to pay attention. That’s exactly what Holmes does when he taps together the tips of his fingers, or exhales a fine cloud of smoke. He is centering his attention on a single element.
Emily Vargas

On-campus living may not stay free for charter school's students | The Kennebec Journal... - 0 views

  • Good Will-Hinckley organization, which provides housing to students at the Maine Academy of Natural Sciences, is enacting a sliding fee scale for boarding costs, which are currently free to all students and are paid for in part by the school and in part by the state.
  • Legislative bills that could potentially take funding away from charter schools and a bill that would end or reduce state funds for boarding at the Good Will-Hinckley campus played a role in the decision,
  • said the change will not affect all students who wish to live at the school.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • We will make it happen, whether we use state funds, money from our private foundation or if we have to raise it through scholarships," he said.
  • To help with the process, the school will use a tuition management company to assess the needs of students,
  • The top priority is to make sure that low-income students from around the state can still attend the school,
  • The school currently boards 27 of its 44 students
  • hey plan to enroll about 75 students in the coming school year and board 37,
  • "It's still up in the air. The number depends on the need of all the students, and the money we have available from the state,"
  • It originally opened with just 19 students in 2011 on the Good Will-Hinckley campus,
  • The residential housing option is available through the school's parent organization, Good Will-Hinckley, which also oversees the L.C. Bates Museum and the Glenn Stratton Learning Center on the campus.
  •  
    Good Will-Hinckley organization,
1 - 10 of 10
Showing 20 items per page