Mindfulness is a basic human quality, a way of learning to pay attention to whatever is happening in your life.
Mindfulness is also a practice, a systematic method aimed at cultivating clarity, insight, and understanding.
Meditation
More than three decades of scientific research at medical centers all over the world suggests that training in mindfulness can positively and often profoundly affect participants' ability to reduce medical symptoms and psychological distress while learning to live life more fully.
Mindfulness Meditation Training, Eight Week Program
Lesson One: Attention and the Now
The objective of this first session is to familiarize you with the two most important building blocks of mindfulness, attention and the present moment. The cultivation of attention to the present moment is at the heart of mindfulness. The most common reason why people fail to pay attention to the present moment is because they are occupied by thinking, often about the past or the future. In this session, your will be introduced to the role of thoughts and their relationship with the present moment.
Lesson Two: Automaticity
The goal of this session is to clarify the relationship between mindfulness and automaticity. This session is included in the beginning of the training because most problems that people experience involve automatic patterns or habits. Without becoming aware of these patterns, change is difficult if not impossible. Paying mindful attention to automatic reactions and routine patterns of thinking and behavior is a powerful way to decrease their effect. Awareness of automatic patterns creates room to choose other behavior than the automatic behavior. You will experience the automatic nature.
Lesson Three: Judgement
An important element of mindfulness is “open awareness”. Open awareness refers to a quality of consciousness that is not evaluative or actively shaped by preexisting ideas or intentions but is fully receptive to allowing the experience to simply occur “as it is”. In this session, open awareness is introduced by addressing the evaluative nature of the mind. While open awareness involves nonjudgment, countless judgments and evaluations cloud most of our daily awareness. By becoming aware of these judgments, an important obstacle of open awareness is removed. In this session, you will experience the judgmental nature of their mind and learn about the problematic aspects of judgments.
Lesson Four: Acceptance
The goal of this session is to introduce you to the concept of acceptance. Mindfulness promotes an accepting stance towards experiences. Rather than fighting or avoiding experiences, mindfulness requires willingness to experience them. Acceptance, however, is a complex and paradoxical construct. This session aims to clarify the essence of acceptance by learning to apply acceptance to difficult emotions and by explaining the goal of acceptance.
Lesson Five: Goals
An excessive focus on the future is perhaps one of the most common obstacles in the cultivation of mindful awareness. The default mode for many people is a “doing model” that is constantly focused on reaching present and future goals and the future. In this session, mindfulness is introduced as the key for finding a balance between being in the present moment and planning for the future. You will experience the pitfalls of an excessive focus on future and explore the benefits of a grateful relationship with the present moment.
Lesson Six: Compassion
The aim of this session is to introduce self-compassion. Mindfulness involves a kind and selfcompassionate stance toward the self. Rather than a self-compassionate attitude, many people suffer from a non-accepting and self-critical relationship with the self. The nature of this relationship is perhaps most clearly reflected by the inner critic: an internal voice that criticizes the self. In this session, you will become acquainted with their inner critic and by increasing their awareness of the inner critic and practicing self-compassion through meditation and self-caring action, they will learn to effectively cultivate a friendly and caring relationship with the self.
Lesson Seven: The Ego
The goal of this session is to clarify the relationship between mindfulness and the self. At the deepest level, mindfulness practice cultivates a different relationship with the self. The observing stance that becomes stronger after repeated and consistent mindfulness practice allows you to take a step back from all kinds of thoughts, including identity related thoughts. Identity, which can be described as a rather static and thought-based story of “me”, creates a room for a more dynamic sense of self, which can be described as an ever-present observer. This observer is aware of the stories about the self, and it is thus by definition different from the stories themselves. In this session, several exercises allow you to experience the difference between the self as a story and the self as an observer.
Lesson Eight: Integration
In the first 7 sessions, you will learn about and practiced many essential key processes underlying mindfulness. Mindfulness is a multi-facetted construct; thus, it is essential to understand the inner workings of the different processes that underlie mindfulness. In this final session, you will learn the connection between those different processes. In addition, this session focuses on the ways in which mindfulness can be integrated in daily life. The past 7 sessions can be viewed as a starting point of an endless journey. In this session, you are invited to create a personal plan for sustainably incorporating mindfulness in their daily lives after completing this training.
Koru Mindfulness for Students
Being in college is an exciting time of life but for many students, it also involves lots of change, lots of stress, decreased working memory, poor sleep, an inability to focus, wandering endless thoughts, emotional reactivity, and decreased cognitive flexibility. Mindfulness meditation has been shown to reduce these symptoms.
Mindfulness
Koru was designed specifically for young adults and differs from mindfulness programs developed for more general populations of adults in several ways.
- Teaches mindfulness meditation as well as stress-management skills
- A brief model to accommodate the busy schedules of young adults. Taught in four, weekly, 75-minute classes.
- Highly structured with daily homework of a mindfulness log and 10 minutes mindfulness practice
- Taught in small, diverse groups
- Active teaching to address skepticism and build motivation
- Stories and metaphors relevant to the lives of young adults.
Emerging adults and young adults: What’s the difference?
Emerging adulthood is the name of the developmental stage that young adults are in. It lasts from about age 18 through age 29. So essentially, emerging adults are the same as young adults, just like adolescents are the same as teenagers. Young adulthood is an exciting time of life but it also involves lots of change and lots of stress. Mindfulness is a great tool for optimizing this period of growth.
Koru Mindfulness for Emerging Adults and College Students.
In each class you will learn one or two mindfulness-based skills and you will practice meditation with my help. You may use any of the skills or meditations we teach for your daily ten minutes of mindfulness practice. Typically, you will practice with skills during the week after we learn them in class. However, the goal is not for you to become expert at all the skills. Rather, the goal is for you to find one or two mindfulness practices that resonate with you, and work with those practices in greater depth. Everyone is different and will find different practices more or less helpful. Your task is to identify the skills that work for you and to spend your time developing as best you can your ability to use those skills.
Class One
Skill:Belly or diaphragmatic breathing: Belly breathing is a calming skill that you can use to calm yourself if you are feeling anxious or to quiet your mind to help with sleep. You will be taught to breathe deeply, inhaling by using your diaphragm to push your stomach out rather than using the muscles of your chest wall to fill your lungs.
Skill: Dynamic breathing: Dynamic breathing is a very active skill that you can use if you are restless, anxious or tired, and need to a way to focus your attention and energize your body. Students use dynamic breathing when they are tired or worried and still have lots of work to finish.
Meditation: Body scan: In this meditation you will learn to use physical sensations in the body to anchor your awareness in the present moment.
Class Two
Skill: Walking meditation: When practicing walking meditation, you learn to use as your anchor to present-moment awareness the sensations in your feet as you slowly walk across the floor. Students use walking meditation when they are too sleepy or too restless to meditate sitting still.
Meditation: Gatha: A gatha is a series of words, sometimes referred to as a meditation poem, that you use to help you focus your mind during meditation. Many students find that their minds wander so much that they can’t keep their attention in the present for even a moment. A gatha provides you with a stronger anchor for your wandering mind. Students use gathas when they feel very distracted and unable to settle their attention on their breath.
Class Three
Skill: Guided Imagery: Guided imagery is a way of calming your body and mind if you are feeling particularly anxious or stressed. Using all of your senses, you imagine yourself in a comfortable and safe place, which allows your physiology to quiet and calm. Students use guided imagery if they are dealing with high levels of stress or worry.
Meditation: Labeling Thoughts: An important aspect of mindfulness meditation is the ability to notice your thoughts and then, without judgment, release them, returning your attention to your object of meditation, most commonly the sensation of your breath as it enters and leaves your body. Labeling is a technique that makes it easier to release your thoughts and return to your present moment experience. Students use labeling to strengthen their ability to stay nonjudgmentally present with the goings-on in their busy minds.
Class Four
Skill: Eating meditation: With eating meditation, you learn to pay very careful attention to all of the sensations involved in eating, as well as the thoughts and feelings you have when you eat. Eating meditation enhances the pleasure in eating and allows you to consume your food in a healthier way, listening to the reactions and needs of your body.
Meditation: Labeling Feelings: This meditation builds on the labeling practice from last week, providing you a skill for managing strong feelings that may arise during meditation. Sometimes identifying the feelings that are underneath persistent or recurring thoughts can be very helpful, keeping you from getting carried too far away from the present moment.
All group sessions will be held at Dominican College in Orangeburg NY.
Testimonials
Tom managed to address the needs and temper the expectations of a rather diverse group. The sessions I attended included both graduate and undergraduate students, support staff, and administrators. Yet, he very skillfully related the subject matter to a wide range of experiences and made the information accessible to all participants. He created a space that was conducive to meditation and learning by making each session a judgement-free zone. It was a joy and I learned skills I continue to apply.
Dr. Daphne E. Ph D