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I am delighted to have finally got my MBSR outreach project up and running, taking the first completely free course to a group of local yoga teachers based in Makeni, Northern Province, Sierra Leone.

I offered the MBSR several times during my time in Ethiopia and always made provision for subsidised/sponsored places within my fee-paying courses to promote accessibility and inclusion but in Sierra Leone felt ready for a more radical approach to enable broader, more comprehensive access and exposure to skills training in mindfulness for resilience and well-being.

Congratulations to 

Cornelia Baumann

Catherine Nasskau

Gabriele Vanzan

Liz Daley

Kieran Wych

Jasper Cornelis van Eeden

From UK, Italy, Ireland and the Netherlands

A very satisfying experience. And many thanks to Helen Grain for sharing the teaching with me and taking some of the photos.

Student names, Bárbara López Martí, Lianne van Haeren, Cornelia Baumann, Emily Hanna, Itzel Lerma, Jon White, Linda Keys, Dariusk Mazurek, Karolina Mazurek, Daniel Pfleger, Fernando Balsera Pita, Andreea Rusu, Astrid Kuebler, Kevin Hawkins, David Adeane.

From, Spain Valencia, Valencia, UK, USA, Luxembourg, UK, Madrid, Poland, Poland, Valencia, Germany, Greece, Switzerland, Valencia, UK

Student names: 

Olga Sengunlu, Melanie Banerjee, Anna Bardaka, Kieran Wych, Merve Karakus, Patrick Bron, Jon White, Katherine Grenville-Jones, Maria Boťanská, Kvetoslava Sarvašová, Elena Sushko, Liliana Paraipan, Tom Errera, Didem Hacıpaşaoğlu, Marianne Pilgrim

From: 

Turkey, France UK, Greece, Nederlands, Den Haag, Turkey, Istanbul, Switzerland, Genève, UK, UK, London, Slovakia, Slovakia, Košice, Ukraine, Kiev, Rumania, Spain, Madrid, Turkey, USA,

Jasper van Eeden
Ferda Alakuş
Trudi Bannister
Leila Lahbabi
Hanka Čechová
Olena Mukha
Yulia Stadnytska
Karolina Mazurek
Tania Nemirovsky
Fernando Balsera Pita

How many times do you beat yourself up for repeating the same limiting or self-sabotage patterns even though you “know better”? You might find yourself reaching for the next self-help book or seminar which often reiterates all the ways you “know better.” Back to square one!

IT’S HARD TO put your finger on the point when the Western stereotype of Buddhist meditation flipped. It was sometime between the 1950s, when Zen Buddhism seeped into the beat generation, and the early 21st century, when mindfulness meditation seeped into Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

Mariella Privitera
Emma Ullvin
Emre Duru
Lianne van Haeren
Camille Roque
Marie Celine Bernard Soto (Ixtaliy)

Graduate name    From
Maria Opidowicz    Poland
Andras Harsanyi    Hungary
Alex la via    UK
Nada Aladel    Saudi Arabia
Christine Griffin    Ireland
Lisa Meagher    Ireland
Jitka Pouzarova    Czech Republic, Prague
Filip Stys    Tenerife
Mahasti Mohammadi    Switzerland
Theresa Cohen    USA, Wyndmoor

Trainers:

Tuire Niinimaki

Jazz - Zhassulan Abishev

In 2005, Jon Kabat-Zinn published his magnum opus, Coming to Our Senses. At 650 pages and years in the making, it was a monumental achievement. It allowed the founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction to put his life’s work in a larger context. Mindfulness is not a mental trick, an adjunct to regular life. It’s a basic human inheritance that is essential to life.

LAST MONTH, IN advance of its annual Stress in America report, the American Psychological Association released what will likely be counted among the most obvious research findings of 2016. The presidential election, concluded the APA, was a source of significant anxiety for the country. Regardless of party, over half of American adults surveyed felt very or somewhat stressed by the election. Gasps could be heard from across nowhere.

Just graduated from the MBSR Teacher Training Nov 2018

Stephen Davis, France.

Tine Christine Steiss, Spain.

Liz Hall, Spain.

Suzan Grootscholten, Spain.

Maja Pelc, Poland.

Dorota Stoińska, Switzerland.

Adriana Orellana de Rickebusch, Switzerland.

Maartje van der Zedde, Netherlands, Amsterdam.

Laurie Ellis-Young, USA.

George Ellis, USA.

Geraldine Goulding, Ireland.

For some time at Mindful we’ve been concerned that discussions of the brain—particularly in the context of mindfulness and meditation—have become simplified to the point of distorting the truth. They often present the brain as a set of building blocks or Lincoln Logs, each with its own function. The goal of meditation in this model is to strengthen certain parts and suppress others. When we asked neuroscientists doing actual research about these notions, the answer ranged from “that’s very, very simplistic” to “that’s nonsense.”

Meditation can lead people to some dark places, triggering trauma or leaving people feeling disoriented, according to Dr. Willoughby Britton, who has studied the adverse effects of contemplative practices for more than a decade. In May 2017, she and her research partner and husband, Dr. Jared Lindahl, released a study that identified 59 different kinds of negative meditation experiences. Their research has also shown that these distressing experiences are not limited to people who have a history of mental illness.

How to Help Your Clients Understand Their Window of Tolerance

BY RUTH BUCZYNSKI,
Our clients are best able to cope with stressors and triggers when they’re operating within their window of tolerance.

But a traumatic experience can narrow our participants’ window of tolerance, leading to states of either hyper- or hypo-arousal.

How convincing is the science driving the popularity of mindfulness meditation? A Brown University researcher has some surprising answers.

Flickr/Litchenstein