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<p>This article describes the design and advocacy of the Bachelor of Fine Arts in Jazz and Contemplative Studies curriculum at The University of Michigan School of Music. The curriculum combines meditation practice and related studies with jazz and overall musical training and is part of a small but growing movement in academia that seeks to integrate contemplative disciplines within the educational process. The article considers issues such as the structure of the curriculum, the reconciliation of contemplative studies and conventional notions of academic rigor, the avoidance of possible conflicts between church and state, and other challenges encountered in gaining support for this plan, after weeks of intensive debate, from a 2/3 majority of the faculty.</p>
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In this article the author examines the use of meditation as an aid to conventional medicine, examines the increased research on the subject, and offers a critique of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), the therapeutic meditation method developed by molecular biologist Jon Kabat-Zinn. A number of topics are addressed including Kabat-Zinn's perception of MBSR as Buddhist meditation without a religious element, the moral framework of yoga and meditation, and the lack of interaction and community in the practice of MBSR.
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<p>Covering both theory and practice, this work provides a guide to reflection and meditation in school, showing how to relate such principles to the curriculum as a whole.</p>
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Responding to growing interest among psychotherapists of all theoretical orientations, this practical book provides a comprehensive introduction to mindfulness and its clinical applications. The authors, who have been practicing both mindfulness and psychotherapy for decades, present a range of clear-cut procedures for implementing mindfulness techniques and teaching them to patients experiencing depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and other problems. Also addressed are ways that mindfulness practices can increase acceptance and empathy in the therapeutic relationship. The book reviews the philosophical underpinnings of mindfulness and presents compelling empirical findings. User-friendly features include illustrative case examples, practice exercises, and resource listings.
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- Buddhist Contemplation by Applied Subject,
- Contemplation by Applied Subject,
- Contemplation by Tradition,
- Psychiatry and Contemplation,
- Psychotherapy and Buddhist Contemplation,
- Health Care and Buddhist Contemplation,
- Psychotherapy and Contemplation,
- Health Care and Contemplation,
- Psychology and Contemplation,
- Science and Contemplation,
- Buddhist Contemplation
<p>A number of books have explored the ways psychotherapy clients can benefit from learning and practicing mindfulness. This is the first volume to focus specifically on how mindfulness can deepen the therapeutic relationship. Grounded in research, chapters demonstrate how therapists' own mindfulness practice can help them to listen more attentively and be more fully present. Leading proponents of different treatment approaches—including behavioral, psychodynamic, and family systems perspectives—illustrate a variety of ways that mindfulness principles can complement standard techniques and improve outcomes by strengthening the connection between therapist and client. Also presented are practical strategies for integrating mindfulness into clinical training.</p>
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- Classical Buddhist Contemplation Practices,
- Contemplation by Applied Subject,
- Contemplation by Tradition,
- Four Immeasurables (catvary apramanani, tsemé zhi),
- Heath Care Workers & Organizations and Contemplation,
- Health Care Organizations and Contemplation,
- Psychiatry and Contemplation,
- Psychotherapy and Contemplation,
- Health Care and Contemplation,
- Practices of Buddhist Contemplation,
- Buddhist Contemplation
<p>Focuses on how mindfulness can deepen the therapeutic relationship. This book features proponents of different treatment approaches - including behavioural and family systems perspectives - illustrate ways that mindfulness principles can complement techniques and improve outcomes by strengthening the connection between therapist and client.</p>
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- Social Context,
- Classical Buddhist Contemplation Practices,
- Contemplation by Applied Subject,
- Contemplation by Tradition,
- Four Immeasurables (catvary apramanani, tsemé zhi),
- Heath Care Workers & Organizations and Contemplation,
- Health Care Organizations and Contemplation,
- Psychiatry and Contemplation,
- Psychotherapy and Contemplation,
- Health Care and Contemplation,
- Practices of Buddhist Contemplation,
- Buddhist Contemplation
<p>Mindfulness-based approaches are among the most innovative and interesting new approaches to mental health treatment. Mindfulness refers to patients developing an "awareness of present experience with acceptance." Interest in them is widespread, with presentations and workshops drawing large audiences all over the US and many other countries. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the best-researched mindfulness-based treatments. It emphasizes detailed clinical illustration providing a close-up view of how these treatments are conducted, the skills required of therapists, and how they work. The book also has a solid foundation in theory and research and shows clearly how these treatments can be understood using accepted psychological principles and concepts. The evidence base for these treatments is concisely reviewed.* Comprehensive introduction to the best-researched mindfulness-based treatments* Covers wide range of problems & disorders (anxiety, depression, eating, psychosis, personality disorders, stress, pain, relationship problems, etc)* Discusses a wide range of populations (children, adolescents, older adults, couples)* Includes wide range of settings (outpatient, inpatient, medical, mental health, workplace)* Clinically rich, illustrative case study in every chapter* International perspectives represented (authors from US, Canada, Britain, Sweden)</p>
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<p>"Everyday life is so frantic and full of troubles that we have largely forgotten how to live a joyful existence. We try so hard to be happy that we often end up missing the most important parts of our lives. In Mindfulness, Oxford professor Mark Williams and award-winning journalist Danny Penman reveal the secrets to living a happier and less anxious, stressful, and exhausting life. Based on the techniques of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, the unique program developed by Williams and his colleagues, the book offers simple and straightforward forms of mindfulness meditation that can be done by anyone--and it can take just 10 to 20 minutes a day for the full benefits to be revealed"-- "From one of the leading thinkers on Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, a pioneering set of simple practices to dissolve anxiety, stress, exhaustion, and unhappiness. Everyday life is so frantic and full of troubles that we have largely forgotten how to live a joyful existence. We try so hard to be happy that we often end up missing the most important parts of our lives. In Mindfulness, Oxford professor Mark Williams and award-winning journalist Danny Penman reveal the secrets to living a happier and less anxious, stressful, and exhausting life. Based on the techniques of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, the unique program developed by Williams and his colleagues, the book offers simple and straightforward forms of mindfulness meditation that can be done by anyone--and it can take just 10 to 20 minutes a day for the full benefits to be revealed. "--</p>
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Students with learning disabilities (LD; defined by compromised academic performance) often have higher levels of anxiety, school-related stress, and less optimal social skills compared with their typically developing peers. Previous health research indicates that meditation and relaxation training may be effective in reducing anxiety and promoting social skills. This pilot study used a pre—post no-control design to examine feasibility of, attitudes toward, and outcomes of a 5-week mindfulness meditation intervention administered to 34 adolescents diagnosed with LD. Postintervention survey responses overwhelmingly expressed positive attitudes toward the program. All outcome measures showed significant improvement, with participants who completed the program demonstrating decreased state and trait anxiety, enhanced social skills, and improved academic performance. Although not directly assessed, the outcomes are consistent with a cognitive-interference model of learning disability and suggest that mindfulness meditation decreases anxiety and detrimental self-focus of attention, which, in turn, promotes social skills and academic outcomes.
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Different forms of learning and memory depend on functionally and anatomically separable neural circuits [Squire, L. R. (1992) Psychol. Rev. 99, 195–231]. Declarative memory relies on a medial temporal lobe system, whereas habit learning relies on the striatum [Cohen, N. J. & Eichenbaum, H. (1993) Memory, Amnesia, and the Hippocampal System (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA)]. How these systems are engaged to optimize learning and behavior is not clear. Here, we present results from functional neuroimaging showing that the presence of a demanding secondary task during learning modulates the degree to which subjects solve a problem using either declarative memory or habit learning. Dual-task conditions did not reduce accuracy but reduced the amount of declarative learning about the task. Medial temporal lobe activity was correlated with task performance and declarative knowledge after learning under single-task conditions, whereas performance was correlated with striatal activity after dual-task learning conditions. These results demonstrate a fundamental difference in these memory systems in their sensitivity to concurrent distraction. The results are consistent with the notion that declarative and habit learning compete to mediate task performance, and they suggest that the presence of distraction can bias this competition. These results have implications for learning in multitask situations, suggesting that, even if distraction does not decrease the overall level of learning, it can result in the acquisition of knowledge that can be applied less flexibly in new situations.
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This experiment was designed to explore whether brain norepinephrine (NE) serves as a specific reward system for the power drive. Previous research has indicated that 3-methoxy-4-hydroxyphenyl glycol (MHPG), a urinary metabolite reflecting central NE turnover, is positively correlated with features of assertiveness which one might expect of a person high in the need for power (n power) or in a state of aroused power motivation. Twenty-seven male undergraduates, 13 of whom were high and 14 of whom were low in n power as assessed by a TAT measure, were recruited as subjects. Before and after the laboratory session, subjects voided all urine and concentrations of epinephrine, norepinephrine and MHPG were obtained from samples. The laboratory task consisted of 20 picture-word pairs in which the subject had to learn to anticipate the word associated with each picture before the word was presented. Five pairs of stimuli in each of the following picture-word combinations were presented 12 times: neutral-neutral, neutral-power, power-neutral and power-power. The results revealed that, as predicted, subjects high in n power learn most power-related material faster than subjects low in n power. The need for achievement is unrelated to the learning of any picture-word pairs. The neurochemical data indicated that subjects maintaining a relatively high MHPG excretion rate during the experiment who were also high in n power showed the greatest mastery of power related compared with neutral picture-word pairs. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that brain NE turnover is specifically related to the learning of power-related responses in subjects high in n power.
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<p>Literature is reviewed suggesting that a child's personality determines to a large extent his or her reaction to specific methods of teaching, and even to the whole ethos and atmosphere of the teaching situation. Thus, extraverted children benefit from being taught along the lines of discovery learning, while introverted children benefit from being taught along the lines of reception learning. The apparent lack of difference in achievement in groups taught by these methods hides the large individual differences factor that appears in the interaction term. It is suggested that facts of this kind should be of considerable concern to those who design our courses for future teachers, and for teachers generally. We owe our children care in the design of methods for teaching, and personality differences play an important part in such design.</p>
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A cardinal dimension of adult development and the learning most uniquely adult pertains to becoming aware that one is caught in one's own history and is reliving it. This leads to a process of perspective transforma tion involving a structural change in the way we see ourselves and our rela tionships. If the culture permits, we move toward perspectives which are more inclusive, discriminating and integrative of experience. We move away from uncritical, organic relationships toward contractual relation ships with others, institutions and society. Perspective transformation refor mulates the criteria for valuing and for taking action. Behavior change is often a function of such transformation. In this emerging transformation theory, adult education finds its own inherent goals and functions.
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The aim of this article is to investigate how a contemplative orientation to teaching may facilitate wholeness for teachers and students through a portrait of Diana, a kindergarten teacher working in a contemplative elementary school. The portrait, one of three portraits from a larger study, illustrates three central features of contemplative teaching: compassion, integrity, and mindful awareness. These three central features develop internally within individual teachers and are animated and influenced externally through their role as teachers. The context of their teaching, relationships with students, parents, and colleagues, and pedagogical choices, in turn influence the three central features. The emphasis on wholeness, unity, and integration of a contemplative orientation to teaching moves us toward a view of teachers and students as beings with not only minds and heads but also hearts and bodies. Contemplative teaching offers educational communities a path toward transformational, holistic, and integrative learning and teaching.
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Work in philosophy and psychology has argued for a dissociation between perceptually-based similarity and higher-level rules in conceptual thought. Although such a dissociation may be justified at times, our goal is to illustrate ways in which conceptual processing is grounded in perception, both for perceptual similarity and abstract rules. We discuss the advantages, power and influences of perceptually-based representations. First, many of the properties associated with amodal symbol systems can be achieved with perceptually-based systems as well (e.g. productivity). Second, relatively raw perceptual representations are powerful because they can implicitly represent properties in an analog fashion. Third, perception naturally provides impressions of overall similarity, exactly the type of similarity useful for establishing many common categories. Fourth, perceptual similarity is not static but becomes tuned over time to conceptual demands. Fifth, the original motivation or basis for sophisticated cognition is often less sophisticated perceptual similarity. Sixth, perceptual simulation occurs even in conceptual tasks that have no explicit perceptual demands. Parallels between perceptual and conceptual processes suggest that many mechanisms typically associated with abstract thought are also present in perception, and that perceptual processes provide useful mechanisms that may be co-opted by abstract thought.
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<p>Subregional analyses of the hippocampus have suggested a selective role for the CA1 subregion in intermediate/long-term spatial memory and consolidation, but not short-term acquisition or encoding processes. It remains unclear how the direct cortical projection to CA1 via the perforant path (pp) contributes to these CA1-dependent processes. It has been suggested that dopamine selectively modulates the pp projection to CA1 while having little to no effect on the Schaffer collateral (SC) projection to CA1. This series of behavioral and electrophysiological experiments takes advantage of this pharmacological dissociation to demonstrate that the direct pp inputs to CA1 are critical in CA1-dependent intermediate-term retention and retrieval function. Here we demonstrate that local infusion of the nonselective dopamine agonist, apomorphine (10, 15 microg), into the CA1 subregion of awake animals produces impairments in between-day retention and retrieval, sparing within-day encoding of a modified Hebb-Williams maze and contextual conditioning of fear. In contrast, apomorphine produces no deficits when infused into the CA3 subregion. To complement the behavioral analyses, electrophysiological data was collected. In anesthetized animals, local infusion of the same doses of apomorphine significantly modifies evoked responses in the distal dendrites of CA1 following angular bundle stimulation, but produces no significant effects in the more proximal dendritic layer following stimulation of the SC. These results support a modulatory role for dopamine in the EC-CA1, but not CA3-CA1 circuitry, and suggest the possibility of a more fundamental role for EC-CA1 synaptic transmission in terms of intermediate-term, but not short-term spatial memory.</p>
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This highly interdisciplinary program combines a solid grounding in jazz and improvised music study with courses which involve meditative practices and other areas related to creative development.
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Based on accumulating evidence, simulation appears to be a basic computational mechanism in the brain that supports a broad spectrum of processes from perception to social cognition. Further evidence suggests that simulation is typically situated, with the situated character of experience in the environment being reflected in the situated character of the representations that underlie simulation. A basic architecture is sketched of how the brain implements situated simulation. Within this framework, simulators implement the concepts that underlie knowledge, and situated conceptualizations capture patterns of multi-modal simulation associated with frequently experienced situations. A pattern completion inference mechanism uses current perception to activate situated conceptualizations that produce predictions via simulations on relevant modalities. Empirical findings from perception, action, working memory, conceptual processing, language and social cognition illustrate how this framework produces the extensive prediction that characterizes natural intelligence.
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