MINDFULNESS
What is mindfulness?
This has become the million dollar question. When I first started meditating in 1979, no one had heard of it and the word was misunderstood and approached with suspicion.
Today, it is a term that has become so familiar and overused that we yawn and tune out when we read it and yet it continues to be misunderstood.
It is simple and complex. Common and esoteric. Specific and general. It is central to many different contemplative practices. It can be an orientation towards life, a way of being in the world. Some say it is ethically neutral. Others say it is inherently wholesome.
Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition remains one of the most widely used:
“Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.”
Scott Bishop describes mindfulness as “ a psychological process that involves self-regulation of attention and orientation to what is happening in the present with non-judgement and non-reactivity to inner experience.”
My Work
My Work
I began meditating with a ten-day silent retreat in 1979 and have sat countless retreats since then.
Teaching mindfulness grew organically out of my own personal practice.
Nobody seems to know for sure, but I was about the 10th person to be certified as a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction teacher (MBSR).
I introduced MBSR to the Wellness Community in Santa Monica and continued to offer mindfulness programs to cancer patients and their families for 30 years.
I introduced MBSR to Kaiser Permanente in Northern California in 1996 and helped design their curriculum as well as adapt the program for Kaiser physicians
In 2005 I was hired to co-teach a seminal study out of UCSF, Cultivating Emotional Balance (CEB) that brought together emotion training from Paul Ekman with Buddhist philosophy taught by Alan Wallace. Jon Kabat-Zinn was my mentor throughout this period.
Through this study and subsequent work, I traveled throughout the US and Canada teaching CEB and its derivatives to educators and school administrators.
This study led to the development of Mindfulness-Based Emotional Balance (MBEB), which became my first book (co-authored with Gonzalo Brito-Pons) and has been studied and taught around the world. With Gonzalo and other colleagues, we have also certified teachers in MBEB.
In 2006 I was trained in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Balance (MBCT) by Zindel Segal; his work and clinical acuity have influenced me deeply.
In collaboration with Amishi Jha at University of Miami, I co-developed an adaptation of Mindfulness Based Attention (MBAT) for military spouses, which I taught at numerous military sites around the country, including Joint Special Operations Command Headquarters in North Carolina.
I have taught Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBI’s) to the general public, cancer patients and their families, physicians, leaders, lawyers, groups with a wide variety of psychological distress (depression, anxiety), overweight women, HIV positive men, educators, special forces and military spouses.
10 Minute Guided Mindfulness of Breath Meditation