Mindful Stress Reduction
What’s involved
Purpose
This 8 week skill building program is designed to address emotional regulation, anxiety, depression, chronic pain and stress. Each session you will learn new mindfulness skills, discuss practices and progress with the group, and have worksheets and guided meditations to help you in the days in between sessions.
Evidence Based
Drawing from well-researched programs of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction by Jon Kabat-Zinn and colleagues and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy by Zindel Segal and colleagues. Please note that these are educational courses only, and while they are designed to develop important skills for dealing with stress and other significant life challenges, they are not intended to serve as psychotherapy.
Benefits
These methods can systematically foster increasingly subtle understanding of how the mind works, how to work with difficult thoughts and feelings, how to respond more effectively to challenges, and how to enrich more of the moments of your life.
8 Week Schedule
TBD Spring 2025
Location: TBD
$215
Session 1: Awareness and Automatic Pilot
The first session introduces mindfulness in a concrete and practical way. The primary theme is about bringing awareness to things that we normally do automatically. The raisin exercise engages all of our senses as we pay attention to the process of eating. The body scan is used to systematically and purposefully move our attention throughout the entire body. These exercises are very simple, but can also be challenging, which provides us an opportunity to learn about how our minds operate.
Session 2: Living in Our Heads
This session is about noticing the differences between thinking and direct awareness of experiences, and about how often we are captured by automatic patterns of reacting. This is highlighted through more practice with the body scan and with mindful breathing. We also discuss common challenges that arise during the home practice assignments, like falling asleep, mind wandering, and making time for self-care. An important part of this session is a discussion of how thoughts, emotions, and body sensations influence and interact with each other.
Session 3: Gathering the Scattered Mind
After a couple of weeks of practice, people begin to notice how scattered the mind tends to be. One option is to use the breath or the body as an anchor for bringing awareness back to the present. This session introduces a number of new exercises, including mindful stretching and walking, to demonstrate how mindful awareness can be fostered through a variety of activities, and integrated into daily life. An important part of this session is introducing the idea of staying present with and relating differently to uncomfortable physical sensations, rather than automatically avoiding them or struggling with them.
Session 4: Recognizing Aversion
This session helps us recognize our habitual tendency to push away unpleasant experiences, which if done automatically, can keep us locked into unhelpful patterns. Practicing mindfulness helps us gain a wider perspective on our experiences, opening up opportunities to relate differently to our difficulties. This session also brings more awareness to patterns of thinking, particularly in relation to challenges like stress, pain, anxiety, and sadness. We will also view part 1 of a video of others going through a similar 8-week program.
Session 5: Allowing/Letting Be
In this session, we practice intentionally allowing things to be exactly as we find them in the moment, even if what we discover is unpleasant. This involves the development of a sense of kindness toward ourselves and our experiences, letting go of the struggles and judgments we get caught up in with our own thoughts, feelings, and sensations. When we can see things more clearly, we can make better decisions about what we can do in the next moment, if anything. This skill is practiced by purposefully bringing to mind a minor annoyance, and observing and letting go of unhelpful reactions. We will also view part 2 of a video of others going through a similar 8-week program.
Session 6: Thoughts are Not Facts
Session six involves learning to relate differently to our thoughts. It is both obvious and profound to realize that thoughts and words represent reality, but are distinctly different from reality. Recognizing this, instead of answering or arguing with our thoughts, we can pause to notice their patterns. We can see that strong negative thoughts are often symptoms of underlying emotions and moods. Instead of struggling with ruminative thoughts, we can see them as indications that we are becoming overwhelmed. Instead of getting caught up in them, we can watch them, explore underlying body sensations, or take some considered action to take care of ourselves or the situation.
Session 7: How Can I Best Take Care of Myself?
In this session, we emphasize the importance of noticing as the first step in dealing with challenges. When things begin to get bad, we often fall into old patterns, such as ignoring the situation, overreacting, or engaging in unproductive behaviors. By learning to pay attention to the signs of oncoming stress, anxiety, or depression, we can take proactive steps to take care of ourselves before we get too overwhelmed.
Session 8: Maintaining and Extending New Learning
The last session provides an opportunity to reflect on the previous seven weeks, and to note the life changes you have experienced. Plans will also be discussed for maintaining the momentum you have created to prevent falling back into old patterns.