This piece by Karen Bluth, PhD is part 2 of an article honored with the 2022 Mind & Life Institute Award for Public Communication of Contemplative Research and was originally featured in Psychology Today online. Part 1 explained what self-compassion is and its role in improving teen mental health outcomes. But how can self-compassion be taught, and how can …
Continue reading “How Self-Compassion Can Improve Teen Mental Health (Part 2 of 2)”
This piece by Karen Bluth, PhD is part I of an article honored with the 2022 Mind & Life Institute Award for Public Communication of Contemplative Research and was originally featured in Psychology Today online. Teens in the United States are suffering. The reasons are many, including the lingering effects of the pandemic, fears stemming …
Continue reading “How Self-Compassion Can Improve Teen Mental Health (Part 1 of 2)”
An estimated 280 million people globally experience depression, with more than 75 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries receiving no treatment at all. What role can mindfulness play in cultivating mental health and wellness? And how can researchers help ensure equitable access to mindfulness-based approaches? Clinical psychological scientist Sona Dimidjian has spent over …
A familiar scene for many: It’s the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and we’re missing social lunches and coffee dates. Connection is lacking and we’re confined to our homes for work, play, rest, and everything in between. In this reality, online tools like Zoom and social media skyrocketed as a resource for maintaining relationships and …
Continue reading “Contemplative Researchers Seek to Leverage Power of Technology for Well-being”
A collaborative, interdisciplinary, and immersive opportunity for conversations around trauma, healing, and flourishing—for researchers, contemplatives, changemakers, and anyone interested in this topic.
In a video clip from 2022, Mind & Life Founding Steward Jon Kabat-Zinn remembers sharing the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program with the Dalai Lama at the Mind & Life Dialogue in Dharamsala, India in 1990. We shared this video in 2022 as part of our 35th anniversary celebration.
With cascading emergencies from the pandemic to war in Ukraine to the climate crisis now fueling a stress epidemic, social neuroscientist Norm Farb has a lot to say—and a lot on his plate—from ongoing research to co-authoring a new book. “A lot of us are spending our free time absorbing more threat signals,” says Norm, …
Continue reading “Norm Farb: Strategies for Coping with Today’s Stress Epidemic”
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is highly burdensome and psychological and biological features are mechanistically implicated in its etiology. Fewer than one-in-three depressed patients achieve remission after treatment. Understanding treatment mechanisms of MDD is clearly an important objective. Mindfulness training emphasizes the development of attention and experiential acceptance, improves depressive symptoms, reduces the likelihood of relapse, …
The purpose of this project is to make results from the Contemplative Coping during COVID-19 (CCC) research study accessible to a variety of stakeholders. The CCC study investigates the lived experience of ~350 meditation practitioners in the US during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Our aim is to understand how people are making use of meditation practices …
Carl Rogers once said, “a high degree of empathy in a relationship is possibly the most potent and certainly one of the most potent factors in bringing about change”. Mental health counselors need empathy, compassion, and prosociality to provide quality care and reduce the unacceptably high rate of health disparities for Black, Indigenous and People …
