These sessions will explore Daoist (Taoist) standing meditation, Yangsheng (nourishing life) and movement practices. Also referred to as Qigong (ch’i-kung; qi Exercises), Yangsheng is a form of health and longevity practice. Each session will begin with formal instruction on quiet standing (jingzhan) and then explore specific movement practices. While some attention will be given to …
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Contemplative Session: Watching the Breath
Hosh dar dam, “be aware of your breath,” is the first principle in Sufi meditation. In this session we will enter into a state of subtle self-awareness by attending to the influx and outflow of the breath. Hitherto experienced as a more or less homogenous monolith, the body now reveals itself as a dynamic vortex …
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Keynote Panel “Contemplative Practice Enters the Digital Age”
Digital didactics, such as MOOCS and browser-based online programs have opened up realms of content to thousands who for reasons of geography, expense or convenience would otherwise not have had access to these materials. Allowing anyone around the world to take a course at Stanford or learn Geometry on Khan Academy has helped address educational …
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On the Placebo Effect and Its Implications for the Science of Mindfulness
This session will present recent studies on the placebo effect as critical points of reference for understanding the “context” of mindfulness. I will focus on numerous “non-specific” mechanisms that have been evaluated in studies of the placebo effect, including the therapeutic effects of relationship, expectation, hope, surprise, and embodiment. I will draw from published studies …
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Plasticity of the Social Brain: Effects of a One-year Mental Training Study on Social Connectedness, Compassion, Theory of Mind, Social Stress, and the Body
In the last decades, plasticity research has suggested that training of mental capacities such as attention, mindfulness and compassion is effective and leads to positive changes in socio-affective and cognitive functions. Tania Singer will show first results of the ReSource Project, a large-scale multi-methodological one-year secular mental training program in which participants were trained in …
How Difference is Constructed and What We Can Do About It: Perspectives across Evolution, Culture, and Mindfulness Training
Conceptual classification and linguistic reification are intrinsic to, if not diagnostic of, humans as a species. These potentiate but do not necessitate what Foucault calls “dividing practices,” which inscribe stigma and prejudicial discrimination weighted by power to effect domination and control of some classes of people by others. These processes entail intrasubjective dynamics, notes Bruce …
Mindfulness Is Always a Multicultural Experience, Even When It Is Not
Over the past thirty years with the development of Western Insight Meditation communities and Vipassana practice in North America, there has been a process of collective transformation that has been both painstakingly incremental and incontrovertibly powerful. This presentation reviews some of the history and growth of multicultural mindfulness communities; personal experience of diverse practitioners; visual …
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Dismantling Oppression from the Inside Out
From the presenter’s vantage point as a therapist of color, a teacher of courses on race, and a researcher in multicultural psychology, she has been privileged to bear witness to the human struggle to make sense of oneself in a racialized and gendered world. As old narratives are directly challenged by evidence of structural oppression …
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From Looking Out to Looking In: Re-Thinking How We Study and Train Attention in Mental Health
Mindfulness is practiced and cultivated through the training of attention. Not coincidentally, across thought traditions, attention and its (dys)regulation has long been theorized to underlie various mental habits and biases, common forms of suffering, and well-being. Yet, despite this compelling theory, empirical data supporting these foundational ideas about the nature and function of attention are …
Measuring, Understanding, and Changing Mental Habits
This presentation will first explore possible domains of mental habits, including personality, social interaction, identity, emotion, mind wandering, and contemplative practice. From the perspective of grounded cognition, the question will be raised as to how “mental” are mental habits, given that they appear to be strongly grounded in external situations (and conversely that physical habits …
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