Do you feel stressed or overwhelmed with everything you have on your plate?
Do you have “early Alzheimer’s” moments, where something that was just on your mind is suddenly gone, or you misplace an item that was just in your hands, or walk into a room but then forget why you are there? Do you worry about your aging brain?
Do frustration, anger and/or other emotions interfere with your enjoyment of life?
Do you find it difficult to quiet your mind? to get to sleep at night? to just be calm and feel relaxed?
Does physical pain keep you from activities you enjoy?
Do you feel ruled by habits, like checking your email or eating impulsively?
If you answered yes to any of the above, you’re not alone. Our current lifestyles place a great strain on our minds and bodies. For example, multi-tasking is now the norm in our society, and our brains can become inundated with the amount of information constantly bombarding our senses, leaving us feeling frazzled and overwhelmed. As another example, our news media has entrained us to focus on everything that could possibly go wrong, leaving us in a state of perpetual worry and with a propensity to catastrophize every little mishap.
We need tools to cope with the stress and strain of modern life, if we hope to be able to navigate our days with greater peace and happiness. Such tools are available and easy to learn.
In the Minding Your Mind course, you will learn techniques that will help you
- cope with stress
- deal with physical pain
- understand your emotional ups and downs
- manage your impulses that lead to habits you want to eliminate.
What are the elements of the course?
This course takes the best of modern cognitive psychology and combines it with time-proven meditation techniques from ancient Eastern traditions.
Cognitive-behavioral therapy is a psychological approach that emphasizes the importance of our thoughts in determining how we feel and what we do. The key idea behind cognitive-behavioral therapy is that, although we cannot control people and events in our lives, we can control our thoughts about them. It is believed that our thoughts about events, not the events themselves, are associated with quality of life and sense of well-being.
- You will learn to identify 15 styles of “distorted thinking”. For example, filtering occurs when you take negative details and magnify them while filtering out all positive aspects of a situation. As another example, personalization reflects the tendency you may have to believe that everything people do or say is some kind of reaction to you.
- You will learn to intervene into your distorted thinking and choose to guide your mind down a more healthful and helpful line of thought.
The ability to change our thoughts is dependent upon our ability to be conscious of them. The Mindfulness Meditation practices increase our ability to be aware of what we are thinking and feeling in any given moment. In fact, mindfulness means being aware of what is happening in the present moment in a nonjudgmental way.
- You will learn four basic mindfulness practices: the body scan, sitting meditation, walking meditation, and mindful yoga. Each of these practices can be tailored to accommodate your physical abilities and limitations
- You will learn how to apply mindfulness to your daily activities.
- You will build an individualized practice that will help you to continue to develop these life skills after the course has ended.
If these techniques are so beneficial, why don’t more people learn them?
TIME.
It takes a commitment of time and energy to change our mind’s habitual patterns, many of which have been developed over a lifetime. When you already feel overextended, it may seem impossible to add another commitment to your day. And that’s what this course requires, if you are to benefit from it fully, a daily commitment to practice these new skills - even just 15 minutes a day. Past research on this type of course shows a clear relationship between the amount of practice participants undertake and the level of benefit they achieve.
What are the benefits?
The payoff for applying these new skills is significant. Primarily, you will develop a greater sense of acceptance of your life. You will cultivate the mindset that there is a lot more right with you than there is wrong with you. You will acquire a set of tools that apply to all aspects of your life. More specifically, scientific studies have demonstrated that programs like Minding Your Mind can help:
- Reduce anxiety symptoms and psychological distress
- Decrease mood disturbances like depression, anger and confusion
- Reduce the experience of pain
- Reduce headache activity
- Regulate blood pressure
- Regulate sleep
- Support weight management
- Improve memory and attention
- Improve health-related quality of life and well-being
Mostly, these skills support you in living a happier and healthier life.
When and where does the class meet?
Tuesday evenings starting April 8th from 7-9 pm. A half-day silent retreat will be held on Sunday, May 18th. Click here for directions to The Opener, located in the Oakland Hills.
