Mindful Meditation

We are happy to offer mindfulness meditation to support the wellness of our community.

Please join us on Friday December 6, 2013 for two sessions of mindfulness meditation from 12-12:30 PM and 12:35-1:05PM in B742. No experience is necessary. Enjoy taking a moment to sit, relax, and breathe!

Mindfulness is a practice of becoming fully present in the here and now, bringing attention and awareness into the moment. In the busy and distracted consumer culture that is prevalent in the modern United States, this practice may seem irrelevant or impossible. Yet an abundance of research shows numerous benefits of mindfulness practice that include stress reduction and increased resilience. Mindfulness has also been shown to alter neural pathways and to improve the effects of mood disorders (Farb et al., Pg. 320, 2007). Indeed, mindfulness has many benefits to offer our fast-paced and over-stressed American society.

The faithful guide will be Joe Reilly, MSW. He has been a mindfulness practitioner and student of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh since 2004. In the summer of 2011 Joe spent three weeks in Plum Village, Thich Nhat Hanh's meditation center in southern France, as part of a Special Studies course on sharing mindfulness with children, sponsored by Professor Edie Lewis and the Office of Global Activities. Joe is excited to share the practice of mindfulness with the School of Social Work community as an effective means of supporting the wonderful and challenging lives of social workers. Meditations will be offered in a secular, non-religious way and are open to people from all faith and non-faith traditions.

This sessions will begin promptly at 12pm and 12:35pm. It will consist of a 20-minute guided sitting meditation. All are welcome to attend.

Source: Farb, N. A. S., Segal, Z. V., Mayberg, H., Bean, J., McKeon, D., Fatima, Z., & Anderson, A. K. (2007), "Attending to the present: Mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference." SCAN, 2, 313-322.