Why are some types of thoughts so challenging? Some of our patterns of thinking create significant suffering in our mind. Thoughts can lead to anxiety, depression, and anger. Our thoughts can be incessantly judgmental, repetitive, compulsive, worry-filled, anxious, and self-critical. Yet other thoughts can lead to happiness, calm, and peace.
This daylong will explore how we can use mindfulness to transform difficult thinking, led by Diana Winston with a special morning conversation with actress and author Mariel Hemingway.
Through mindfulness we can learn to not believe everything we think, distinguish helpful from harmful thinking, let go of repetitive unhelpful thoughts, and use thought in helpful ways to bring more happiness. The day will also include a basic introduction to mindfulness and tools for getting started with daily practice.
Mindfulness is paying attention to our present moment experiences with openness, curiosity, and a willingness to be with what is. It has scientific support to reduce anxiety, improve health outcomes, reduce emotional reactivity, create positive emotions, and even positively impact brain structure.
This day is intended for clinicians, mental health professionals, chaplains, or anyone from the general public who wishes to learn mindfulness for personal use and to apply it with their clients, patients, and those they work with. While the emphasis will be on developing one’s personal mindfulness practice and tools, these tools are transferable. Appropriate for beginners or people with experience. The day will employ a number of modalities, including lecture, group discussion, interpersonal exercises. The center piece of the day will be walking and sitting meditation, to allow the participants to fully explore the benefit of mindfulness practiced over a full day.
About our Speaker
Diana Winston has been the Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA Semel Institute’s Mindful Awareness Research Center www.marc.ucla.edu since 2006. She is the co-author (with Susan Smalley, Ph.D.) of Fully Present: The Science, Art, and Practice of Mindfulness and the CD, “Mindful Meditations” (2008). She has been teaching mindfulness nationally and internationally since 1993 and has brought mindful awareness into schools, hospitals, businesses, and nonprofits, as well as to leaders, educators, and health professionals in the US and Asia. Her work has been mentioned in the New York Times, Newsweek, O Magazine, Women’s Health Magazine, CBS and ABC News, and the LA Times, among others. She has been called by the LA Times: “one of the nation’s leading mindfulness teachers.”