What do stacked stones mean for mindfulness?

What do stacked stones mean for mindfulness?

by Devinder Kaur3 Comments
As we look forward to our autumn programming, we're always happy to have Dr. Kim Sogge back to the centre. Dr. Sogge brings a wealth of experience and information to her mindfulness-based courses, and this year we've expanded upon her original Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Course and will also be offering her Mindfulness-Based Self-Compassion Course. Whenever we start spreading the word about these beneficial offerings, we look for our favourite pictures that communicate a sense of mindfulness. We are mindful in our choosing - while we love pictures of peaceful-looking people sitting on docks or in wooded landscapes, we want to cultivate the understanding that this is a practice for your daily life. You do not need to escape the city, your job or your family to cultivate mindfulness, and so for promotion, we turn to the stone stack. You may be confused though! After all, what's a stack of stones got to do with a mindfulness-based stress reduction course? It's a great...
Read More

Your Brain on Yoga – by Dr. Eileen Harris

by Devinder KaurNo Comments
In your yoga practice, are you “paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally, to the unfolding of experience moment by moment”? Are you at least striving to do that? If so, you are practicing a form of mindfulness as defined by Jon Kabat-Zinn. I call it mindful meditation. There is a growing body of research that demonstrates that yoga as a mindful meditation can actually alter certain structures in your brain, including structures responsible for feelings of love, peace and well-being. Let’s use peace as an example, which I define as the absence of stress. The stress response is a complicated trigger system governed by the amygdala, the small but vital portion of your brain responsible for memory, decision-making and emotions. When presented with a stressful stimulus (in modern life anything and everything can be a stressful stimulus) there is often an immediate reaction. We know this as the flight, fight or freeze response. It is automatic and often without...
Read More