Adolescence is an important time of life to teach the qualities and skills of compassion. While desires to form positive relationships and contribute to the world-at-large begin to grow, adolescence is also a time when relational challenges arise, including peer pressure to conform, social “othering,” and social exclusion. To support adolescents, current approaches to contemplative …
Grant Type Archives:
Recovering the relational roots of compassion training: Supporting sustainable and inclusive care
Many forms of meditation in the West have been incorporated into an individualistic understanding of people, in which a person attempts to cultivate love, compassion, and wisdom through their own effort. This project will examine the impact of recovering a traditional relational framework to compassion training. Within a relational framework, practitioners first learn to experience …
Gratitude interventions, well-being and social networks: A 16-month longitudinal study
Gratitude interventions, whereby people regularly reflect on and note things they are grateful for, can be effective in improving well-being. When completing gratitude tasks, people often focus on important people in their life. Therefore, this intervention may work by increasing people’s sense of social connection. As such, gratitude interventions have the potential not just to …
How do the benefits of meditation spread? Investigating interpersonal mechanisms following practice
Research has begun to show that the benefits of meditation practice can extend beyond the individual to influence the well-being of others. An important next step in the field is to look at how this happens. We will therefore examine how participation in a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course impacts the amount of negative emotions, specifically, …
