Humans spend at least two hours a night dreaming. That’s more than seven hundred hours a year, and six years spent dreaming in a lifetime. While we all have our own struggles and patterns of successful sleep, dreams are a unifying factor of humanity. Whether you’re riding the subway to work, standing in line for …
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How Self-Compassion Can Improve Teen Mental Health (Part 2 of 2)
This piece by Karen Bluth, PhD is part 2 of an article honored with the 2022 Mind & Life Institute Award for Public Communication of Contemplative Research and was originally featured in Psychology Today online. Part 1 explained what self-compassion is and its role in improving teen mental health outcomes. But how can self-compassion be taught, and how can …
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How Self-Compassion Can Improve Teen Mental Health (Part 1 of 2)
This piece by Karen Bluth, PhD is part I of an article honored with the 2022 Mind & Life Institute Award for Public Communication of Contemplative Research and was originally featured in Psychology Today online. Teens in the United States are suffering. The reasons are many, including the lingering effects of the pandemic, fears stemming …
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Sona Dimidjian Honored with 2022 Mind & Life Catherine Kerr Award for Courageous and Compassionate Scholarship
An estimated 280 million people globally experience depression, with more than 75 percent of people in low- and middle-income countries receiving no treatment at all. What role can mindfulness play in cultivating mental health and wellness? And how can researchers help ensure equitable access to mindfulness-based approaches? Clinical psychological scientist Sona Dimidjian has spent over …
Contemplative Researchers Seek to Leverage Power of Technology for Well-being
A familiar scene for many: It’s the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and we’re missing social lunches and coffee dates. Connection is lacking and we’re confined to our homes for work, play, rest, and everything in between. In this reality, online tools like Zoom and social media skyrocketed as a resource for maintaining relationships and …
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2023 Summer Research Institute
A collaborative, interdisciplinary, and immersive opportunity for conversations around trauma, healing, and flourishing—for researchers, contemplatives, changemakers, and anyone interested in this topic.
Jon Kabat-Zinn – Sharing MBSR with the Dalai Lama
In a video clip from 2022, Mind & Life Founding Steward Jon Kabat-Zinn remembers sharing the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program with the Dalai Lama at the Mind & Life Dialogue in Dharamsala, India in 1990. We shared this video in 2022 as part of our 35th anniversary celebration.
Norm Farb: Strategies for Coping with Today’s Stress Epidemic
With cascading emergencies from the pandemic to war in Ukraine to the climate crisis now fueling a stress epidemic, social neuroscientist Norm Farb has a lot to say—and a lot on his plate—from ongoing research to co-authoring a new book. “A lot of us are spending our free time absorbing more threat signals,” says Norm, …
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Biological and psychological mechanisms of mindfulness meditation-based interventions for depression
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is highly burdensome and psychological and biological features are mechanistically implicated in its etiology. Fewer than one-in-three depressed patients achieve remission after treatment. Understanding treatment mechanisms of MDD is clearly an important objective. Mindfulness training emphasizes the development of attention and experiential acceptance, improves depressive symptoms, reduces the likelihood of relapse, …
Making data more accessible: Visualizing the Contemplative Coping during COVID-19 project
The purpose of this project is to make results from the Contemplative Coping during COVID-19 (CCC) research study accessible to a variety of stakeholders. The CCC study investigates the lived experience of ~350 meditation practitioners in the US during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Our aim is to understand how people are making use of meditation practices …
