Topic Archives:

Inspiring Minds – January 2021

Our January conversation, “Mindfulness, Resilience, and Compassion for the New Year,” features Rhonda Magee and Jack Kornfield, with musicians Marti Nikko and DJ Drez. We look at how we can lay the foundations for a year of compassion and healing grounded in our shared humanity.

Sleep’s role in realizing the prosocial benefits of contemplative practice

Robust learning requires substantial effort. Our recent studies, conducted in a sleep laboratory as well as in typical home environments, have showed that sleep contributes to learning. Indeed, sleep is important for solidifying memories of various types. By extension, in a contemplative practice when people strive to develop enduring prosocial qualities, such as compassion, kindness, …

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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, …

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Aware, awake, woke: How a brief mindfulness intervention fosters prosocial/ethical attitudes

Buddhist and psychological models of awakening often propose that ethical sensitivities that encompass “peace, compassion, mindfulness and more justice” (Dalai Lama) can be fostered through mindfulness. The literature and our own previous work (Verhaeghen & Aikman, 2020) suggest that increased trait mindfulness is indeed associated with stronger endorsement of care and fairness/justice as moral values, …

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Making PEACE, one moment at a time: Mindfulness-Based Trauma Recovery for Refugees

We theorize that mindfulness and compassion training tailored to forcibly displaced refugees will have significant salutary pro-social effects. By means of a randomized (active) control design, we will test whether Mindfulness-Based Trauma Recovery for Refugees (MBTR-R) has restorative pro-social effects on traumatized Eritrean asylum seekers. Pro-social outcomes include (i) Trust, (ii) Compassion, (iii) Pro-social inter-personal …

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How One Scientist is Using Mindfulness to Transform Treatment for Pain and Addiction

There’s growing concern that the COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating another ongoing epidemic: the opioid crisis. Recent reports point to an increase in fatal overdoses in the United States since the pandemic began. Could mindfulness-based approaches offer long-term relief for those grappling with chronic pain and addiction? Dr. Eric Garland, Director of the Center on Mindfulness …

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