Mindfulness Practices for Life
Five Wednesday Evenings
Beginning February 4 and ending March 4 • 6:30 to 8:30 PM
Half-day Retreat on Saturday February 28 • 1:00 to 5:00pm
This course starts from the belief that we don’t practice mindfulness to get better at
meditation; we practice mindfulness to get better at life. The course will draw from the
Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) curriculum as well as from Deeper
Mindfulness (Williams and Penman, 2023). Both of these sources integrate rigorous
science and experiential knowledge from the wisdom traditions to offer practices
consistently resulting in positive outcomes beneficial to beginner and experienced
practitioners.
This five-week course will focus on
1. Introducing and cultivating practices that can be integrated into daily life
2. Coming to our senses through pausing and grounding
3. Coming to recognize the feeling tones* pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral and
their role in perception and response.
4. Restoring balance, gratitude, and appreciation.
*“Mindfulness of feeling tones is one of the master keys that both reveals and unlocks
the deepest patterns of our conditioning.” Joseph Goldstein
Workshop Leader: David Patterson, Ph.D.
David is a professor emeritus of the University of Tennessee College of Social Work. He is a certified MBSR Teacher through the Brown University Mindfulness Center and has had a daily sitting practice for over three decades. He has trained a wide array of individuals and groups in mindfulness practices. For five years, he taught the MBSR 8-week course to UT graduate students in social work, counseling, and psychology.
“In Asian languages, the word for mind and the word for heart are same. So if you’re not hearing mindfulness in some deep way as heartfulness, you’re not really understanding it. Compassion and kindness towards oneself are intrinsically woven into it. You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.”
– Jon Kabat-Zinn –
First created in 1979, by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., MBSR now has 40 years of outcomes research highlighting statistically significant reductions in symptoms for various physical and behavioral health conditions including anxiety, depression and chronic pain, along with positive changes in risk factors that may lead to more serious chronic ailments. The 8-week MBSR course integrates a range of meditation practices including body awareness and gentle yoga with the intention to aid participants in enhancing self-care and improved emotional and physical adaptations for healthier living. Participants will learn experientially and conceptually how and why this public health intervention that is “secular, scientific, evidence-based practice has become an accepted part of mainstream medicine”[1] and behavioral health.
