When: Four Saturdays — 20 and 27 October, 03 and 10 November 2018
16:00-18:00
[Note: Ideally, you have to join all four sessions to get the full benefit from the course.]
Where: West Jerusalem [exact address TBA to confirmed participants]
Limited to 12 participants
Why learn mindfulness?
Phil Jackson holds the record for the biggest number of NBA titles (six with the Chicago Bulls and five with the Los Angeles Lakers). Behind his coaching success is the Zen principle “one breath, one mind” (Huffington Post). “As much as we pump iron and we run to build our strength up, we need to build our mental strength up… so we can focus… so we can be in concert with one another,” he says. This he accomplished with his teams by having them practice mindfulness through meditation.
Athletes, Fortune 500 corporate leaders, Silicon Valley techies, the US Marines, hardened criminals, educators, doctors and many more—all have discovered transformational power in the simple practice of sitting still. And it is not a flash in the pan. According to Jon Kabat-Zinn, an MIT scientist widely acknowledged as the man who introduced mindfulness to mainstream America, research on the topic has expanded exponentially in the last few years—from almost zero in 1990 to more than 800 scientific articles in 2016 alone.
The findings from all the research are nothing short of compelling. Studies suggest that mindfulness can help relieve stress, boost the immune system, lower blood pressure, reduce chronic pain, improve sleep, increase relationship satisfaction, build compassion, and help treat depression, substance abuse, anxiety disorders and other mental ailments.
There was a study out of Harvard involving participants who completed an eight-week mindfulness program that suggests that the size of the hippocampus—the gray matter in the brain associated with emotion and memory, the same part of the brain shown to be smaller in people with stress-related disorders like depression and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)—can increase through meditation practice.
Mindfulness can literally change the brain, and it looks like for the better.
Chade-Meng Tan, formerly Google’s Jolly Good Fellow (his title, seriously), best-selling author, and one of my teachers, created, with the help of thought leaders in the Buddhist, psychology and neuroscience spaces, what is still one of the most popular courses at Google, called Search Inside Yourself, a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence program.
About Me
I am an attorney with the United Nations. I got into mindfulness as a relaxation technique. I was in Geneva, living alone, when I was diagnosed with cancer. After four months of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, I was pronounced clear of the disease, but I became paranoid: With every trivial pain in my body, I would call my oncologist. It was then that I got introduced to meditation, and the paranoia slowly subsided. What was interesting was that my teacher, whenever we met, would ask whether I noticed any change in the way I related to people, and my answer, for the first few months, was always “no.” But as I continued my practice, subtle but real changes were manifesting within me. When I asked a colleague “How are you?” it was not the perfunctory “Hi” one usually gives to people; I really took the time to hear what the other person had to say. It blew my mind that a seemingly simple practice was turning me into a kinder, more authentic human being. That was in 2013, and I have been diving deeper into the practice ever since, and it has been nothing short of life-transforming.
I am a certified Search Inside Yourself teacher. And now, I am doing a two-year mindfulness teacher training course under Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach, two of the most respected and well-loved meditation teachers in the world. It is in connection with this training course that I am offering this introductory course on mindfulness for free.
If you want to join, please send me an email at [email] no later than 15 October 2018. Looking forward.
With gratitude,
Joel
Some articles I wrote on mindfulness:
http://opinion.inquirer.net/87530/what-mindfulness-is-not
http://opinion.inquirer.net/86504/breaking-mind-wandering
http://opinion.inquirer.net/91297/a-despicable-mind
http://opinion.inquirer.net/92953/readiness-is-all
http://opinion.inquirer.net/97722/the-promise-of-burning-man