Mindfulness-Based Programs Offered at UCSD
For those in Southern California, UCSD offers a a diverse menu of options to explore and experience mindfulness. For a complete listing of our 2013 group programs please click on the schedule & registration page link below.
Hope you don’t mind this very different take on mindfulness and MBSR
In its essence, mindfulness changes how we ‘want’, but in spite of the explosion of research on the neuroscience of mindfulness, a neurological definition of wanting has never been incorporated in any of this research literature. A major reason may be the predominant use of brain imaging (fmri) to observe the minds of mindfulness practitioners. Since the fmri only measures brain activity through the proxy of changes in blood flow within the brain, it cannot measure the biochemical correlates to wanting that are independent of neural blood flow. Indeed, because ‘wanting’ processes in the brain involve small arrays of cells within the midbrain, the fmri is as useful in observing wanting as the Mount Palomar telescope is in observing sub-atomic particles. In other words, it’s the wrong tool for the problem at hand.
Below is a link to the first explanation of mindfulness that is derived from the neuroscience of wanting. Based on the work of and endorsed by the behavioral neuroscientist Kent Berridge of the University of Michigan, it provides a very short, simple and new explanation of mindfulness that justifies it in a most unusual way, as well as providing a simple explanation why mindfulness is so effective as an antidote to tension or ‘stress’.
I hope you find it of interest.
http://mezmer.blogspot.com/2011/11/mindfulness-and-wanting.html
Cheers!
A J Marr