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My life is not
this steeply sloping hour in which you see me hurrying."
- Rainer
Maria Rilke |
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An Invitation to
Learn
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
Photo: Barbara Carr
Learn
to live with greater vitality, health and well-being at an
eight-session Mindfulness-Based Stress
Reduction program.
Presented by the Mindfulness-Based
Stress Reduction Center of New Jersey™ and hosted by Temple Sinai, Summit NJ, the
program offers powerful methods for reducing stress in your everyday life.
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"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!
I say let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a
thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen....In the midst of
this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and
quicksand's and the thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man
has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make
his port at all by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator
indeed who succeeds. Simplify, Simplify.."
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
barn's burnt
down
now I can see
the moon
Masahide
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Upcoming events
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Free Introductory
Talk
Wed. November 10
7:30-9:00
pm
Temple
Sinai
208 Summit Ave
Summit NJ 07901
Eight-week
Summit program
begins Wednesday January 26, 2011
Metuchen/Edison course begins June 2011
For more
information or to reserve a place for talk or course, please contact Dr.
Diane Handlin at 732-549-9100 or diane@drdianehandlin.com.
About Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction
Mindfulness is the universal
capacity to pay attention non-judgmentally in the
present moment. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) offers tools that can
enable you to access your own inner resources and healing potential. It is modeled on the
Stress Reduction Clinic program founded by Jon
Kabat-Zinn at UMass Medical School. More than 18,000 participants referred by
over 4,000 physicians have participated in this highly researched program since its inception
in 1979.
For more details
about the Summit and other NJ courses, click here.
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Worthy
of note
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Free talk
"How to Live
Sanely
in an Insane World"
Leonia Public Library
227 Fort Lee
Rd
Leonia, NJ 07605
Wednesday, Nov. 17, 7:15-9:00
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Look for
Dr. Diane Handlin's article: "Happiness: Art or
Skill" in an upcoming issue of New Jersey Health and Life magazine
Jon
Kabat-Zinn
Google Tech Talk
March 8, 2007
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Free talk
"Mindfulness-Based
Stress Reduction"
Warren Township Free Library
42 Mountain Blvd
Warren,
NJ 07059
Saturday, April 30, 2011, 2:00-3:30 pm
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The Living Moment
There is a stillness at
dawn
asking for me
I hear
the note not played
I
see
The line not written
I understand
the word not
spoken
I am in stillness
I am
the Living
Moment
uncommitted.
Cliff
Woodward
(with Stephen
Damon)
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As we
approach the time of year when we in New
Jersey will witness the vibrant beauty of autumn, after the unrelenting
heat of this past summer, and before the winter solstice--the time for
many manifestations of life on earth to rest or draw inside, many of us
may be taking stock, and even making resolutions. Into this moment when
we might be inspired to catch our breath, and take a pause, a fine
article on Mindfulness-Based Stress
Reduction comes out of a place I might have thought unlikely:
Oprah Magazine. In its
September 2010 issue, there is a solid article called, "Learning to Exhale,"
written by a freelance writer named Catherine
Price.
Having just received the gift of
teaching Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based
Stress Reduction to an intelligent, vibrant and highly
motivated group of participants this past summer, I'd been feeling
protective of this wonderful program and definitely not eager to see
some enthusiastic, but watered down version of what this challenging and
rewarding MBSR program offers.
So, not prepared to be undiscriminating or uncritical, I was
pleasantly surprised by this article. Here's a sample:
Lately, it's felt like my life
is on warp speed. Weekends blur into months; months blur into
seasons. I eat fast, I talk fast, I walk fast-I swear I even sleep
fast. And I find it almost impossible to sit still....I may get a
lot done, but smell the roses? I'm not even getting a passing
whiff.
Catherine Price addresses, as does Jon
Kabat-Zinn, the universal challenge of how to live our best lives (as
did Thoreau in 1854 in the quote above). She lets us experience the
journey with her, and doesn't in any way cheapen or minimize its rigor
or its rewards.
To read the entire article, please
click here.
More and more scientists are
investigating how the brain works. Price cites researcher Norman
Farb who studies meditation and experimental psychology at the
University of Toronto, and who points out that Mindfulness-Based
Stress Reduction can actually change
the way we use our brains. Jon Kabat-Zinn likes to remind us that
because we are human beings, pain will be inevitable, but suffering is
often a result of the stories we tell ourselves about the meaning of our
disappointments and our pain. Norman Farb indicates that the type
of narrative processing that we do in ascribing meaning to events
typically takes place in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the
brain behind the center of our forehead that coordinates complex
behaviors and thoughts. Sometimes, due to faulty education
and our automatic reactivity, the activity that takes place in this area
of the brain results in emotional
suffering.
Norman Farb discovered,
however, that people who complete the MBSR
training are actually able to activate an entirely
different part of their brains--the insula. As Catherine
Price points out, the insula is located deep inside your gray matter and
informs you of what's happening in the present moment without connecting
the experience to specific emotions related to the stories we tell
ourselves about the meaning of an event, its causes and possible
consequences. For example, Price uses the example of when we're caught
in a traffic jam, we might begin to tell ourselves that a clogged highway =
extra minutes stuck in the car = misery. When you've learned to use your
brain in a different way, a traffic jam can potentially be just a
traffic jam. MBSR teaches the skills to
create the pause necessary to make it possible to evaluate and then
reroute information so that it is possible to respond to an event
without being caught in conditioned, automatic thinking and
reactivity.
When Catherine Price decided to see if
she could change her way of living, she went directly to the
source...Jon
Kabat-Zinn, the founder of the Stress
Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical
School, where he originated MBSR
in 1979, which is now the oldest and most scientifically
validated mediation-based clinical program in the world. An intelligent and
critical student, she describes what she learned from his program and
how she benefited from it. (See above.)
Diane
Handlin, Ph.D
Licensed psychologist
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Diane
Handlin, Ph.D.
Licensed
psychologist
Founder and Executive Director
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"As to the value of the course, I would note
that the group workshop designed to work through Jon Kabat-Zinn's
curriculum is very effective. The workshop / course added a great
deal of depth and opened my mind to a different way of looking at things
and fostered exploration. When mindfullly present, time seems to
expand for me. I relax, freed from thinking about the next place I
have to be or the next thing I have to do ... I have discovered that if
I hold off, I usually do not act along the lines of my first
reaction. I've realized that I almost always have time not to act
immediately. I've also rediscovered my happy me, what I remember
from soooo long ago ..., and that is really wonderful." - Jane
Dobson, Corporate attorney
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NJ Lic. #3306
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NY Lic. #015840
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Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Center of New Jersey™
328 Amboy
Ave, Metuchen NJ 08840
Tel: 732-549-9100, www.mindfulnessnj.com
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