Professional Training

Teachers: Cynthia Price, PhD MA LMT, Elizabeth Chaison, MEd LMT and Carla Wiechman, LMT

Interoceptive awareness – the awareness of inner body sensations – is integral to mindfulness practice. Most often, in mindfulness classes and practice, people engage in interoceptive awareness by attending to the sensation of their breathing or by engaging in a body scan.

Embodying Mindful Presence and Investigating Mindful Inquiry

This advanced training intensive is for MBSR and MBCT teachers who wish to deepen their understanding of universal principles for teaching mindfulness-based interventions. As such, the focus for this training is less about teaching to the structure of MBSR and MBCT and more about intentionally embodying mindful presence and strengthening the facilitation of mindful inquiry. Inquiry is both a practice and a skill.

It’s summer time. A time for those of us who work on college campuses to take a deep breath and reflect for a moment on the school year just past, and make plans for the year a head.For me, this means thinking about our Koru Mindfulness program, looking at the number of students we served last year at Duke and contemplating how we can continue to expand our programming to meet the growing needs of students. Not surprisingly, this activity produces a surge of gratitude in me.

When asked what gets in the way of consistently performing at their best, most people can easily identify obstacles such as time, energy, scheduling conflicts, and distractions. These can indeed be areas that need focus but what I’ve found in my coaching practice is that most of our real obstacles are internal. Another way to say this is, our greatest obstacle to peak performance is often ourselves.

There are risks of becoming attached and consumed by our goals. In Part 1 of this blog, we considered how striving for results and clinging to outcomes can lead to stress and anxiety, diminishing well-being and eroding performance over time. However, goals don’t need to be eliminated because of this, just approached more mindfully.

“You are perfect the way you are…and you could use a little improvement”

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

Even at work, caring and compassionate relationships matter. Especially at work, it turns out. According to the American Time Use Survey, we spend an average 8.7 hours of every day at work (averaged over all 7 days each week), more than any other single time-use component. This means that if we’re miserable at work, it makes a huge impact on the overall quality of our lives.

The Meditative Experience

Weeks ago I read an article by Penelope Green about a woman named Marie Kondo who gives advice on de-cluttering our lives.