Bob Stahl – Mindfulness & Healing

Description Of Mindfulness & Healing

As you’ll discover in the Mindfulness & Healing program, mindfulness teaches us to see the world from a broader perspective. The healing cultivated through mindfulness meditation applies to your whole being and affirms that no matter what you are faced with, you can begin to meet life’s challenges with equanimity and a peaceful heart.

Managing Pain with Wisdom and Compassion

In the 7-week Mindfulness & Healing program, you’ll be given mindfulness practices that will help you re-educate and reorient yourself to live with greater comfort and ease in all aspects of life. Just as sailors learn how to ride out raging storms and crashing waves, you’ll discover how to skillfully navigate the storms of life rather than resisting or fighting through them.

Ultimately, mindfulness meditation practice can improve your wellbeing by lessening the mental, emotional and even physical aspects of pain and other bodily challenges. And mind-body studies reveal that welcoming more peace into your life actually sets off positive biochemical processes that lead you to be be even stronger, healthier and more resilient.

Each of this program’s 90-minute sessions will consist of a talk on different dimensions of mindfulness practice; a guided mindfulness meditation to work with pain, stress or illness; a small-group discussion; and a question-and-answer session.

During this life-changing, interactive course, you’ll discover how to:

• Change your relationship to stress and emotional, mental and physical pain
• Reduce your suffering as you build a constructive relationship with pain
• Navigate the bridge between healing and curing, so you can manifest greater wisdom around challenges
• Meet pain as a teacher and gain a renewed enthusiasm for life
• Improve your sleep, focus and acceptance of whatever life delivers to your doorstep
• Decrease anxiety and depression
• Boost your immune system and overall health and wellbeing
• Better cope with stressful situations
• And much more…

If you’d like to know how to use mindfulness meditation to promote health and healing by transforming your relationship to stress, pain or illness, this is an ideal course for you.

The Importance of a Master Teacher

As with any endeavor, your progress can be helped immeasurably by a great teacher — one who has not only mastered the content, but who can inspire you in your practice, open your mind and heart, and lead you forward on the path.

Bob Stahl has founded seven mindfulness-based stress-reduction programs in medical centers throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. He lived and practiced for over eight years in a Buddhist monastery, is the guiding teacher at Insight Santa Cruz, and a visiting teacher at Spirit Rock Insight Meditation Center.

He is a co-author of A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook, Living With Your Heart Wide Open and Calming the Rush of Panic.

Plus, he’s a warm, funny and wonderful man. You’ll love him!

What You’ll Learn In Mindfulness & Healing

What You’ll Discover in These 7 Weeks

Course sessions are on Tuesdays at 5:00pm Pacific.

In this 7-week Mindfulness & Healing program, you’ll be introduced to mindfulness practices that will help you live with greater peace, calmness and happiness. This course can offer profound support to anyone desiring improved health and wellbeing as well as for those living with stress, anxiety, insomnia, chronic pain or illness. A growing body of evidence-based research reveals that mindfulness meditation fosters improved health, stress reduction and overall healing.

Each weekly, LIVE contemplation and training session will build harmoniously upon the next so that you’ll develop a complete, holistic understanding of the practices, tools and principles you’ll need to sustain your mindfulness practice.

In each session, Bob will offer a guided mindfulness meditation practice and a talk on a variety of topics on how mindfulness can support wellbeing. There will also be time for small- and large-group discussions, and each class will include a Q & A session with Bob.

During your 7 weeks with Bob, you’ll learn how to apply mindfulness practices to many areas of your life, including:

• Mindful communication
• Stress management
• Discernment of mindful reactivity and responding mindfully
• Chronic pain management
• Living with illness
• Developing better concentration
• Increasing creativity
• Cultivating better balance and more equanimity
• Decreasing anxiety and depression
• Improving immune system functioning
• Experiencing more peace and greater vitality and happiness

Module 1: Your History Is Here Inside Your Body: Mindfulness of the Body

Become more connected to your body and mind through mindfulness meditation. The body has its own intelligence, and our history can be found within our own skin, flesh, organs, bones and being. The body is the storehouse for all our memories and learnings, through our thoughts, feelings and experiences.

In this module, you will practice and discover:

• What is mindfulness
• Mindfulness as a way of life
• Mindful breathing
• Mindful check-in
• Body scan
• Mindfulness in everyday life activities

Module 2: Is it a Stick or a Snake?: Perception

Perception plays an important role in health and wellbeing. It’s all in how you see things. Our challenge is to break free from the box of our limited perceptions and see from a wider perspective. At times, our beliefs can be self-limiting and imprisoning.

In this module, you will practice and discover:

• Mindful check-in meditation, mindful breathing and the body scan
• An investigation on perception — is it a stick or a snake?
• How to work with physical pain
• How to work with Illness
• More on bringing mindfulness into everyday life activities through S.T.O.P. (Stop, Take a Breath, Observe what’s here in body and mind, Proceed being present)
• How to calm and steady the mind and body
• Mindfulness in everyday life activities

Module 3: The Passing Weather Systems: Pleasant, Unpleasant & Neutral Feelings

We live in a world of change, as evidenced by the weather, the seasons and our aging bodies. Understanding how to more skillfully navigate our moods, thoughts, emotions and senses (sights, sounds, smells, tastes and sensations) can help us live a more peaceful life. It’s important to clearly see how and why each moment can be either pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. When not attended to — when we are not being mindful — these moments can catapult us into reacting in ways that don’t support our wellbeing.

In this module, you will practice and discover:

• Mindful check-in meditation
• Introduction to the sitting meditation
• Guided sitting meditation
• Bringing mindfulness to pleasant, unpleasant and neutral feelings — and not getting so caught up in them
• More effective coping strategies for working with physical and emotional pain and illness

Module 4: Back in the Hole Again:

The Patterns of Automatic Reactivity

This session is devoted to exploring how patterns of reactivity impact us. As humans, we can become creatures of habit and live life on automatic pilot, which can have a decidedly negative effect. We’ll explore how reactivity affects our body and mind. It’s not the stress, but how we react to it that makes all the difference.

In this module, you will practice and discover:

• Mindful check-in meditation
• Guided sitting meditation
• Bringing mindfulness to habitual patterns
• How reactive patterns affect your sensations, thoughts and emotions
• Mindfulness in everyday life activities

Module 5: Walking Around the Hole:

Viktor Frankl says, “Between the stimulus and the response, there is a space, and in that space, lies our freedom to choose.” We will explore this “space” and the difference between mindless reactivity and mindful responding. Reacting, versus responding, can often fuel habitual patterns that can have a detrimental effect on your thoughts, emotions and sensations. Conversely, when you become mindful, you may see that you have a choice, that you can respond in a more constructive way rather than react in a non-productive or even destructive way. We’ll explore how the practice of mindfulness transforms old patterns of reactivity.

In this module, you will practice and discover:

• Mindful check-in meditation
• Guided sitting meditation
• The difference between mindless reactivity and mindful responding
• Bringing mindfulness to habitual patterns and responding to them in a much more constructive way
• How to have a broader and wiser attitude when meeting life’s challenges
• Mindfulness in everyday life activities

Module 6: Understanding Each Other: Interpersonal Mindfulness (July 5)

Bringing mindfulness to the way we communicate is one of the most important things we can do to bring more peace into the world and to ourselves. Maya Angelou once said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” The way we relate to one another can foster a sense of belonging, trust and love, or can lead to separation, fear and hate. This session will offer mindfulness practices to cultivate deeper listening and more mindful speaking, which will seed greater understanding and deeper connection into our relationships.

In this module, you will practice and discover:

• Mindful check-in meditation
• Guided sitting meditation
• Using mindful response rather than mindless reaction
• The satisfaction of being heard and understood when you talk with another
• The rewards of listening deeply to another and offering the gift of your empathic heart
• Loving kindness meditation
• Mindfulness in everyday life activities

Module 7: Mindful Living: Food, Media &

In this last session, we’ll look at what we take in, in the form of food, media and the world, and how it affects us physically, mentally and emotionally. We’ll also explore mindfulness as a way of life, and what we can do to support our mindfulness practice upon completion of this course. We’ll discover that we are at the beginning of a mindful journey that can help foster our wellbeing and sense of peace throughout our lifetime.

In this module, you will practice and discover:

• Mindful check-in meditation
• Guided sitting meditation
• A greater awareness of what you take in and how it affects your body and mind
• Resources to support your mindfulness meditation practice
• Loving kindness meditation
• Mindfulness in everyday life activities

About Bob Stahl

Bob Stahl, PhD has founded seven mindfulness-based stress reduction programs in medical centers throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and currently directs programs at Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz and El Camino Hospital in both Mountain View and Los Gatos. Bob serves as a senior teacher for the Oasis Institute for Mindfulness-based Professional Education and Training.

He is a co-author of A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook, Living With Your Heart Wide Open, Calming the Rush of Panic, A Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction Workbook for Anxiety and MBSR Every Day. Bob is a long time practitioner of mindfulness meditation, having lived and practiced over eight years in a Buddhist monastery and is the guiding teacher at Insight Santa Cruz and a visiting teacher at Spirit Rock Insight Meditation Center.

More courses from the same author: Bob Stahl