Originally published: . Volume 10, No. 4. Source pages: 15.
The annual Mindfulness workshop will be held Saturday, April 13 from 8 am to 5 pm at the Tam Bao Meditation Hall, in Baton Rouge.
This year's topic is "Practical Approaches to Mindfulness-Based Interventions, A Day of Mindfulness for Mental Health Professionals."
According to workshop organizer, Dr. John Pickering, the focus of this year's workshop will be on the practical implementation of mindfulness. Local clinicians with years of experience in mindfulness interventions will discuss how they have a directly applied these therapeutic techniques to mental health and substance abuse disorders. Opportunities will be provided for meditation practice.
In this workshop, participants will become familiar with the basic contents of a mindfulness program including the use of meditation and body scan. They will also become familiar with recent research on the use of mindfulness in treating substance abuse disorders and be able to define psychological flexibility from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy perspective and how mindfulness-based interventions affect psychological flexibility. Attendees will be guided through several periods of medication to help develop and deepen their own meditative practice.
"Mindfulness, a practice associated with 2 1/2 millennia of Buddhist psychology, has become an increasingly popular concept in psychotherapy and counseling literature over the past three decades as more and more professionals have become aware of it and incorporated meditation and mindfulness approaches into their personal lives and therapeutic repertoires. Several empirically supported therapies, such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBRT), Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) have included a significant mindfulness component as part of their therapeutic regime."
Dr. John Pickering, psychologist, has been one of the organizers for this yearly event for many years and has explained in other articles about the program.
“Previous workshops have included topics about use of mindfulness interventions in psychotherapy, introduction to various evidence– supported therapies based on mindfulness, neuropsychological mechanisms involved in mindfulness, and the use of meditation to enhance therapists’ attention, presence and empathy.”
The popularity of Mindfulness as a therapy method and technique has grown in recent years, as evidence for its effectiveness and research findings have been helped understanding, explained Pickering. There are several short periods of guided meditation led by a Zen Buddhist monk throughout the day.
Contact Dr. Pickering for information and registration through the Meditation Hall or at 7510 Highland Road in Baton Rouge, 70808.
Quyen Ho (Thich Dao Quang) is the Zen Buddhist monk who teaches at the Mindfulness Day.
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