 My name is Ulrich Parkl, I serve as convener of CMA, Traditions of Yoga and Meditation. And as such, I'm well positioned to answer questions about today's taster lecture as well as about the program in the broader perspective. In today's talk, I have selected a topic that I think is of very great relevance to many of us. And good number will have heard of the concept of mindfulness or modern mindfulness as it is sometimes used, or it's as it is sometimes called. And I'd like to introduce modern mindfulness through its role in the public discourse and modern mindfulness has matured over the last 3040 years or so the concept itself was coined in 1979 or so. I'll just look at my slide for some reason it doesn't go through. I think I might have used the wrong. Yes, here we go. Modern mindfulness is a concept that is increasingly well known. It has entered public discourse it has began to appear in a great number of domains in our life in society in general, and the first slide gives you indication of its popularity perhaps but certainly of its presence in modern society. It appeared on Time Magazine we have a congressman Tim Ryan speaking about mindfulness that appears in the FT magazine and then a number of other publications that are not normally considered to be noted meditation journal at all but these are mainstream publications that all now begin to take note of modern mindfulness for its different applications, different functions in the modern world so clearly modern mindfulness is no longer a niche phenomenon but something that has gained increasing presence over the last few years. Now mindfulness is of course not only modern mindfulness but mindfulness is a concept that goes back to the historical Buddha himself he coined the term or the point or use the Sanskrit or Pali equivalent or Sati or Smriti or mindfulness and it is interesting to see to explore the degree to which the modern version of mindfulness correspond to the classical interpretations of mindfulness. So, we probably need first to look at some of the definitions that we encountered today. The, the, the best known definition is probably that, which was articulated by founder, John Kabat-Zinn, who in 1994, described mindfulness as a mean as a means paying attention in a particular way on purpose in the present moment and non-judgmentally. So there are two key aspects or into or features of mindfulness in this interpretation. And that is that it needs to be according to Kabat-Zinn, focused or located in the present moment, and that it needs to be non-judgmentally. And these are very controversial attributes, because according to the canonical interpretations of mindfulness the Buddhist interpretation of mindfulness. It is above all an act of remembering both Sati in the Pali or Smriti the Sanskrit really mean to remember or memory recollection. They do not, in essence, refer to the act of focus or attention. Yet Kabat-Zinn firmly locate modern mindfulness in the present moment and this raises an interesting problem to which we shall return in a minute. So the second interesting element is non-judgmental. Kabat-Zinn said that modern mindfulness generates or produces a sense of non-judgmentality. He introduces this concept in order to create a buffer between the event in which we encounter and the habitual judgment that we form about those events. And he said modern mindfulness is essentially a practice that removes judgment from the experience. This is also very controversial and very difficult to align with traditional Buddhist concept because in traditional Buddhist concept judgment forms a key part of the individual's brutal training. The individual needs to judge what is virtuous and what is non-virtuous and then needs to embrace what is virtuous. The idea that mindfulness somehow has become non-judgmental as it travels down the centuries into modernity is a difficult quality to reconcile with the classical or ancient interpretations of mindfulness. Let us look at, let us introduce modern mindfulness. It goes back to 1979. It was founded by John Kabat-Zinn, who then introduced it or made it core to a mindfulness-based stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. It was designed to treat parent patients with physical or mental illness. And it grew over time into a center for mindfulness in medicine, healthcare and society at the University of Massachusetts again. 20 years past since the inception of modern mindfulness as a therapy in 1979 and the foundation of the center for mindfulness in medicine. It was achieved through a series of government grants, government grants that were aimed at the clinical application of mindfulness as a therapy. In order to secure those grants, Kabat-Zinn was very skillful in removing all Buddhist connotations from mindfulness. The ritual, the mythology, the religious practice were perceived to be a danger to the broadening popularity of mindfulness. So Buddhism was really extracted from mindfulness or mindfulness was extracted from Buddhism and was presented as a universal therapy that had very little bearing on religion or on Buddhism in particular. Kabat-Zinn then set out to train certified MBSR teachers, mindfulness-based reduction therapy teachers that became then active in over 30 countries. And he did this in order to secure the authenticity or the authority of his program. So he fairly rapidly moved on to a formal system of teaching, to a formal system of hearing that relied on lineage, on programs, on certification. The question then needs to be asked, what is mindfulness for? In Buddhism, the answer is very easy. It's one single answer. In Buddhism, mindfulness serves to achieve enlightenment, enlightenment which reduces suffering. So in Buddhism, mindfulness has a very clear religious, sociological purpose. Modern mindfulness in current society is much more varied in its application. It features in healthcare, it features in education, it features in the penal system, in the workplace and so forth. And many of these aspects were brought together in the Mindful Nation report that was produced in 2015 in the Houses of Parliament. Broadly speaking, in modern times mindfulness serves to prevent depression, to support well-being, to introduce resilience across the population. It serves in education to produce academic attainment. In mental health, it serves to achieve emotional regulation, to prevent depression again, to build character, perhaps even. So mindfulness has a very broad well-being health and attainment purpose in today's applications. The early areas of modern mindfulness practice were not quite as broad. When Kabir didn't set out in his practice, he really wanted to reduce physiological effects of stress, pain or illness. So he identified very concrete areas of the absence of well-being and so to mitigate them. He needed to do that in order to generate a set of criteria by which modern mindfulness could be assessed, could be judged for its effectiveness. A good amount of his early work centered on the experimental exploration of those experiences and how emotional reactivity to those experiences could be better managed or possibly altogether eliminated. So equanimity was introduced as an objective of mindfulness practice or equipoise, perhaps as a better term. He sought to introduce a buffer between an event in our life and our reaction to that event. And this was then believed to generate a sense of clarity, a sense of serenity where the emotion would no longer override or govern our experience of a particular event. This led to a series of emerging or in part new, a very well-known one formulated by Bishop in 2004 read the follows. Well, a kind of non-elaborative non-judgmental present-centered awareness in which each thought, feeling or sensation that arises in the attentional field acknowledged and accepted as it is. What do we have here? The key word is accepted as it is. So we have the emphasis on non-judgmental awareness that combat and over identifying with the experience that we undergo. It is non-elaborative, that is to say, it is an awareness that does not discursively seek to respond to the impulse. It aims to disengage from habitual compulsive patterns of reactivity that many of us experience in their life, of course, as a matter of routine. So once again, the notion of the creation of a space, a buffer or zone that somehow separates or isolates us from the experience that we undergo and thus sort of cuts through the tendency of reaction and interpretation and the emotional response to those events. The roots of modern mindfulness do not go back to Massachusetts. The roots of modern mindfulness go back to the vipassana movement of Southeast Asia. Here, the Burmese teachers of Lady Sayodo and Mahasi Sayodo were key contributors. They reformulated in many ways vipassana meditation in the middle of the 19th century and prepared the way for vipassana meditation to be adapted to a new set of parameters. Their teachings were carried over from Southeast Asia by American students like Jack Fawnfield, Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzburg and others. This happened a few years before Kabidzin developed or if you like invented modern mindfulness and Kabidzin did so really in continuation of the vipassana tradition that these teachers Goldstein and so forth had brought back from Southeast Asia. So there's a very close link between the vipassana movement of Southeast Asia in the 19th century. The encounter of those traditions by a small group of Americans who then brought vipassana to the West, to America, where Kabidzin encountered it and then modified some of the vipassana elements into modern mindfulness. So Kabidzin is part of a much broader transmission, if you like, reaching from the jungles of Burma to the West coast of America and the East coast afterwards. And much of that influence because it comes from Burma enters around the Theravada tradition that can be no doubt about. But in Kabidzin's case, his influence was not limited to the Theravada tradition of Burma. He too was influenced by other lineages within the Buddhist tradition, the Vietnamese tradition, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and then Buddhism. The most important influence on his early life was probably the Vietnamese linear shoulder in the Tien tradition, which has some commonality with Japanese then Buddhism. And Vietnam is, in Buddhist terms, one of the most interesting area of Southeast Asia because it brings together Mahayana Buddhism of East Asia of China and the Theravada tradition of Southeast Asia and if you look on the map you will see that Vietnam is really sitting on the cusp of those two traditions of those two areas. As a result, Tich Nhat Han adopted Theravada mindfulness exercises but gave them a Mahayana especially Zen interpretation. Tich Nhat Han in the tradition of mindfulness was probably one of the most important disseminator his book The Miracle of Mindfulness published in 1976 was one of the landmark events. But his work extended well beyond that he founded terms like engaged Buddhism. He was the first to use terms like interbeing or even mindfulness in a global context. And Kabidzin had studied Tich Nhat Han and he really read his works and became influenced by his thought. Even though most identify John Kabidzin as the founder of modern mindfulness, that is not entirely true because Tich Nhat Han was through his publications really one of the first person to identify mindfulness as a therapeutic tool. So here we have the master himself, John Kabidzin. Kabidzin was not a spiritual person by education by training he was a biologist, molecular biologist so he was firmly rooted in medicine. I think he studied with a number of meditation teachers, the health Korean teachers, Sang San was important, but he also studied with the Zen tradition and came himself a teacher in Zen Buddhism. He had a vision in 1979 as he was participating in a vipassana meditation retreat, organized by Cornfield, and as part of that vision he saw the potential of mindfulness as a stress reduction tool. And this led them to the foundation of the stress reduction clinic in Massachusetts. The scholarship to begin with focused mainly on insight vipassana, in particular on the vipassana influence on mindfulness. You can see very clearly the link between modern mindfulness on the one hand, and the vipassana tradition as it had been brought to the US by Cornfield in the in the early 1970s. So if we look at Kabidzin as a as a founder of modern mindfulness as a religious man, perhaps, we not only see the terravada tradition of vipassana, but we also see then there we see Tibetan Buddhism in the form of two game and we see the Vietnamese tradition of Vietnam. And some of this may seem like a footnote, an observation of not great importance but but it does matter in fact because it helps understand some of the features of modern mindfulness that would not be explainable through a terravada background alone. He describes his own practice in fact as a mix of Zen vipassana elements now even by Dzogchen and the MBSR method as vipassana practice with the Zen attitude. So, all elements are present in those definitions then vipassana terravada and Tibetan Dzogchen. He based all of his early teaching in the clinical setting. He focused on patients with chronic pain with AIDS with cancer, and the the aim always was to reduce suffering to reduce stress chronic stress at the result of those medical conditions, and while he understood as a man of science that mindfulness could not cure cancer, it provided in his view, an instrument a tool who deal with the suffering with the pain that sprang from those chronic physical conditions. He published his finding very eagerly. Many of these findings were published in scientific and medical journals. So he was very early on position mindfulness in the medical sector this was his environment this was where his upbringing had taken place. Now, in order to succeed in science and scientific work in order to succeed in a clinical environment. Whatever you propose needs to be easily replicable. It needs to lend itself to scientific study. So the eight week MBSR course that he developed was very formulaic in its conception. It was for formulaic in large matter so it could be replicable so it could be tested by medical scientific studies. He adopted his training course in other words to the environment within which he hoped to develop and in which he hoped to secure funding for it. His best selling book was full catastrophe living published in 1990 and that became somewhat of a Bible or modern mindfulness. The attitude towards Buddhism developed over the years initially he was firmly grounded in the scientific framework of his work. But then later on he came to search that mindfulness based stress reduction must be grounded in universal Dharma understanding that is congruent with the Buddha Dharma. In other words, he began to introduce Buddhist elements that will probably have shaped his very early ideas about mindfulness but that he then needed to withdraw from modern mindfulness in order to gain acceptance. And in his most recent publications he is quite quite open to acknowledge the significant impact of Buddhism on his thinking and the way it shaped many elements of modern mindfulness application. And therefore, people have now began studies on habits in and his exposure to Buddhism and it seems to be increasingly clear that his own mind Buddhism always played a role in in mindfulness. What does mindfulness based stress reduction look like it consists of a combination of formal practice on the one hand, and informal practices the formal practice consists of a body scan of mindful movement walking. or other movements. It involves fitting meditation where the individual observes the breath observes the body the sounds of the thought. And which is then called a choiceless awareness awareness that does not engage in choice or selecting loving kindness becoming increasingly integrated into mindfulness based stress reduction and that tells it's a very interesting addition because loving kindness as such as an emotive practice has really no role in the Buddhist context of mindfulness but loving kindness has a key role in vipassana or at least in modern vipassana. On which habits in ruin his early work so the inclusion of loving kindness is is probably the result of the influence of his early vipassana contacts in the in the mid 1970s. All practices about their bound in particular in the daily life about mindful eating mindful routines or watching the tease. Getting dressed. Having awareness to the daily experience and thought whatever it is, and help us analyze whether an event is pleasant or unpleasant, and then introduced a buffer to the emotional response to that experience. Normal practices often take place in group sessions. We have normally eight times two and a half hours plus a retreat day teachers and participants. We collaborate to interrogate each other. The teacher plays a very key role in those sessions and home practice usually is encouraged to last about 45 minutes a day. So we have an eight day training session of two and a half hours each day, followed or accompanied by teacher participants interaction. And then that is continued at home, be it at a reduced level. And these practices apply wherever you encounter mindfulness based stress reduction therapy. No matter whether you take a course in the US or you take a course in the UK or elsewhere, you will encounter a high degree of consistency in those practices. Mindfulness. Look off as a result of cupboards in success, significantly and here in front of this chart, you have a graph of the research studies per year between 1994 and 2015. It could be extended to 2021 with a similar trajectory. So you can see that in 1994 only a small number of studies have taken place that began to rocket really around 2004. 2004 was an important event because it marks the foundation of the Mind Life Institute. The Dalai Lama became interested in modern mindfulness Richard gear contributed. So, sometimes in the mid 2000s, a great deal of publicity was given to mindfulness, modern mindfulness, and the interest in research surrounding mindfulness as a result spiral. There are one other form of modern mindfulness that we need to examine and that is mindfulness based cognitive therapy. This is a type of mindfulness practice that involves elements of psychotherapy cognitive therapy. It is essentially designed to help participants to guard themselves against mood changes to deal with the recurrent depression. It was founded by seagull and Williams, as well as Steve Dale, who all come from the clinical domain of psycho therapy. Based mainly in the UK where we have the Oxford mindfulness center, which is the hub of all mindfulness based cognitive therapy in the UK. It was approved by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which meant that it could be prescribed to the NHS, but provision is very. And we seem to have lost Ulrich there with internet connection difficulties. But while we're waiting for him to get back online, if anybody has any sort of general questions about so I do feel free to enter those in the Q&A section. I'm also joined by Nahidah here as well. He's a current student. So if you have any questions for her about her experiences as a current student, do let us know. I'm the student ambassador. Don't be shy at all. Anything you want to ask. That's what I'm here for. Whether it be student life or just the general vibe that so as I can give you answers and I'll try and be as honest as possible. So don't be shy. How have you found your year this year of online learning, Nahidah? Well, it's been different. And because it's kind of like the first of its kind, it's hard to compare to anything. So from my experience, I'd say it's going well, but you never know. Each year we'll just get better and better. And hopefully, corona dies down a little bit. So we won't have to get to the point where it has to get better and better. But, you know, even 1% of progression is improved. Even 1% of improvement is still progression. But yeah, I think at the beginning of the year, everyone was struggling because we just weren't used to it. But especially where uni is like us, we're being very campus based, because you have unis like the open university who have obviously done it online. But I think so I just picked it up really well. And we've caught up because I haven't had that many issues, other than the slight technical issues on my part, like my wife, I will be down or something. So I think that's just a general worldwide issue. Other than that, you know, so it's been really good in terms of keeping up with the time. And perhaps it could you mention a little bit about sort of any extracurricular things that you do it so as any society. Actually, when I joined because of how the year was going to be, I knew it was going to be more I had, I had low expectations, I'll be honest of extracurricular societies because I just assumed most things will be, you know, when you're in person. But that was completely the opposite. I'm a part of quite a few societies. The first one, the first thing I joined was the spirit, which is kind of like our newspaper, our school newspaper, which is completely student run. And at first I was a bit confused. I was like how are we going to put together a whole paper from from our homes. I was very confused. But it was very innovative actually like we do it on Google Docs and well then the editors can edit on the Google Doc and it was actually very interesting. I've written two pieces so far for the newspaper, which was really interesting because I do want to go down the journey and then pass. And then I also am part of this peer mentoring scheme. So me and my mentor she's in, she's currently in year, the third year, and she does politics. And she, we will have like zoom sessions quite often just to, she checks up on me and she just asked me how I'm finding stuff and I remember I was when I was first assignment in turn it in. I was completely confused. I did not know what I was doing at all because I was, because I missed one of the buttons, it was just completely, I just did not see it. So I remember my mentor took control on my screen and she was like, I can literally see the button. I was like, Oh, I was like, Oh, no, she's like, No, that's fine. That's what I'm here for. I mean, feel at ease, because sometimes it's inevitable to feel a little bit intimidated by the staff and teachers us with any, anywhere, anywhere you go anyone knew you just feel a little bit intimidated. But it was nice to have a student body that was really engaging. So that really helped me in the beginning. And how do you sort of find the social community, I guess, it's the eggs. It's a bit tricky if you've not been on campus this year and not had that experience on campus this year but in general, what's the social community like for you. I'm like you said we haven't been on campus so I don't know how the campus community is in terms of social community in general. It's actually considering we're online it's actually quite. What's the word I'm looking for. There is a community that's why I'm trying to say, because we have WhatsApp groups for each of our subjects and then we have many WhatsApp groups that stem from there for our tutorials and then you'll hit it off with someone because we're going to break out rooms quite a lot, but it's something that you wouldn't really get if you were in like on campus you'd have to obviously you'd have to be more organic but this way it forces you to talk to people. And so people I've spoken to and I've actually become quite close to and I remember them saying, oh, if we were in real life and I probably wouldn't have spoken to you because I'm quite shy and I don't really like talking I was keep to myself because when the breakout room, I was forced to talk to you. So as a plus of being online, people are a little bit more confident maybe like behind the screen they they're in their place they can, you know, speak their own. Okay. Great. Thank you. So if anybody does have any any more questions for either of us please do please do let me know. I work in the student recruitment team so if you have any questions about missions or any other aspects of so as do you let us know in the Q&A. We are trying to get Eric back but it does look like he's having a new internet connection difficulties. And so, if we aren't able to get him back this evening, you can always contact Eric on his email address, which is up one at so ask dot AC dot UK so that's up and then the number one at so ask dot AC dot UK. So if you did want to ask him any questions about anything he's spoken about this evening or about the program, you can contact him that way. But as I said we are trying to get him back just for a short Q&A at the end of the session. So, bear with us just a couple of moments. But if you do have any other questions in the meantime do let us know. Perhaps you could talk a little about your contact hours and he's there and how many contact hours you have a week and sort of roughly how much study you do outside of your class time week. Well, because of the way we are online right now. So half of my, because I do a double I do a joint on this so I do development studies and politics. So half of them are reported and then half of them are live. So first I make sure I do my reading beforehand and I'm a slow reader. So I think you'll expect. It looks like you're back with us Rick. You may be on mute though at the moment. So what happened to the connection. I'm not too sure I'm not too sure what happened to the internet connection, but we're back now so that's good. When, when did you lose me. I lost you on the slide regarding. I'm not too, I'm not too sure but it was about it was about two minutes ago but we lost you. Okay, so it's not too bad and perhaps very good so I'm available for questions now. I don't see the Q amp a is yet where would that be. The Q amp a is on the on the bottom of this. Now he does just been talking a little on her experience of being a student at so asked as well in the meantime. At the moment I don't see any question. Doesn't look like we have any questions just yet from the participants this evening but if you do if you do come up with any questions do feel free to write them in the Q amp a box and whether they're related to all ricks talk this evening or more generally about the program in the structure of the program, or more generally about so as as well. Maybe, maybe in the interim I can say a few words about the program. The program, both really into components on the one hand we have a number of modules or courses that focus on very specific aspects of yoga and meditation one module is called the Buddhist. In addition, in India and Tibet and other one is called deals with the origins of yoga and its development in ancient India. So these are fairly closely prescribed modules on top of that as at all. So as you have the opportunity to select open modules, open modules in principle give you access to any masters course masters module that is being delivered at source and then the degree yoga meditation, a very popular combination or very popular choices open module would for example be learning Sanskrit or Tibetan or any other language that connects to your own interest in your meditation and picking up Sanskrit through this may will allow you to measure your own research much closer with the traditions of yoga and meditation in India and Tibet or possibly even beyond that is that is a very good opportunity to deepen your skills that you may want to develop as part of your study. The dissertation is the the the crowning production of your masters. It accounts for a third of your credits and it provides you with a unique opportunity to really develop and to engage with your topic of your personal interest in yoga meditation you could write for example the dissertation on modern mindfulness you could write the dissertation on the potentially yoga sutra you could explore specific aspects of Tibetan meditation, and we will provide you with the skills and the supervision to realize those dissertation plans and and if you if you succeed if they succeed at the very highest level as I said earlier you, they could lead to publications we had so far. We have three for public MA dissertation that were published in peer review journals and that then led to PhD work and and further studies. So the MA can both be a degree independent for its own benefit with its own value but it can also become a stepping stone in a much broader development of your studies and every year I have students who take up that opportunity. Thank you, it doesn't look like we have any questions but if anybody does. Oh, okay, we do have one from Miranda who's asked what is the difference in the ways mindfulness is practiced in Kabadzin style compared with the cognitive therapy style. Yes. Thank you, Miranda. It's a very, very good very important question the, the, the cognitive therapy aspect is much more focused on on depression. It does not really set out to engage with with physical stress physical pain and as a result, the form of mindfulness that is developed or promoted within the cognitive therapy is has a much stronger sort of mental or emotional focus, let's say, than than than the physical focus the, the principles that underlie cognitive therapy are very similar to the, if you want to the mainstream or regular mindfulness based reduction therapy but the, the, the, the, the objectives of focus is different and some aspects of the training as a result of the underlying principle is very similar it's a creation of a buffer between an event and the emotional reaction to that event mindfulness based stress reduction in his cognitive and non cognitive facility is really designed to sever that near automatic response that that most of us maybe all of us have events that that that we experience and by doing so it allows the patient or the participant to manage those experiences better. Okay, I think, I think that might be all of the, all of the questions that we have. Unless anybody has any last questions. If there's nothing coming through today then just let me, let me conclude by saying that I'm, of course, available for further inquiries further further questions outside this webinar. I have routinely office hours that are used to talk about the program with prospective students we can hold them in zoom we can hold them by email or hopefully before long they can take place again on campus although we're not quite there yet. Students come to mindfulness come to meditation to yoga with very individual very specific study aspirations and I'm most happy to talk you through those aspirations and find out with a source. It's the right place for you to realize those aspirations I have access to a number of students from the current pool. I'm most happy to to care with you their experience studying towards the program, either as part time students or full time students. My email address is probably available through the event today but you can simply Google me on my in my source email address will then pop up very early on in your search. Great. Thank you so much for it for really engaging presentation this evening. And thank you as well and he does for being here as well and thank you to all the attendees for coming along to the session. I hope it's been really useful and enjoy the rest of your evening. Thank you. Thank you.