Call for presenters/facilitators/attendees
Mindfulness and Mental Health Day - 1st November 2013, London Camden
Dr. Meg Barker will be running a free event on 1st November for practitioners and academics who are interested in mindfulness and mental health, to coincide with the publication of their new book on the subject. Please get in touch with Meg if you are interested in attending or getting involved (megbarker@gmail.com).
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Colleagues might be interested in the following event taking place on 5-8 Sept 2013
The August edition of Mindful Research Monthly on Mindful Experience is out now – round up of research on mindfulness.
The July edition of the mindful experience newsletter is out now. It includes a round up of the latest research publications relating to mindfulness and more.
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Stephen Stanley was recently asked to provide an introduction to a screening of the documentary ‘Happy‘ (trailer below). Here’s what he had to say…
Apparently a ‘turn to happiness’ – or perhaps a near-obsession with happiness – is happening across government, science, therapy and popular culture.
The general idea is that: the purpose of life is to be happy, we all want to be happy, and that to be happy, be need to do certain things. Furthermore, we have a right to be happy, and a moral obligation or duty to be happy, for ourselves and others. As one psychiatrist remarks, “Happy people seem to wish to force their condition on their unhappy companions and relatives” (Bentall, 1991, p. 94). If we fail to find happiness, we have failed in life.
This idea is historically recent. We have lost the connection with the Middle English word ‘happ’ which means chance, luck or fortune. The idea that happiness is what happens to us, and is beyond our control, goes against the grain of contemporary understanding.
This ‘turn to happiness’ has taken place across at least three domains.
There’s a new post by Meg on how we relate to depression and conflict over on Rewriting the Rules. It includes a lot about compassionate mindful relating to ourselves and others.
There’s a new post by Meg about mindfulness and happiness over on the Rewriting-the-Rules blog.
The May edition of the mindful experience newsletter is out now. It includes a round up of the latest research publications relating to mindfulness and more.
Here’s a link to a great introductory post by Thich Nhat Hanh about 5 steps towards being mindful.
1. Mindful breathing
2. Concentration
3. Awareness of the body
4. Releasing tension
5. Walking meditation
Joanna Blake writes on Intuitive Inquiry:
Intuitive inquiry was introduced by Rosemarie Anderson (1998) to study transformative experiences. Anderson (2004) states ―intuitive inquiry is an epistemology of the heart that joins intuition to intellectual precision in a hermeneutical process of interpretation. Intuitive inquiry has been informed by feminist theory, heuristic inquiry, hermeneutics, phenomenology, and Gendlin’s Focusing and thinking beyond patterns.
It is a method that invites the exploration of complex experiences in an intersubjective state between researcher and that which is studied. It is a method that encourages creative work in a flexible process of scholarly cycling of literature with data collected. In addition, intuitive inquiry allows complexity to exist, and its depths to be plumbed without reducing the experiences studied to sectional analyses. However, the constant cycling from the expansive to the particular and vice versa is not for the faint of heart or thought! Intellectual discernment, along with intuition, is at the heart of doing intuitive inquiry well.
Intuitive inquiry contains five cycles, two in the forward arc in which the topic is honed and initial lenses are developed, and three cycles on the return arc in which the data collected is summarized. Lenses are developed through intuitive engagement with and intellectual discernment of the study‘s data, and, finally, these are integrated with the literature review. Intuitive inquiry is found to be a unique postmodern method useful in the study of western patriarchal history, as it is situated outside the traditional cultural framework.
References
Anderson, R. (1998). Intuitive inquiry: A transpersonal approach. In W. Braud & R. Anderson, Transpersonal research methods for the social sciences: Honoring human experience (pp. 69-94). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Anderson, R. (2004). An epistemology of the heart for scientific inquiry. The Humanistic Psychologist, 32(4), 307-341.
Phelon, C. R. (2004). Healing presence in the psycho-therapist: An intuitive inquiry. The Humanistic Psychologist32(4), 342-356.
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