Marion Institute Program Platform

Theme: "As long as you're breathing, there is more right with you than wrong with you." -- Jon Kabat-Zinn. Here you will receive an overview of the course and establish the learning context for the rest of your experience. You will learn the theory and evidence of mind-body medicine and how to apply it in your life. You'll be experientially introduced to mindful eating, anchoring awareness, and the body-scan method, with a special emphasis on what it means to be fully engaged in the present moment.

Theme: The role of perception. Perception is key in mindfulness—how you see things (or don't see them) will determine in a large part how you respond. This week's session and practices will ask you to examine your perceptions, assumptions, and the way you view the world. You will learn to use the body-scan practice to cultivate a greater degree of awareness of how you react to stressful situations. Changing the way you perceive and respond to difficulties and challenges will impact the short-and long-term effects of stress on your mind and body. The practice of the body scan and mindful movement continues.

Theme: There is power and pleasure in being present. In this session, you'll practice several distinct yet interrelated mindfulness practices—mindful lying-down yoga (with chair adaptations for those for whom lying down on the floor is not accessible), sitting meditation, and (if time) walking meditation. Daily practice with the recordings has been going on for two weeks, and there is time to ask questions, share learning and discoveries, and talk about how it is to make time for this new habit–including the challenges of doing that. You will discover that there is both pleasure and power in being present—you'll directly attend to and investigate how your experiences create such reactions as pleasure or discomfort in the mind and body. Another theme for Class 3 is exploring “pleasant experiences,” and how these are received in one’s thoughts, emotions and sensations.

Theme: Bringing awareness to the patterns of automatic, habitual stress reactivity. By practicing mindfulness, we cultivate curiosity and openness to the full range of our experience, and through this process our ability to pay attention becomes more flexible. After three weeks of daily mindfulness practice, participants often report a greater awareness of all experiences: pleasant, unpleasant and everything in between. Curiosity and openness are being cultivated through practice, which begins to show up not just in meditation–but also in ordinary moments of life. You'll learn about the physiological and psychological bases of stress reactivity (fight, flight, or freeze), and experience mindful strategies for responding in positive, proactive ways to stressful situations.

Theme: How mindfulness interrupts the stress cycle. At the halfway point in this course, you should now be familiar with the foundations of mindfulness and able to focus on applying it more rapidly and effectively to specific challenges and stressors in your life. This week you will begin to pay attention to the places where you might be stuck in repeating unhealthy patterns that you can disarm through mindful awareness. You will also learn how to apply mindfulness at the critical moment when you experience a physical sensation, intense emotion, or condition, with special attention to exploring the effect of reactivity in health and illness.

Theme: Mindfulness and communication. Resilience or “stress hardiness” is our ability to return to equilibrium after stressful situations. This week, you will focus on transformational coping strategies to broaden your inner resources and enhance your resilience through mindfulness practice. You'll also learn the fundamentals of interpersonal mindfulness—applying awareness and presence at times when communication becomes difficult or fraught with strong emotions. You'll gain direct experience of a variety of styles for more effective and creative interpersonal communication.

This day-long guided retreat will take place between weeks six and seven. The intensive nature of this six-hour-plus session—held mostly in silence with skillful guidance by your instructor—is intended to assist you in firmly and effectively establishing the use of MBSR skills across multiple situations in your life, while simultaneously preparing you to utilize these methods far beyond the conclusion of the program. You will be led through the mindfulness practices learned thus far in the course, along with a few new options. This day offers an opportunity to see your life closely and freshly, through the lens of practice and the qualities that come along with it, including kindness, curiosity and interest, self-sovereignty, and choice. Without the usual demands and distractions, possibilities, insights, and new perceptions may arise.

Theme: Mindfulness in daily life. Mindfulness is most effective when it becomes a lifelong commitment. This week, you will explore the many ways that you can integrate mindfulness more fully and personally into your life. While having a dedicated regular practice for mindfulness meditation is important and beneficial, it is just as important to bring a broader sense of awareness and presence to every moment in your life, and to use non-judgmental mindfulness in your self-reflection and decision-making processes. You'll learn how to maintain the discipline and flexibility of daily practice as circumstances change over the course of your life. Along with the establishment of a regular, daily mindfulness practice, the class explores how to bring mindfulness “off the cushion” and into your life as an ongoing “habit,” of mind, body and heart. The prior weeks of practice have offered a new perspective on how to care for yourself, how to meet moments of stress and challenge, and how to savor moments of joy and peace.

Theme: The rest of your life... In the final week of the program, we come full circle. You will have a complete review of everything you've learned over the course, with an emphasis on carrying the momentum you've built forward into the coming months and years. You'll learn about resources available to you to pursue mindfulness in new directions as your life and practice evolve, as well as the support systems that exist to help you continue to integrate, learn, and grow. While acknowledging the program’s end, we also celebrate how each person will carry the practice forward in the unique and supportive ways they choose. The final class is on hour longer.