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Mindfulness and the Brain: A Professional Training in the Science and Practice of Meditative Awareness
The Buddha Meets Neurobiology in the Science of Heightened Awareness
Mindful awareness creates scientifically recognized enhancements in our mental functions and interpersonal relationships. But how can we integrate this information into our personal or professional lives?
In the Mindfulness and the Brain audio learning course, Jack Kornfield, PhD, and Daniel Siegel, MD, offer theoretical and experiential teachings on the power of inner transformation and the cultivation of a wise and loving heart.
Whether you’re a therapist, healer, educator, parent, meditation practitioner―or anyone interested in developing a healthy mind―this training offers a practical exploration of what it means for our world and us to be able to nurture and sustain heightened awareness
Course
Summarize basic concepts of neurobiology and neuroplasticity
• Explain the difference between the concept of mind and the brain
• Summarize the Buddhist model of mental health
• Compare awareness with mental activity
• Discuss how mindfulness practices can change the brain
• Practice mindfulness meditation exercises
• Evaluate the practical relevance of these insights on the individual and on the world as a whole
An Integration of Head and Heart
In this training, you’ll discover how mindful practice helps reduce suffering and promote resilience; the "resonance circuit" that enables an individual to attune to oneself and others; and how intrapersonal attunement can catalyze mental, interpersonal, and psychological well-being. /p>
From scientific findings and down-to-earth Buddhist perspectives to memorable anecdotes and real-life stories that illustrate key concepts, Mindfulness and the Brain invites you to discover a more integrated and connected way of knowing and developing a wise and loving heart.
Course Highlights
Clinical findings on the transformative power of interpersonal neurobiology
• The structure of the mind and how understanding consciousness can lead to freedom
• Neural integration and how it helps create more balanced lives
• How to incorporate compassion and forgiveness into our personal and professional life
• More than six hours of essential teachings and tools for cultivating healthy change in ourselves and others
Mindful awareness creates scientifically recognized enhancements in our mental functions and interpersonal relationships. But how can we integrate this information into our personal or professional lives?
In the Mindfulness and the Brain audio learning course, Jack Kornfield, PhD, and Daniel Siegel, MD, offer theoretical and experiential teachings on the power of inner transformation and the cultivation of a wise and loving heart.
Whether you’re a therapist, healer, educator, parent, meditation practitioner―or anyone interested in developing a healthy mind―this training offers a practical exploration of what it means for our world and us to be able to nurture and sustain heightened awareness
Course
Summarize basic concepts of neurobiology and neuroplasticity
• Explain the difference between the concept of mind and the brain
• Summarize the Buddhist model of mental health
• Compare awareness with mental activity
• Discuss how mindfulness practices can change the brain
• Practice mindfulness meditation exercises
• Evaluate the practical relevance of these insights on the individual and on the world as a whole
An Integration of Head and Heart
In this training, you’ll discover how mindful practice helps reduce suffering and promote resilience; the "resonance circuit" that enables an individual to attune to oneself and others; and how intrapersonal attunement can catalyze mental, interpersonal, and psychological well-being. /p>
From scientific findings and down-to-earth Buddhist perspectives to memorable anecdotes and real-life stories that illustrate key concepts, Mindfulness and the Brain invites you to discover a more integrated and connected way of knowing and developing a wise and loving heart.
Course Highlights
Clinical findings on the transformative power of interpersonal neurobiology
• The structure of the mind and how understanding consciousness can lead to freedom
• Neural integration and how it helps create more balanced lives
• How to incorporate compassion and forgiveness into our personal and professional life
• More than six hours of essential teachings and tools for cultivating healthy change in ourselves and others
6 pages, Audio CD
First published April 28, 2010
14 people are currently reading
318 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
August 21, 2013
UPDATED REVIEW: My experience with this has changed, from 4-Stars with a tepid review, to 5-STARS and a RARING Review. What changed? Obviously I did...
Take Jack Kornfield, a Stream-Winner, Insight Attainee, who then went on to become a Clinical Psychologist, then on to start and run two of the biggest, influential Buddhist Dharma & Meditation Centers in the US, and with the foremost leader of Neuronal-plasticity, and you get a very interesting Seminar.
One Reviewer called is "A nice "introduction, for those unfamiliar with Mindfulness..." or something close to that. That Review is Absurd!
There is profound depth and breadth in the 6.5 hour Audio/Seminar version that I have and LOVE! I am far from an expert, but I did study Physiology and Psychology for eight years at University, with my main interest being neurophysiology and the interface with psychology, until I departed that trajectory to study, practice, live, teach Buddhism, over 16 years ago, so I love this stuff! I would probably be doing something like Dr Siegel if I hadn't found the Direct Experience of Meditation far more meaningful, but I appreciate both, and this, of all the books I've read in this field of Mindfulness Meditation mixes with Neuronal-Plasticity, to be the best, because it brings you into the experience, makes you try these practices and get a first-hand taste of what kind of impact Mindfulness and Equanimity can have on one's Direct Experience.
It's intended for Professionals in the field of Psychology Counselors, MBSR, and related fields.
It obviously cannot be comprehensive to either neurophysiology and anatomy, nor to Buddhism, Mindfulness, meditation, and the infinite applications, but it does provide REAL, PRACTICAL, EXPERIENTIAL understanding and learning.
It takes on too much.
That said, with obvious limitations, it is a OUTSTANDING resource and a Must-Read for anyone in MBSR or Mindfulness-Based Therapy, or How Mindfulness Influences the Mind, What is Consciousness, and how it all applies to Neurology, Neuronal-plasticity and Therapeutic applications.
Take Jack Kornfield, a Stream-Winner, Insight Attainee, who then went on to become a Clinical Psychologist, then on to start and run two of the biggest, influential Buddhist Dharma & Meditation Centers in the US, and with the foremost leader of Neuronal-plasticity, and you get a very interesting Seminar.
One Reviewer called is "A nice "introduction, for those unfamiliar with Mindfulness..." or something close to that. That Review is Absurd!
There is profound depth and breadth in the 6.5 hour Audio/Seminar version that I have and LOVE! I am far from an expert, but I did study Physiology and Psychology for eight years at University, with my main interest being neurophysiology and the interface with psychology, until I departed that trajectory to study, practice, live, teach Buddhism, over 16 years ago, so I love this stuff! I would probably be doing something like Dr Siegel if I hadn't found the Direct Experience of Meditation far more meaningful, but I appreciate both, and this, of all the books I've read in this field of Mindfulness Meditation mixes with Neuronal-Plasticity, to be the best, because it brings you into the experience, makes you try these practices and get a first-hand taste of what kind of impact Mindfulness and Equanimity can have on one's Direct Experience.
It's intended for Professionals in the field of Psychology Counselors, MBSR, and related fields.
It obviously cannot be comprehensive to either neurophysiology and anatomy, nor to Buddhism, Mindfulness, meditation, and the infinite applications, but it does provide REAL, PRACTICAL, EXPERIENTIAL understanding and learning.
It takes on too much.
That said, with obvious limitations, it is a OUTSTANDING resource and a Must-Read for anyone in MBSR or Mindfulness-Based Therapy, or How Mindfulness Influences the Mind, What is Consciousness, and how it all applies to Neurology, Neuronal-plasticity and Therapeutic applications.
April 2, 2014
These lessons came at the perfect time.
December 7, 2014
Shift of Identity
Step beyond biography.
Who could you be, who are you if you don’t have that belief about yourself, if that trauma doesn’t define you.
This capacity for a shift of identity seems to be absolutely central to our capacity for awareness, both in the biographical sense that we are not limited by our biography, but in the deepest Buddhist sense of self and no self, that there all these constructed identities and they are useful and tentative – you need them – but that is not who you really are, it’s only a part of it.
Interpersonal neuro-biology
Inter-personal neuro-biology’s main theme is integration.
Once you can make sense of a loss, you know what it is you’re letting go of.
Eudamonia – happiness you feel when you feel a sense of connection to yourself and others. When you feel a sense of meaning in your life, when you have equanimity. That’s a big contrast to hedonia – which is let’s have a thrill, let’s have fun, let’s go quick….
Mindfulness practice for 6 weeks, staying present for the pain of difficulties in our lives. If you withdraw from a challenging news you heard, challenging situation you’re in, you will create suffering by withdrawing.
Suffering is creating by withdrawing from things we’re challenged by. Life is full of pain, but suffering is created by clinging on to expectations or withdrawal that’s a natural reflex.
How can I learn skills to focus my mind to integrate my brain and my relationships – that’s the whole interpersonal biology approach.
No one can harm you worse than your own mind misunderstood or unwise. And no one can help you as much, not the most loving friend or parent, as your own mind well-trained. With the mind to observe the mind.
What we can’t love in ourselves, prevents us from loving another.
Buddhist definition of mental health is the capacity to change from the unhealthy mental states (anger, greed, jealousy, addiction) to healthy ones (love, clarity, kindness, gratitude). Shift the inner landscape to healthy states.
Cause of suffering is clinging and fear.
Neuro-plasticity and integration
Neural firing leads to neuro-plasticity. You get neurons to fire by focusing your attention. Awareness harnesses the power of neuro-plasticity in general and in specific circuits.
Whenever someone comes to me and says they are depressed, I take out my prescription pad and prescribe: Voluntary aerobic exercise (you have to choose to do it) 5-6 times a week, work up to 40min a day. And way over half the people get better. Depression inhibits neuro-plasticity. The brain is stuck being what it is. We a built to continually learn, create, emerge, and when the brain doesn’t do that, it’s literally depressing. We also have to get enough sleep and eat well.
Where you focus your attention activates the neurons in those particular circuits that correlate with that activity.
Focused, careful, massed concentration like in meditation activates the nucleus-basalis – massed means 20 hours of practice, better to do them in one week than spread them over 2 years, if you’re gonna be in psychotherapy, maybe you should go twice a week, rather than once a week for a year – neurons fire and wire.
Reflective practice – mindfulness practice – can focus attention on particular areas.
When you create an integrated set of firing patterns in the brain, you are creating the neural equivalent of infinite potential.
Neural integration is a foundation for mental health. Neural integration is defined as the linkage of differentiated parts of the nervous system.
When integration is present, you have harmony and coherence, if not, you get rigidity or chaos.
You see what domains of a person’s life have rigidity or chaos or a combination of the two dominating them, you then focus your awareness on aspects of those domains, to see where differentiation does not occur, promoting differentiation and promoting linkage. What it entails is to focus awareness and focus on neural circuits that have either not been working well together (linkage) or they haven’t been differentiated first, and then allowed to link (blocked integration). The reason mindful awareness helps across different areas is because mindful awareness is the first domain of integration.
You can focus your attention to change brain function. Instead of being a passive rider along the journey of your nervous system, you can use your mind to change the function and the structure of your brain.
Mind sight – the capacity to track energy and information flow, the capacity to know yourself and know others, their inner worlds
Name it to tame it. When you name the internal world you can calm yourself down. Mindfulness states are created by an intentional focus of attention to create awareness of awareness, attention to attention, and mindful awareness. With practice a state becomes a trait.
Traits:
1. Capacity to be non-judgmental – you may make judgments but you don’t take them too seriously.
2. Equanimity – non-reactive – the ability to have an emotional response, but then come back to equilibrium relatively quickly
3. Active-aware – being aware of what you’re doing as you’re doing it
4. Label and describe the internal world
5. Ability for self-observation
The Science of Compassion
The human brain has evolved to determine who is in your in-group and your out-group. And when you’re under threat, these circuits of the brain that determine in-group out-group status are heightened, and the people in the out-group are treated with more hostility, and the people in the in-group are treated with more kindness.
Love is not enough. There is a second kind of compassion that you do not get from the love of your parents. Universal or extended compassion you only get by mental training that allows you to even love your enemy.
We need to build a mental training component into our basic education to allow people to experience a loving-kindness training that allows us to develop a much wider extended form of compassion.
The open possibility of choice and change which is what consciousness gives you, gives you the possibility to rise above your inherited evolutionarily-beneficial fight-flight-freeze responses and the fight that gets you to push away people not like you especially when you’re under threat.
Dalai Lama: We in the religions have failed to make this a more compassionate world. You in science must find a secular ethic to guide this world to become a more compassionate place. The ethic of health.
Step beyond biography.
Who could you be, who are you if you don’t have that belief about yourself, if that trauma doesn’t define you.
This capacity for a shift of identity seems to be absolutely central to our capacity for awareness, both in the biographical sense that we are not limited by our biography, but in the deepest Buddhist sense of self and no self, that there all these constructed identities and they are useful and tentative – you need them – but that is not who you really are, it’s only a part of it.
Interpersonal neuro-biology
Inter-personal neuro-biology’s main theme is integration.
Once you can make sense of a loss, you know what it is you’re letting go of.
Eudamonia – happiness you feel when you feel a sense of connection to yourself and others. When you feel a sense of meaning in your life, when you have equanimity. That’s a big contrast to hedonia – which is let’s have a thrill, let’s have fun, let’s go quick….
Mindfulness practice for 6 weeks, staying present for the pain of difficulties in our lives. If you withdraw from a challenging news you heard, challenging situation you’re in, you will create suffering by withdrawing.
Suffering is creating by withdrawing from things we’re challenged by. Life is full of pain, but suffering is created by clinging on to expectations or withdrawal that’s a natural reflex.
How can I learn skills to focus my mind to integrate my brain and my relationships – that’s the whole interpersonal biology approach.
No one can harm you worse than your own mind misunderstood or unwise. And no one can help you as much, not the most loving friend or parent, as your own mind well-trained. With the mind to observe the mind.
What we can’t love in ourselves, prevents us from loving another.
Buddhist definition of mental health is the capacity to change from the unhealthy mental states (anger, greed, jealousy, addiction) to healthy ones (love, clarity, kindness, gratitude). Shift the inner landscape to healthy states.
Cause of suffering is clinging and fear.
Neuro-plasticity and integration
Neural firing leads to neuro-plasticity. You get neurons to fire by focusing your attention. Awareness harnesses the power of neuro-plasticity in general and in specific circuits.
Whenever someone comes to me and says they are depressed, I take out my prescription pad and prescribe: Voluntary aerobic exercise (you have to choose to do it) 5-6 times a week, work up to 40min a day. And way over half the people get better. Depression inhibits neuro-plasticity. The brain is stuck being what it is. We a built to continually learn, create, emerge, and when the brain doesn’t do that, it’s literally depressing. We also have to get enough sleep and eat well.
Where you focus your attention activates the neurons in those particular circuits that correlate with that activity.
Focused, careful, massed concentration like in meditation activates the nucleus-basalis – massed means 20 hours of practice, better to do them in one week than spread them over 2 years, if you’re gonna be in psychotherapy, maybe you should go twice a week, rather than once a week for a year – neurons fire and wire.
Reflective practice – mindfulness practice – can focus attention on particular areas.
When you create an integrated set of firing patterns in the brain, you are creating the neural equivalent of infinite potential.
Neural integration is a foundation for mental health. Neural integration is defined as the linkage of differentiated parts of the nervous system.
When integration is present, you have harmony and coherence, if not, you get rigidity or chaos.
You see what domains of a person’s life have rigidity or chaos or a combination of the two dominating them, you then focus your awareness on aspects of those domains, to see where differentiation does not occur, promoting differentiation and promoting linkage. What it entails is to focus awareness and focus on neural circuits that have either not been working well together (linkage) or they haven’t been differentiated first, and then allowed to link (blocked integration). The reason mindful awareness helps across different areas is because mindful awareness is the first domain of integration.
You can focus your attention to change brain function. Instead of being a passive rider along the journey of your nervous system, you can use your mind to change the function and the structure of your brain.
Mind sight – the capacity to track energy and information flow, the capacity to know yourself and know others, their inner worlds
Name it to tame it. When you name the internal world you can calm yourself down. Mindfulness states are created by an intentional focus of attention to create awareness of awareness, attention to attention, and mindful awareness. With practice a state becomes a trait.
Traits:
1. Capacity to be non-judgmental – you may make judgments but you don’t take them too seriously.
2. Equanimity – non-reactive – the ability to have an emotional response, but then come back to equilibrium relatively quickly
3. Active-aware – being aware of what you’re doing as you’re doing it
4. Label and describe the internal world
5. Ability for self-observation
The Science of Compassion
The human brain has evolved to determine who is in your in-group and your out-group. And when you’re under threat, these circuits of the brain that determine in-group out-group status are heightened, and the people in the out-group are treated with more hostility, and the people in the in-group are treated with more kindness.
Love is not enough. There is a second kind of compassion that you do not get from the love of your parents. Universal or extended compassion you only get by mental training that allows you to even love your enemy.
We need to build a mental training component into our basic education to allow people to experience a loving-kindness training that allows us to develop a much wider extended form of compassion.
The open possibility of choice and change which is what consciousness gives you, gives you the possibility to rise above your inherited evolutionarily-beneficial fight-flight-freeze responses and the fight that gets you to push away people not like you especially when you’re under threat.
Dalai Lama: We in the religions have failed to make this a more compassionate world. You in science must find a secular ethic to guide this world to become a more compassionate place. The ethic of health.
March 9, 2020
I loved listening to this audiobook - and I'll continue to listen to it as I head to and from work in the car. It's so exciting to have two people from such different backgrounds come to a mutual understanding as regards the benefits of mindful practice. There are many explanations of complex mechanisms that happen in the brain but I really don't think this should be off-putting. You definitely do not need expert knowledge to take from this the essence of what is being said. Fantastic and so beautiful to listen to.
May 17, 2020
This recording of a seminar was so interesting, and the authors so engaging, with so much information and humor. The things they are discovering about the brain and how it matches so closely with many Buddhist practices is amazing, especially when they didn't have the technology or research that we have today.
November 11, 2024
This audio was a series of lectures by two men and includes meditations. The voices of the two men are indistinguishable. It's all very new-age stuff. Reincarnation is part of the belief, the Dalai Lama, and buddhism.
July 14, 2018
Meaningful anecdotes, beautifully woven wisdom, timeless spiritual truths and neuroscience discoveries presented by respected experts. Thank you.
August 24, 2019
Great mediations to return to
April 27, 2020
An incredible look at how mindfulness affects the brain, but also how pain, compassion, anger, empathy, etc. affects the brain. Very instructive and completely accessible.
September 3, 2022
Encouraging ways to continue caring for your brain,
April 6, 2013
Positively fascinating. I saw Dr. Siegel at a special education conference in Monterey this past winter and was very much taken with and inspired by his studies. Hearing him again was amazing - his voice is very soothing, he is very funny as well as intelligent. I have just purchased Kornfield's book, Buddhist Psychology, as a result of how much I enjoyed this collaborative work.
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December 3, 2015The philosophy & the science behind how Meditation heals the brain from a miss-spent youth or PTSD.
I did an audio book with several meditation lessons demonstrated rather than just explained.
Enjoyed the whole thing tremendously.
I did an audio book with several meditation lessons demonstrated rather than just explained.
Enjoyed the whole thing tremendously.
December 2, 2011
A great combination of science and Buddhist practice. I loved it!
January 24, 2013
A great introduction for those who don't know much about mindfulness and/or the brain.
October 4, 2015
Hoping for more science, more how this works.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews