Consider Taking a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course

I just finished my home-practice for the John Kabat-Zinn, PhD-inspired 10 session course MBSR [Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction], I’m taking with world-class expert, Jeff Brantley, MD  over @ Duke Integrative Medicine. We’re in the 7th week, with a day-long meditation coming this Saturday.  My professional interest is in the solid & impressive scientific research on participants’ mind /body outcomes — I’ve long been interested in the major overlaps/similarities between the altered states of consciousness we call “clinical hypnosis” & “meditation”. And a fine teacher of mine, Michael Yapko, PhD, in Caiif. published this year what he told me will be his last  book – Mindfulness & Hypnosis: the power of suggestion to transform experience —about how guided Mindfulness meditation & guided [as opposed to self-] hypnosis have such commonalities [& differences] that meditation teachers & practitioners would benefit greatly from the good science that’s been done over many decades on hypnosis & suggestion.  Meditation folks, like most other folks, seem to me usually rejecting hypnosis practice & research, w/o really knowing anything at all about what clinical hypnosis actually is.

My personal interests in the course are the same as what i think calls most/?all psychotherapists to becoming therapists — dealing better w/ the conflicts, discomforts & interferences leftover from the interaction between our genetic potentials & our formative family experiences.  There’ve been enough positive developments from that course in my inner life & it’s outer expression, especially in up-time experiences of frustration & anger, that I’m recommending highly clients & therapists take an MBSR course themselves, when the time is right.

Michael Yapko has suggested that if/when follow-up studies of daily self-hypnosis practitioners were done [there are none he know of], brain changes & psychological benefits similar to those reported for MBSR participants & daily, long term, self-guided mindfulness meditators/monks would likely be found in the daily self- hypnosis group.  Doing such research w/ self-hypnosis would be quite challenging for many reasons.  And I think many more folks practice daily mindfulness meditation than daily self- hypnosis, partly because the historical context/reputation of mindfulness is so much more appealing than that of [much-misunderstood] hypnosis — people likely identify way-more with being “spiritual”, like the Dali Lama, than with being “wierd/dangerous”, like Dracula, Svengali & stage hypnotists.

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