This weekend I was away with a friend and we had an interesting discussion about the amount of free will that we are able to exercise in our day to day lives. My feeling is that we think we exercise far more free will than we actually do and that the main advantage of training…
I was teaching a compassion retreat last week with Choden for the cohort of students on our new Masters degree program. This program is in teaching mindfulness and compassion and we partner with the University of the West of Scotland to deliver it. During the retreat we were asked about the evidence base for compassionate…
In neuroscience the default mode network (DMN) is a network of widespread brain regions showing functional connectivity. It is active when we are not task focussed, such as when the mind is wandering. It is active when we are thinking about others, ourselves, remembering the past or planning for the future. It has been shown…
In my blog last week I introduced research into loving kindness meditation by exploring some systematic reviews and meta-analyses of the body of research evaluating loving kindness meditation interventions. Please refer to that blog as an introduction to this blog. In particular, it describes what loving kindness meditation is, how it differs from compassion meditation…
Loving kindness meditation practice is a big part of the curriculum of the Mindfulness Association’s courses. In our mindfulness courses we practice loving kindness for a dear friend and then loving kindness for a dear friend and ourselves. In our compassion courses we practice widening the circles of loving kindness, where we start with a…
In this new blog we will be looking at some of the science in psychology, biology and neuroscience around training the mind in mindfulness, compassion and insight. If you want to investigate further, links are provided at the end of the blogs to the cited literature. This blog is partly inspired by our work with…