"Positive psychology, the science of well-being and strengths, is the fastest growing branch of psychology, offering an optimal home for the research and application of mindfulness."

"Positive psychology has integrated, more or less clearly, contemplative practices such as mindfulness within the range of grounded and empowering techniques of the positive aspects of being human."

"People have in their repertoires thousands of 'scripts' for talk or behavior that they act out when they are cued by something familiar. The array of behavior people can carry out without thinking is enormous."

--Philip J. Hilts, "Scientist at Work: Ellen J. Langer; A Scholar of the Absent Mind," New York Times, Sept. 23, 1997

"Broadly conceptualized, mindfulness has been described as a kind of nonelaborative, nonjudgmental, present-centered awareness in which each thought, feeling, or sensation that arises in the attentional field is acknowledged and accepted as it is . . . . In a state of mindfulness, thoughts and feelings are observed as events in the mind, without over-identifying with them and without reacting to them in an automatic, habitual pattern of reactivity. This dispassionate state of self-observation is thought to introduce a 'space' between one's perception and response. Thus mindfulness is thought to enable one to respond to situations more reflectively (as opposed to reflexively)."

--Scott R. Bishop, et.al., Mindfulness: A Proposed Operational Definition, 11 (3) Clinical Psychological: Science & Practice 231, 231 (2004)

Readings

Class Viewing 1: Let's Talk about Mindfulness: An Interview [11:21 mins.] [Ellen Langer] [2014] [commentary on "well-being" (a general state of engagement)] [end class presentation at 6:32 mins.] [Ellen Langer is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and the author of Mindfulness (1990), The Power of Mindful Learning (1998), and On Becoming an Artist (2006)]

Class Viewing 2: Mindfulness over Matter [22:20 mins.] [2013] [end in-class presentation at 11:30 mins.] [Ellen Langer]

Class Viewing 3: Why Mindfulness Is the New Superpower [3:21 mins.] [Dan Harris]

Class Viewing 4: Stopping the World [9:29 mins.] [Gary Starnes] [Gerry Starnes is an Austin, Texas shamanic practitioner and teacher] [Starnes comments on internal dialog, the incessant internal chatter that most people experience] [class presentation begins at 1:06 mins, ends at 6:28 mins.]

Class Viewing 5: This Will Also Pass: An Interview with a Mindfulness Teacher [21:18 mins.] [Andries J Kroese, professor of vascular surgery and mindfulness teacher] [end presentation at 9:00 mins. (for a shorter presentation end at 5:48 mins.)] [Kroese is pronounced "Crow-sche"]

Class Viewing 6: Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction with Heidi Walk [29:32 mins.] [class presentation begins at 5:21 mins., ends at 10:18 mins.] [Heidi Walk is a Toronto-based physician psychotherapist and certified yoga instructor] [Heidi Walk outlines Jon Kabat-Zinn's approach to mindfulness as the practice of paying attention, on purpose, in the present, in a non-judgmentnal way; focus on stress]

Class Viewing 7: Len Riskin Talks about His Approach to Mindfulness Meditation [9:41 mins.] [class presentation runs from beginning of video to 3:16 mins., and resumes at 5:11 mins.] [reference to stress and how we respond to stress]

Class Viewing 8: FloridaBarNews.TV Update: The Mindful Lawyer [1:25 mins.]

Class Viewing 9: Dan Harris: How I Went from Skeptic to Meditator [7:00 mins.] [Harris turns to meditation was prompted by a panic attack]

Alternative Class Viewing

10% Happier: Mindfulness Applications at Work
[33:27 mins.] [Dan Harris, ABC News]

Supplemental Notes (Ellen Langer)

Ellen Langer Harvard Business Review Interview, "Mindfulness in the Age of Complexity," adapted from March, 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review:

--"Mindfulness is the process of actively noticing new things. When you do that, it puts you in the present. It makes you more sensitive to context and perspective. It's the essence of engagement."

--"We did a study with symphony musicians, who, it turns out, are bored to death. They're playing the same pieces over and over again, and yet it's a high-status job that they can't easily walk away from. So we had groups of them perform. Some were told to replicate a previous performance they'd liked--that is, to play pretty mindlessly. Others were told to make their individual performance new in subtle ways--to play mindfully. Remember: This wasn't jazz, so the changes were very subtle indeed. But when we played recordings of the symphonies for people who knew nothing about the study, they overwhelmingly preferred the mindfully played pieces. So here we had a group performance where everybody was doing their own thing, and it was better. There's this view that if you let everyone do their own thing, chaos will reign. When people are doing their own thing in a rebellious way, yes, it might. But if everyone is working in the same context and is fully present, there's no reason why you shouldn't get a superior coordinated performance."

--"I've been studying [mindfulness and mindlessness] for nearly 40 years . . . [W]e find that mindfulness generates a more positive result. That makes sense when you realize it's a superordinate variable. No matter what you're doing--eating a sandwich, doing an interview, working on some gizmo, writing a report--you're doing it mindfully or mindlessly. When it's the former, it leaves an imprint on what you do."

Art Kleiner, "Ellen Langer on the Value of Mindfulness in Business," Strategy + Business (Issue 78), February 9, 2015:

--"People assume they should act one way at work and another way at home. But that type of work-life balance is mindless. Sure, it's better than work-life imbalance. But better still is work-life integration. People should be the same person wherever they are, bringing the same talents to bear at home and work."

--"[S]tress is a result of mindlessness. It's a result of a thought that something bad is going to happen. You can examine that thought. You can give yourself five reasons why this awful event might not occur. That immediately reduces the stress. Or you can explore the advantages it might bring along with the problems. If you continue to be mindful about your own thoughts, and direct them this way, it is possible to live a virtually stress-free life. It saddens me that people in industrial culture take stress as a baseline. They think that to be human is to be stressed. I don't think so."

--"Are more people comfortable with being mindful in the face of uncertainty? I would like to think so, but I don't know. Many people confuse the stability of their mind-sets with the stability of the under-lying phenomenon. Everything is changing, but people act as if things are more certain than they actually are. We're taught this in school, and it is reinforced at work. Even learning a sport, like tennis, you're told, 'Here's how you hold the racket; here's how you swing.' None of these things are universally true; they apply only to certain players at certain times. But it's presented as true, and over time, this gives us the illusion that we know what's going on."

--"When you think you know what's going on, you don't look. And when you don't look, you don't see. And if you don't look or see, you're not thriving."

--"Events are neither innately exciting nor innately non-exciting. You can make a boring event engaging by noticing things about it. We studied this by taking groups of people who professed [some] antipathy: people who hated football, rap music, or classical music. We had everyone watch a video they professed to hate, but we gave them instructions: Notice six things that were new to you. Then we asked them how they liked the video. The more they noticed, the more engaged they were--not the other way around. If you're bored, make a distinction. It doesn't matter if that distinction is grand, grandiose, or petty; it has the same psychological effect on you. If you truly dislike what you're doing, then being mindful about it might show you a way to stop having to do it."

Supplemental Reading

Christopher Germer, What Is Mindfulness? Insight J. 24 (Fall, 2004) [online text]

A. Cebolla, et.al., Contemplative Positive Psychology: Introducing Mindfulness into Positive Psychology, 38 (1) Psychologist Papers 12 (2017) [online text]

Scott R. Bishop, et.al., Mindfulness: A Proposed Operational Definition, 11 (3) Clinical Psychological :Science & Practice 231 (2004) [online text] [note: read pp. 230-234]

R. Lisle Baker & Daniel P. Brown, On Engagement: Learning to Pay Attention, 36 UALR L. Rev. 337 (2014) [online text]

Reference (Ellen Langer)

Explaining Mindfulness
[11:30 mins.] [comment on the relationship of her work to positive psychology begins at 4:58 mins., ends at 5:58 mins.] [for fuller presentation of the video begin at 0:46 mins., end at 7:08 mins.]

Ellen Langer on Mindfulness
[5:04 mins.]

Ellen Langer Explains How She Took Up Her Work on Mindlessness
[9:30 mins.] Pt2 [9:30 mins.] Pt3 [8:55 mins.]

Ellen Langer on Stress
[2:48 mins.] [commenting on mindlessness]

Counterclockwise: The Power of Possibility
[25:33 mins.]

Counterclockwise
[8:28 mins.] Pt2 [6:26 mins.] Pt3 [8:18 mins.]

Why Mindfulness Should Be Part of Your Life
[11:17 mins.]

The Psychology of Luck
[16:28 mins.]

Mindfulness and the Psychology of Possibility
[1:17:52 mins.] [poor video quality]

Mindfulness as a Way of Being
[48:08 mins.] [lecture] [poor video quality]

Mindfulness and Leadership
[49:35 mins.] [speaking at the ADC Future Summit, Melbourne, Australia]

Mindful Learning and the Power of Possibility
[36:20 mins.] [podcast]

Mindfulness and the Psychology of Possibility
[1:17:52 mins.]

Our Ego Makes it Difficult to Experience Present Moment Awareness
[4:59 mins.]