Mindfulness
“The present moment is the only moment, and it is the door to all other moments”
do you control your mind? or does your mind control you?
I have been honored to work as the Lead Coordinator for the University of Houston Mindfulness, Well-Being & Spirituality Lab for the past 5 years. Our research specializes in integrating spirituality, engaging in wider communal action and providing universal/preventative services to create clusters of change (beyond the individual level).
Listed below are some evidence-based benefits of engaging in mindful practices:
(click on description to learn more)
- Broadens compassion
- Helps improve awareness
- Aids with pain & fatigue
- Can lead to greater spirituality
Addressing Criticisms of Mindfulness
Mindfulness has gone mainstream; there are thousands and thousands of programs, apps and retreats designed to help improve our daily functioning. Although I and our lab are hopeful that this cultural movement has the potential to radically shift our modern hustle-bustle lifestyles towards a more compassionate, clear and connected existence, we also hear the vehement skepticism and seek to address it in a number of ways:
- Intentional Spirituality: Students have their own religious/spiritual resources which can be supplemented for broader and culturally-sensitive impact. Indeed, our research found that in comparing a mindfulness intervention with only secular language and a mindfulness + spiritual intervention, students rated both as being moderately spiritual.
- This indicates that these practices are inherently viewed as spiritual and thus more benefit can be gained by integrating spirituality (which is found to have more substantive effect sizes, along with religiosity).
2. Science-based:
- We take an evidence-based approach so that our claims are grounded in verifiable truths. Our work has been published in several studies and presented in various scientific conferences across our nation.
- Video to the left is from a presentation at the National Association of School Psychology Conference in Baltimore, MD (2020).
- Mindfulness, due to the abstract and often haphazard manner in which it is implemented, has been found to have limited impact.
- This is largely due to methodological issues such as lack of randomized control trials, large differences across the many (often different) mindfulness interventions, and unspecified target outcomes.
- We take an evidence-based approach so that our claims are grounded in verifiable truths. Our work has been published in several studies and presented in various scientific conferences across our nation.
3. Community-based & Free:
- Along with our research lab, our organization also has a student organization entitled the Mindful Coogs which serves as the community-based liaison to bring resources/practices including over 50 workshops, mindfulness training and yoga (reaching over 1000 students since its founding in 2019).
- All of these are free and available for any and all persons; we share much of the criticism by Indigenous practitioners that the commodification of mindfulness has served primarily to better the bottom line of corporations (i.e., mindful industry is a multi-billion dollar enterprise which is incentived for people to be stressed, anxious and unsatisfied with who they are so they can sell them the idea of ‘buying happiness’).
- Any person can get involved with our research and/or community organization; we do not serve as gate-keepers blocking entry or gaining our own prestige from wisdom which is not ours to profit from in the first place.
If you would like to learn more about our organization and find out how to become further involved, email mindfulcoogs@gmail.com