Winter Seminar: Meditation and Visualization Practices for Everyday Living

 The essence of various spiritual traditions is the discovery of practical wisdom about everyday living. Clinicians encounter what Freud once called "the problem of everyday unhappiness." This affects both patient and clinician. The spiritual traditions provide a way to discover full presence, excellence, well-being, happiness, and vital engagement in everyday life. This workshop integrates the practical spiritual wisdom from the Eastern meditation traditions, and self-hypnosis and visualizations, and methods from positive psychology from the Western psychotherapy traditions to address staying in the 'flow' and bringing one's best self to everyday living. These methods include: visualizations for developing optimal performance states, the development of character strengths and positive states of mind to potentiate mastery of being in everyday life, the articulation of ultimate concerns from promoting vital engagement in life, training the mind to develop everyday well-being and happiness, concentration training to cultivate continuous and complete focus on whatever you are doing at the moment, insight meditation to reduce reactivity and develop a non-reactive openness to experience, and visualizations to develop sensitivity and compassion for others. The outcome of participation in this workshop will be the enhancement of everyday living, well-being and peak performance. Teaching in this workshop is by lecture and demonstration of experiential visualization and meditation practices. The educational presentation for this course includes; didactic lectures, demonstrations and Q & A.