Josh Falcone – General Assignment Reporter
Southern Connecticut State University was recently introduced to the Mindful-Based Stress Reduction program on its campus. Mindful-Based Stress Reduction is an eight week program designed to help attendees feel better in body, mind and spirit with the might of mindful practices.
Southern graduate student Anne Dutton is facilitating the program on campus and said she has experience with mindful-based stress reduction.
“I’m a graduate student at Southern and interning at the Counseling Center and that is what I do, I teach mindful-based stress reduction,” she said, “In my previous life that’s what I did, before I went back to school at Southern.”
Dutton said she mentioned mindful-based stress reduction and her knowledge in it to Counseling Services and gauged their interest in the program.
“I said, well I do this thing if you guys are interested and they said sure, and that’s how it came to Southern,” Dutton said.
The program was founded in 1979 by Dr. John Kabat–Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School as an alternate form of treatment of pain, according to the Center for Mindfulness website.
“He was teaching in the medical school and he met some colleagues in the pain clinic who were complaining that they didn’t have any good intervention for their patients other than medication and he was a meditation and yoga practitioner himself and he said give them to me and I’ll work with them, teach them what I know to help them,” Dutton said.
After the medical school did research into Dr. Kabat-Zinn’s work, Dutton said, they found that there were really impressive results from his teachings.
“So he developed this eight week course at the university and he opened what was called the Stress Reduction Clinic at that time and that morphed into the Center for Mindfulness,” she said.
The program teaches participants how to take charge of their lives by learning to work willfully, proficiently, and thoroughly with all the various types of stress they face in their day-to-day lives, according to the Counseling Services webpage.
Dutton said the program is a “total experimental course” and that those who partake in the program will not be lectured to or be forced to read and complete assignments.
“There is no learning that people are use to,” she said, “It is all experimental, so it would be like going for a walk in the woods and the teacher would say, ‘What did you see?’ so instead of going for a walk in the woods, we do mindfulness practices and I say, ‘Okay what happened? What did you notice?’ and in the first class we just talk about what there is to notice and how do you define mindfulness.”
Also in the program’s first class which was held last Wednesday, Dutton said, the class also started with what is called a body scan, which is a mindfulness practice of bringing attention to the body because the body is constantly giving off messages that many people do not pay attention to.
“From the body scan we go into eating meditation, so paying attention to the process of eating and then we go into mindful movement, yoga based movements,” Dutton said. “And mindfulness of breath, walking meditation and what we call informal meditation, which is using an ordinary activity as a practice.”
Normally in the eight week program people would be assigned the practices to do at home, Dutton said, but she figured that the students at Southern did not need one more thing added to their already packed day-to-day schedule.
“So instead of saying you have to do this everyday, I say, ‘Here is the thing, you might want to try if you are interested and you are really suffering and you feel like you don’t know what to do, try this,’” Dutton said.
The class is also normally two and a half hours long, Dutton said, but she altered it to an hour and a half in length, and the classes themselves are broken into two parts.
“About half of that one and a half hours, about half of that time would be practice time, where we practice together and the other half would be what I call inquiry time, so it is like a discussion about what you noticed and what your experience was, along with seeing what kind of insights you can get out of your experience,” she said.
The program also features a retreat that takes place the weekend after the sixth class, Dutton said.
“That retreat is in complete silence,” she said.
As for the first session last week, Dutton said it seemed like it went positively.
“I think it went well,” she said, “We have so many people that want to take the class, we had to turn away 40 people or something. We tried to stuff as many people in the class that we could, and it was a bit cozy.”
As for the draw of the program, people are looking for something to assist them when dealing with their health, Dutton said.
“People are hungry for something they can do to help themselves and meditation is the most powerful tool human beings have, I think, to really help themselves,” she said. “And they have been using it for thousands and thousands of years and I think people are very hungry for this.”
