Free Guided Meditations From UCLA: Boost Your Awareness & Ease Your Stress

in Creativity, Health, How to Learn for Free, Psychology | February 11th, 2014 2 Comments

Pre­vi­ous­ly, we’ve writ­ten about a grow­ing num­ber of cul­tur­al fig­ures who prac­tice tran­scen­den­tal med­i­ta­tion, with Paul McCart­ney, David Lynch, Leonard Cohen, Ellen Degeneres, and Sheryl Crow being ardent sup­port­ers. Mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion, while less known, has also steadi­ly increased in pop­u­lar­i­ty over the past half-decade. In part, there’s its inher­ent appeal: mind­ful­ness cul­ti­vates an all-accept­ing aware­ness of the present moment, there­by dis­solv­ing anx­i­eties about the future or pre­oc­cu­pa­tions with thoughts of the past. There’s also the grow­ing momen­tum of mind­ful­ness research in the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty, with stud­ies sug­gest­ing that mind­ful­ness-based ther­a­peu­tic approach­es may ben­e­fit a host of psy­cho­log­i­cal issues. Its use to alle­vi­ate anx­i­ety, depres­sion, and stress is par­tic­u­lar­ly promis­ing.

“Sounds tempt­ing,” you say, “but where does one try this mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion busi­ness, any­way? Can I try it with­out going any­where?” You’re in luck, my friend! UCLA’s Mind­ful Aware­ness Research Cen­ter (MARC) has uploaded a set of mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tions to iTune­sU, where the series is present­ly the #1 down­load. “I’m too busy,” you say, open­ing a Face­book tab. Not so fast! Most of the med­i­ta­tions are under 10 min­utes long, with the com­plete series clock­ing in at two hours.

We’ve had trou­ble lis­ten­ing to the lec­tures on the UCLA site, so if you’re inter­est­ed, head over to iTune­sU to down­load Mind­ful Med­i­ta­tions. Oth­er­wise, if you live with­in a rea­son­able dis­tance of UCLA’s Ham­mer Muse­um, drop in for free week­ly med­i­ta­tion ses­sions (record­ings for most of these are avail­able here).

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writ­ing at the Huff­in­g­ton Post.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alan Watts Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to Med­i­ta­tion & East­ern Phi­los­o­phy (1960)

David Lynch Talks Med­i­ta­tion with Paul McCart­ney

Mihaly Czik­szent­mi­ha­lyi Explains Why the Source of Hap­pi­ness Lies in Cre­ativ­i­ty and Flow, Not Mon­ey

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Enhances Our Cre­ativ­i­ty


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Comments (2)
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  • prashant says:
    May 22, 2014 at 2:28 am

    want to share some knowl­edge abou tan­cient indi­an yoga.i have some
    prac­ti­cal knowledge.it defi­nat­ly help­ful in sort­ing out prob­lem like
    men­tal ill­ness ‚can­cer or any disease.i don’t have plate­form to share
    this knowl­edge plz con­sid­er.
    ancient indi­an yoga
    any human body divid­ed into 2 parts male and female which is called
    ardhnar­ish­war in sanskrit.indian yogis devel­op a method called mantra
    or vibra­to­ry science.there are many chakras in body.but in present
    time emph­e­sis on 7 chakra.in which 5 hav­ing element,6th not hav­ing any
    ele­ment but vibra­to­ry cen­ter for which mantra is used.7th is out­side
    body.
    med­i­ta­tion is come from ardhnar­ish­war shiv.as shiv is kriya shak­ti and
    female part is yoga shakti.we hav­ing cen­ter in our body.every cen­ter
    has hav­ing mag­net­ic field and elec­tric field.
    elec­tric field and mag­net­ic field both hav­ing to type.hence one cen­ter
    or chakra hav­ing 4 parts ante­ri­or part of chakra i.e. front part is
    for +ive mag­net­ic and elec­tric field and pos­te­ri­or part of chakra is
    made up of ‑ive type of mag­net­ic and elec­tric field.hence by ante­ri­or
    part we digest pure or satvik food i.e. veg­e­tar­i­an feel their chakra
    on front side of bod­ies while non veg­e­tar­i­an or tam­sic peo­ple feel
    chakra their behind part of body.this ia way nature auto­cor­rect us.
    these cen­ter are present in every organ­ism by which nature con­t­role
    the human being or auto­cor­rect sys­tem which is called adap­ta­tion in
    biotecnology.antibiotic resistance,why earth is overheated,pollution
    con­t­role or any prob­lem can be solved if we have right knowl­edge of
    these chakra system.i hav­ing knowl­edge more than 7 chakras.which i
    want to share with this plate­form.

    Reply
  • Alicia Crego-Chandler says:
    September 7, 2019 at 3:48 am

    Just want to thank you sooo much for shar­ing this great infor­ma­tion!!! As some­one rel­a­tive­ly new to mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion, I great­ly appre­ci­ate help­ful infor­ma­tion like this, and I’m sure many oth­ers do and will in the future!

    Just want­ed to point out that one link is not work­ing- the one lead­ing to the record­ings of the live ses­sions. I would love to check those out!

    Any­way, my main point is to thank you. You’re obvi­ous­ly work­ing hard on get­ting this infor­ma­tion out to help oth­ers- offer­ing valu­able con­tent to oth­ers who need it, and again, you are great­ly appre­ci­at­ed for doing so! I’m book­ing this page for the won­der­ful links and infor­ma­tion found here, as well as to check for any updates.

    Ali­cia

    Reply

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