Fostering Mindfulness

An essential guide to mindfulness activities and strategies that help students cultivate the skills they need for self-regulation, stress management, and learning. Simple activities and practices throughout the book are designed to strengthen areas of the brain that allow students to better manage their attention, emotions, and behavior. This comprehensive resource shows you how to incorporate mindfulness in your classroom practice in just minutes a day. It offers step-by-step instructions, activity sheets, ready-to-use templates, and much more. This highly readable book includes stories from teachers who successfully incorporate mindfulness in their classroom practice.

You can spend years in graduate school, internship, and clinical practice. You can learn to skillfully conceptualize cases and structure interventions for your clients. You can have every skill and advantage as a therapist, but if you want to make the most of every session, both you and your client need to show up in the therapy room. Really show up. And this kind of mindful presence can be a lot harder than it sounds. Mindfulness for Two is a practical and theoretical guide to the role mindfulness plays in psychotherapy, specifically acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). In the book, author Kelly Wilson carefully defines mindfulness from an ACT perspective and explores its relationship to the six ACT processes and to the therapeutic relationship itself. With unprecedented clarity, he explains the principles that anchor the ACT model to basic behavioral science. The latter half of the book is a practical guide to observing and fostering mindfulness in your clients and in yourself-good advice you can put to use in your practice right away. Wilson, coauthor of the seminal Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, guides you through this sometimes-challenging material with the clarity, humor, and warmth for which he is known around the world. More than any other resource available, Mindfulness for Two gets at the heart of Wilson's unique brand of experiential ACT training. The book includes a DVD-ROM with more than six hours of sample therapy sessions with a variety of therapists on QuickTime video, DRM-free audio tracks of Wilson leading guided mindfulness exercises, and more. To find out more, please visit www.mindfulnessfortwo.com.

As more clinicians train in mindfulness and acceptance-based therapies, the demand for skills specifically for treating diverse clients grows. In this much-needed edited volume, you’ll find evidence-based strategies for treating gender and sexual minorities with acceptance and compassion for better treatment outcomes. Gender and sexual minorities face unique concerns and, according to research, are actually more likely to want and seek therapeutic help due to greater levels of psychological distress. But research also shows that many psychologists and therapists do not feel adequately educated or efficacious discussing topics related to sexuality and gender in clinical practice. This book will address this significant gap with evidence-based and best-practice interventions and applications. Mindfulness and Acceptance for Gender and Sexual Minorities offers a number of practical strategies within a contextual behavioral science framework, including mindfulness and acceptance-based interventions, compassion-focused therapy (CFT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), relational frame theory (RFT), and more. With chapters on stigma, shame, relationships, and parenting, this book will be a valuable resource for all therapists. If you’re a clinician, you understand the ongoing need for cutting-edge, effective approaches for treating a variety of clients. With this guide, you’ll learn about the unique application of contextual behavioral approaches as they relate specifically to the experiences of gender and sexual minorities, and feel better equipped to help all of your clients work toward happiness and health.

This handbook addresses the educational uses of mindfulness in schools. It summarizes the state of the science and describes current and emerging applications and challenges throughout the field. It explores mindfulness concepts in scientific, theoretical, and practical terms and examines training opportunities both as an aspect of teachers’ professional development and a means to enhance students’ social-emotional and academic skills. Chapters discuss mindfulness and contemplative pedagogy programs that have produced positive student outcomes, including stress relief, self-care, and improved classroom and institutional engagement. Featured topics include: A comprehensive view of mindfulness in the modern era. Contemplative education and the roots of resilience. Mindfulness practice and its effect on students’ social-emotional learning. A cognitive neuroscience perspective on mindfulness in education that addresses students’ academic and social skills development. Mindfulness training for teachers and administrators. Two universal mindfulness education programs for elementary and middle school students. The Handbook of Mindfulness in Education is a must-have resource for researchers, graduate students, clinicians, and practitioners in psychology, psychiatry, education, and medicine, as well as counseling, social work, and rehabilitation therapy.

Anxiety can feel like a relentless storm, churning emotions and blurring your sense of calm. Taming the Emotional Storm offers a safe haven, providing strategies to manage anxiety and cultivate inner peace. Delve deep to understand the root causes of your anxiety, and learn to identify your personal triggers. Discover effective coping mechanisms like mindfulness techniques and relaxation exercises to manage anxiety in the moment. Develop emotional regulation skills to express your emotions healthily and break free from the cycle of overwhelm. Finally, create a personalized toolkit for building a life of calmness and clarity. Taming the Emotional Storm empowers you to weather the storm, find the eye of peace within, and create a life filled with emotional well-being.

There have been exciting new developments in the treatment of schizophrenia and related psychoses in recent decades. Clinical guidelines increasingly recommend that patients be offered evidence-based psychosocial treatments in addition to medications, as such interventions can produce greater improvements and may prevent relapses better compared with medications alone. In parallel with these recent advancements, an evolution in the way cognitive-behavioral therapies are being conceptualized and implemented has occurred due to the incorporation of novel strategies that promote psychological processes such as acceptance and mindfulness. While there are a variety of acceptance/mindfulness approaches being developed to address psychosis, there is not currently a dominant approach. In Incorporating Acceptance and Mindfulness into the Treatment of Psychosis, Brandon Gaudiano brings together the researchers and clinicians working at the cutting edge of acceptance/mindfulness therapies for psychosis to compare and contrast emerging approaches and discuss them within the context of the more traditional cognitive-behavioral interventions. The book includes a section that focuses on six distinct treatment models that incorporate acceptance and mindfulness strategies for psychosis and a section that provides a synthesis and analysis of acceptance/mindfulness approaches to psychosis. It concludes with recommendations for moving the research forward in a constructive and responsible way. This volume will be an important resource for researchers and clinicians interested in gaining a deeper understanding of mindfulness- and acceptance-based approaches and newer psychosocial treatments for severe mental illness.

Featuring embedded exercises and guided meditations—as well as an appendix with audio guided meditations and a resource list—Becoming Mindful: Integrating Mindfulness Into Your Psychiatric Practice provides clinicians with readily accessible tools to use in sessions with patients. With chapters that focus on the benefits of mindfulness for both the clinician and the patient, this guide discusses practical aspects and offers solutions for overcoming common obstacles, including restlessness and boredom, sleepiness, and sensory craving. Key takeaways summarize each chapter’s content, making it easy for busy clinicians to quickly reference the information they need to most effectively treat patients, including children and adolescents; patients battling substance addiction; and patients suffering from such disorders as depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. With additional sections on mindful eating, mindfulness and technology, and the growing field of positive psychiatry, Becoming Mindful introduces readers to the full scope of benefits that mindfulness has to offer.