Taught by

Mindfulness is the ability to fully attend to what is at hand and be in the present moment. Mindfulness is being applied to a variety of professional fields, including health care and education, to improve effectiveness and enhance well-being. The practice of mindfulness can increase our individual and collective resiliency to respond to changing personal and global situations in adaptive and creative ways.

The program will focus on mindfulness through theory, practice, and its application in relation to developmental psychology and abnormal psychology. Questions to be explored include how is mindfulness being integrated into working with people at various developmental stages of life? How can mindfulness be applied to emotional health? How is mindfulness being integrated in working with physical and mental health?

Fall quarter will focus on developing a foundational understanding of constructive thought and emotion from both Eastern and Western perspectives based on philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. Students will study developmental psychology of birth through adolescence in terms of emotional, physical, and mental development. Winter quarter will focus on mindfulness, destructive thought and emotions through exploring habitual patterns of thought, emotion, and behaviors. Students will study human development from adult, geriatric, and end of life perspectives. Spring quarter will focus on how mindfulness is being applied in clinical settings to promote physical and mental health. Students will study abnormal psychology and see how mindfulness is being integrated into the treatment of mental health, pain, addictions, hypertension, and other health conditions.

Mindfulness will be explored through theoretical, applied, and expressive arts projects. Each quarter will include a full-day mindfulness retreat. In addition, students will also look at how these dimensions of mindfulness interface with developmental and abnormal psychology.

Students will have an opportunity to learn in many ways using diverse modalities and multiple intelligences. We will integrate mindfulness practices into our studies, including movement, integrative health practices, and expressive art workshops (no prior experience necessary). We will participate in community readings, rigorous writing assignments, theoretical tests, and critical study of important texts.

Quarters

Fall Open Winter Open Spring Conditional

Location and Schedule

Campus Location

Olympia

Time Offered

Day