In the Coos
Is it possible for one weekend in Oregon to be more Oregon-y than another? Because if it is, I'm pretty sure I just had the most Oregon weekend known to man.
It started at the lab. Each year, OIMB grad students have the opportunity to plan a weekend workshop or short course on a topic we find interesting, and this year, we invited UO administrator and professor Lisa Freinkel to lead us in a workshop on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. I had zero experience with mindfulness practice prior to the workshop, so it was a learning experience for me. We did a lot of meditating. We practiced focusing on our breath or the sound of the waves outside to clear our minds. We laid on the floor and mentally scanned our bodies for any points of pain or tension. We ate breakfast together in silence.
Though mindfulness has strong ties to Buddhism, it started as a therapeutic technique in hospitals and doesn't necessitate a Buddhist practice. One of the exercises we did was actually just examining a raisin, pretending we had never seen a raisin before. We took a solid half hour to notice every detail of the shriveled fruit - its brownness, its wrinkliness, its sweetness - then ate it as slowly as possible. It was definitely a new experience for me to be so keenly aware of a single fruit, but it was valuable all the same. Mindfulness can reduce stress by making a person more aware of their own physical and emotional reactions to their environment. We talked about the increase in our pulse rate when we open our e-mail, our knee-jerk reactions to sensitive sentences or phrases. We talked about self-defeating thought patterns, because in Lisa's words, "Once you notice a pattern, its days are numbered." Merely being aware of our physiological reactions to stress can help reduce them.
The workshop was an interesting experience for sure.
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| OIMBers quietly meditating. |
Though mindfulness has strong ties to Buddhism, it started as a therapeutic technique in hospitals and doesn't necessitate a Buddhist practice. One of the exercises we did was actually just examining a raisin, pretending we had never seen a raisin before. We took a solid half hour to notice every detail of the shriveled fruit - its brownness, its wrinkliness, its sweetness - then ate it as slowly as possible. It was definitely a new experience for me to be so keenly aware of a single fruit, but it was valuable all the same. Mindfulness can reduce stress by making a person more aware of their own physical and emotional reactions to their environment. We talked about the increase in our pulse rate when we open our e-mail, our knee-jerk reactions to sensitive sentences or phrases. We talked about self-defeating thought patterns, because in Lisa's words, "Once you notice a pattern, its days are numbered." Merely being aware of our physiological reactions to stress can help reduce them.
The workshop was an interesting experience for sure.
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