International Conference on Mindfulness 2024

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Strand 2: Contemplative, philosophical, and spiritual

Contemplative, philosophical, and spiritual approaches

How do we encounter mindfulness?

For many, practicing mindfulness leads to profoundly meaningful experiences that are hard to put into words and challenging to measure. These experiences remain largely unexplored scientifically. Mindfulness-based approaches have a vital role in supporting mental and physical health and they have the potential to open us to a deeper understanding of wholeness, interconnection, suffering, and meaning. In this strand, we’ll talk about how classical and modern mindfulness practices intertwine, and how we can bring these less concrete ideas into mainstream society. 

Strand 2 includes, but is not limited to:

  • Mindfulness and religion
  • The intersection of science and Buddhism
  • Mindfulness and metaphysics
  • Contemplative research and practice
  • Compassion-based practices
  • Insight-based practices

Strand 2 begins with a Keynote from Catherine McGee. After this you can choose to attend either: a related panel discussion, workshop, research symposium, or guided practice, which will be held across various spaces in Bangor University’s Pontio Centre

keynote

Expanding Our Vision: What more can mindfulness help us see that could serve this changing world? with Catherine McGee.

What opens up for us in mindfulness practice is inevitably shaped by the frameworks and values that undergird our moment to moment enactment of perception. Recognising this we can ask ourselves some questions: What frameworks are shaping my perceptions? What more is possible, and what do I want from my practice? In this keynote Catherine will reflect on these questions, and will offer a phenomenological approach to some of the territory that may lie beyond our current horizons. She will invite our intuitions and our passion to go beyond what we know to explore these further questions: How might mindfulness open and expand our senses of beauty and sacredness, and how might this empower our deepest values and meaningful participation in a changing world.

panel

Opening to Mindfulness beyond a scientific account: a dialogue about possibility and promise with Bridgette O'Neill (chair), Catherine McGee, Micheal Waupoose, and Nana Korantema Pierce Williams.

A key enabler to establishing mindfulness-based programmes across a range of contexts in the last 50 years has been the emphasis on the scientific trials evidencing positive outcomes for participants. Significantly however, these desirable outcomes have been gained through engagement in teaching processes which have origins across diverse cultures, practices, and traditions. This panel discussion will bring together highly experienced mindfulness teachers who bridge different traditions, approaches and ways of knowing. They will speak about less measurable aspects of experience that may be profoundly meaningful and valuable in our current times. Our exchange will consider what if anything may need to open, stay the same, change, and be inquired into in mindfulness settings, in the teaching and research, in the view to open us to deeper understandings of wholeness, interconnection, health, suffering, and meaning.

workshop

The Wisdom of Emptiness and Awareness: Touching our Changeless Nature and Reaching out with Compassion with Choden

Buddhist monk Choden will draw on the profound teachings of Mahamudra in Tibetan Buddhism and offer some simple practices for accessing that part of our being that is always at peace, free and complete in and of itself – called ‘Buddha Nature’. This nature is the experience of nondual awareness. When we learn to rest in this awareness everything else in our lives is experienced as being ephemeral and fleeting. At first this is disconcerting but then it feels more and more liberating. It is like coming home to something stable and precious within ourselves. But we don’t stop there. We then reach out with compassion and respond skilfully to the struggles that abound in life all around us. This was the path of the mystics of old. They taught that it is important to have our feet in two realities at the same time: one foot in timeless awareness and another foot in the world as we know it with all its issues and struggles. The benefit of this approach is that we are always responding to what is difficult from a place of wholeness and peace and this helps us act with more effectiveness and clarity in the world.

online workshop

Turning Towards the Lovely: A Radical Approach to Responding to the Difficult.with Trish Bartley

This online workshop will explore the movement of turning towards what is pleasant and enjoyable – both as a practice and as a group / personal reflection – to discover what this might offer us at particular moments and as an everyday exercise. The practice itself is developed within Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Cancer program to cultivate an everyday response to lifting the mood and to managing difficulty. We will follow a similar path on this workshop – through mindfulness practice, reflection, and discussion. Join us with a willingness to participate, experience, question, enjoy and learn!

Bartley, T., (2012), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Cancer: Gently Turning Towards. Wiley-Blackwell

Bartley, T., (2017), Mindfulness: A Kindly Approach to Being with Cancer. Wiley-Blackwell

Research Symposium and Presentations

Abstracts under review

guided practice

Grounding through Compassion in a Changing World with Dr Marleen Ter Avest

In this session, a series of compassion practices will be offered that enables participants to allow grounding of the body, calming of the mind and expanding of the heart. In-between practices, there will be some time for short group inquiries. Special attention will be given to the challenges of our time: how to keep openly receiving the suffering of the world with recognition of our tendency to worry, close down and perhaps even become despondent. Central to the session will be balance and insight: balance in how to care for ourselves and have the resources to receive and be touched by the world as it is, and insight into the wise course of action that we may undertake to alleviate some of our own suffering, that of others and of the world at large.

ICM:2024 Mindfulness in a changing world

conference sessions centred around five key strands
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