Spacious Awareness in Mahāyāna Buddhism and Its Role in the Modern Mindfulness Movement

This paper investigates a particular understanding of ‘awareness’ in Mahāyāna Buddhism and its relevance for secular mindfulness. We will focus on the Zen and Mahāmudrā traditions which share a view of awareness as an innate wakefulness, described using metaphors of space, light and clarity. These traditions encourage practices in which the meditator rests in this spacious ‘non-dual’ awareness: Zen’s ‘just sitting’ and Mahāmudrā’s ‘open presence’. We explore the role of this approach within secular mindfulness, in particular Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). We see how Jon Kabat-Zinn brought influences from Zen into the creation of MBSR, in his approach of ‘non-doing’, and in the practice of ‘choiceless awareness’, akin to Zen’s ‘just sitting’. We then examine how ‘open presence’ meditation is developed in the Tibetan Mahāmudrā tradition, using a sixteenth-century text Mahāmudrā: The Moonlight as our focal point. Turning to interviews with leading UK mindfulness teachers with Tibetan Buddhist training, we explore how this understanding of awareness can infuse meditation with a sense of ‘space’, and how that manifests in their teaching. We argue that a willingness to explore the ‘space of awareness’ can help mindfulness to offer a transformative path beyond stress reduction and therapy.     

Gender differences in health anxiety: An investigation of the interpersonal model of health anxiety

Health anxiety (HA) involves persistent worry about one’s health and beliefs one has an illness or may contract a disease. In the present study, gender differences in Noyes et al.’s (2003) interpersonal model of health anxiety (IMHA) were examined. Using a sample of 950 undergraduates (674 women; 276 men), multigroup confirmatory factor analyses suggested the measurement model for key dimensions of the IMHA (i.e., reassurance-seeking, alienation, worry, and absorption) were invariant across gender. This suggests key dimensions of this model are applicable to and generalizable across women and men. Coefficients alpha for and bivariate correlations between these IMHA dimensions were also roughly comparable across women and men. As hypothesized, mean levels of reassurance-seeking and worry were significantly higher in women compared to men. No gender differences were observed in mean levels of alienation or absorption. Reassurance-seeking and worry appear salient in the interpersonal behavior and emotional life of women with HA. The present study helps to clarify gender differences in the IMHA and other HA models involving similar variables.     

Personal Control and Disordered Eating Patterns Among College Females

Individuals deemed high in personal control tend to attribute life events to internal, rather than external causes. A lack of perceived personal control has been linked repeatedly to deficiencies in mental and physical health. Many scholars and practitioners have suggested that eating disorders are yet another problem stemming from a perceived lack of personal control. However, empirical research linking attributional tendencies and eating disorders is limited. In the present study, it is argued that eating disorders actually could be associated with a tendency to make internal attributions of responsibility for events. Using a sample of college females, this study offers preliminary support for this assertion. Results offer a unique challenge to the view of internal attributions as universally adaptive.     

Treatment Participation among Children with Conduct Problems and the Role of Telephone Reminders

Children with antisocial, aggressive and disruptive behaviour problems are among the most frequent referrals to mental health services. These young people and their families present with a range of adverse contextual factors and can prove challenging to engage. We examined the characteristics of children with conduct problems, treatment participation, and the impact of telephone reminder calls. Consecutive referrals (N=262) to two child and youth mental health services were randomly assigned to either a reminder call condition or service as usual. In comparison to referrals without conduct problems, conduct problem children presented with greater sources of psychosocial adversity, attended fewer initial appointments and were at greater risk of treatment refusal. Importantly, telephone reminder calls significantly increased treatment attendance, though only for participants with elevated conduct problems. Telephone reminder calls, however, had no impact on treatment refusal, regardless of conduct problem status. The findings highlight a straightforward approach for enhancing treatment participation among a group that has been challenging for mental health services.     

A role for eyebrows in regulating the visibility of eye gaze direction

The human eye is unique amongst those of primates in having white sclera against which the dark iris is clearly visible. This high-contrast structure makes the gaze direction of a human potentially easily perceptible to others. For a social creature such as a human, the ability to perceive the direction of another's gaze may be very useful, since gaze usually signals attention. We report data showing that the accuracy of gaze deviation detection is independent of viewing distance up to a certain critical distance, beyond which it collapses. This is, of itself, surprising since most visual tasks are performed better at closer viewing distances. Our data also show that the critical distance, but not accuracy, is affected by the position of the eyebrows so that lowering the eyebrows reduces the critical distance. These findings show that mechanisms exist by which humans could expand or restrict the availability of their gaze direction to others. A way to regulate the availability of the gaze direction signal could be an advantage. We show that an interpretation of eyebrow function in these terms provides a novel explanation for several well-known eyebrow actions, including the eyebrow flash.     

Psychoanalysis,violence and rage-type murder

Abstract

This paper presents and explores some ideas about the ways that children referred to a London borough learning support service, their teachers and school managers can be helped by a specialist teacher making use of her training as a psychodynamic counsellor and child psychotherapist. This paper is based on the premise that conditions necessary for feeling secure and establishing the capacity to think and learn by experience are based upon the infant's experience of a facilitating maternal environment coupled with the infant's ability to engage in this relationship. By extension, children need to feel safe enough in order to take advantage of the learning and social opportunities offered in the context of the school environment. The author draws upon psychoanalytic theories and developmental psychology as useful frameworks for understanding the continuing impact of infantile experience upon the learning process. The author also draws attention to the context of her work as an area support teacher, concluding that prevailing political demands for rapid change hinder the capacity of educational support services, schools and individual staff from mediating effectively the emotional demands of children trying to engage in the difficult task of learning.

One starts somewhere -where the learner is. And one starts whenever the student arrives to begin his career as a learner.