The Joy and Pain of the Wandering Mind

Really looking forward to the collaboration with Mind Body Spirit for tonight’s webinar.  Inspired by the work of Smallwood and Hasenkamp the webinar will present a neurocognitive model of mindfulness. The intention in sharing this model is to talk you through what happens in your brain and mind in a mindful moment.  With this knowledge, you will understand i) how any activity can be mindful and ii) why it is important to move through all the four stages of the model in order to train the underlying brain networks.  Only with this can we really get to the transformative potential of mindfulness.

Hasenkamp’s work showed that when meditators were asked to push a button to indicate that their mind’s had wandered from the breath to something else, disengaged the attention network and engaged the default mode network. It is this switching between networks that is important in mindfulness training.

Can you detect these subtle (and sometimes not so subtle mental movements when your mind goes into What If? As if? or If Only modes?

Join us tonight at 7pm UK time to find out more.

 Default-Mode-Network2
Some other nice resources:
The attention model of mindfulness meditation Malinowski – really great
A nice post by Wendy Hasenkamp explaining her work.
What is the default mode network anyway? A short video.
A wondering mind is an unhappy mind?  Killingsworth’s research.
Dan Harris (newsreader) on meditation.