HEALTH
January 9, 2011
Mindfulness therapy comes in different forms. Patients can receive it through group therapy or one-on-one sessions with a therapist. Some practitioners use CDs or books, such as "The Mindful Way Through Depression," to help guide the therapy. The precise structure of a program varies: The mindfulness-based stress reduction program at UC San Diego's Center for Mindfulness, for example, offers an eight-week plan that combines CDs, books and daily home assignments. In one assignment, participants write down their physical and emotional responses to unpleasant events.
ENTERTAINMENT
May 16, 2013 | By Gary Goldstein
There's something healing about simply watching "Free the Mind," Danish filmmaker Phie Ambo's gentle, compassionate documentary spotlighting the use of such drug-free options as meditation and mindfulness to treat anxiety and trauma. Writer-director Ambo focuses on three main subjects: Will, an endearing 5-year-old with ADHD and a fear of elevators; Steve, an Afghanistan war veteran haunted by his stint as a military intelligence soldier and interrogator; and Rich, a former battalion leader in Iraq wracked by guilt and horrific memories of combat.
HEALTH
September 29, 2012 | By Mary MacVean, Los Angeles Times
Every Thursday at lunchtime at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, several dozen people turn off their cellphones and take seats in the bright pink chairs of the Billy Wilder Theater. They come to spend half an hour with Diana Winston, a former Buddhist nun and one of the nation's best-known teachers of mindfulness meditation. The lights go down, and Winston takes a seat in an office chair and speaks quietly into a microphone. Occasionally she is accompanied by Michael Perricone playing about 20 Tibetan bells, the haunting, wave-like sounds enhancing her voice, which is so soothing it's as if she were born to the work.
NEWS
April 16, 2013 | By Mary MacVean
Mark Coleman has been practicing meditation for 30 years. In a conversation with the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday morning, he offers some thoughts and advice about how to get started. If you've ever been intrigued by the idea of mindful meditation, he provides all you need to get started -- and the entry bar is low: just five minutes a day. Mindfulness is being used in prisons, public schools, corporations and the military to help people focus and improve their reactions. It can even help make the traffic more bearable.
NEWS
December 10, 2010 | By Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times
Depression increasingly looks to researchers and clinicians like, say, a psychiatric version of bronchitis or a heart attack. Some people come down with a case of it, have it treated (or not), and it goes away. But for a great number of patients, it's a chronic condition that must be treated when it flares. And after depression's acute symptoms subside, many patients need to manage the disease -- to continue with some kind of treatment -- to reduce the likelihood of experiencing repeated bouts of mental suffering.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
August 8, 2011 | By Mitchell Landsberg, Los Angeles Times
Vincent Horn opened his eyes after a moment of meditation, scanned the room and smiled. About 150 other people were emerging from their own states of dead-silent, self-induced tranquillity. They shuffled a bit in their seats. "Hello, Buddhist geeks!" Horn said from his perch onstage. "This is the most geeks I've seen in one place, I think, ever. " His statement brought to mind a moment in the documentary "Woodstock," when folk singer Arlo Guthrie takes in the crowd of several hundred thousand young people and cackles, "Lotta freaks!"