Mindfulness

As business classes get underway at the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University, MBA students open their laptops and professors fire up PowerPoint presentations in many classrooms. In the Executive Mind class, however, professor Jeremy Hunter pulls out decidedly different tools: a brass singing bowl and leather-wrapped mallet. The chimes from three strikes on the bowl quiet the dozen or so students, who have put away smartphones and other devices. They close their eyes.

NEW DELHI - The disaster caused shocking loss of life among young, mostly female garment workers, awoke the conscience of a nation, spotlighted dismal working conditions and spurred loud calls for construction and labor reform. So far, that description could apply equally to the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex in Bangladesh three weeks ago and to the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in New York in 1911. The Triangle fire would prove a turning point in safeguarding American workers after 146 mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrants died, including many who jumped to their deaths because they were trapped behind locked doors.

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!"

WASHINGTON - First came the letter-writing campaigns, then the protests at town hall meetings and now the television ads. The last several weeks in New Hampshire have had the feel of a heated electoral season - but the target of this siege, first-term Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte, isn't on the ballot until 2016. Welcome to Round 2 in the battle over gun control. The first round ended last month, when a proposal to expand the background check system to cover most commercial gun sales fizzled in the Senate.

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.

Of all fields of medicine, psychology seems especially prone to fads. Freudian dream analysis, recovered memory therapy, eye movement desensitization for trauma ? lots of once-hot psychological theories and treatments eventually fizzled. Now along comes mindfulness therapy, a meditation-based treatment with foundations in Buddhism and yoga that's taking off in private practices and university psychology departments across the country. "Mindfulness has become a buzzword, especially with younger therapists," said Stefan Hofmann, a professor of psychology at Boston University's Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders.

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.

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.

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.

For anyone who spent 2010 worrying about his or her weight, the economy or egg recalls, it's time to look within. Introspection can mean a healthier you -- not a more narcissistic you. That's the message featured in a new weight loss book called "The Self-Compassion Diet. " This Allentown Morning Call story features a Q&A with author and Harvard psychotherapist Jean Fain. She tells the paper: "What I'm saying is when you treat yourself with self-compassion, when you treat yourself like a friend or a loved one with love and kindness, you're more apt to eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full; rest when you're tired and move when you feel energized; and when you do that, you lose weight naturally.

Fly toy helicopters with your mind. Be a DJ and shift musical tracks based on how you feel. Wiggle robotic cat ears by increasing your state of calm. Astonishing advances in the ability to harness brain waves have made the fantastic notion of moving and controlling objects with the mind possible. Now neuroscientists are grappling with another challenge: Find a "killer app" that will demonstrate the true potential of tapping into brain waves and ignite the neurotechnology revolution.

More than 17% of children considered to be at risk of committing suicide have guns in the home that could make a passing destructive impulse deadly, and between 15% and 30% of those adolescents told researchers they had access to those guns, to bullets, or to both. Those figures, presented over the weekend at the American Academy of Pediatrics' annual meeting, underscore a growing interest in pediatricians in weighing in on gun violence and its toll on children. The new research was unveiled during a session of the physicians' confab devoted to understanding the role of violence in media, the challenge of recognizing which kids are potentially violent, and what role guns play in the death and injury of children.

One day last year, a 9-year-old named Thomas came home and announced he was running for office. "Are you kidding me?" his father responded. "Don't we have enough elections in this family?" Thomas, the son of Los Angeles City Controller Wendy Greuel, has been around politics his entire life. Over the years, he has gamely tagged along as Greuel has waged four election campaigns, including her current bid for mayor. He's the kid with sandy blond hair and square-framed glasses standing next to Greuel at fundraisers, field office openings and in commercials.

CARLSBAD, Calif. - The Legoland Hotel, which opened April 5, got plenty of little things wrong in its first weeks. But its designers got one thing enormously right, and that will make this place a screaming success: kid-centricity. "The dragon is made out of Legos!" my daughter, Grace, who is about to turn 9, said as we approached the hotel entrance a week after the opening. Inside the lobby, Grace; my wife, Mary Frances; and I found a faux fountain, a play pit full of little plastic bricks and dozens of deeply absorbed children who were collaborating on a rainbow-hued monolith, constructing pretend weapons, hollering, whispering, running, jumping and dragging their parents from one discovery to the next.

This talk of whether the Lakers should re-sign Dwight Howard is a no-brainer. D12 is the superstar the Lakers need to build their future on. Fans and the media have been too hard on a guy recovering from serious back surgery, forced to take a back seat to Kobe, trying to perform in the wrong system while being coached by the wrong coach and all the while trying to live up to Shaq-sized expectations. We all better give him a break or he will take the first offer out of town and leave the Lakers and us fans holding the bag. Gino Cirignano Playa del Rey :: Advice to Dwight Howard: Move on. The Lakers are not the team for you, at least not now. You are a very good player but not a leader like Chris Paul to the Clippers.

Play harder and play better. Be more physical and smarter. Raise the level of play even higher. That's what Clippers Coach Vinny Del Negro is asking of his team when it travels to Memphis to play the Grizzlies in the next two Western Conference playoff games. "If we grow in that direction," Del Negro said, "then our chances get better. " The Clippers won both games at Staples Center, and lead the Grizzlies in their best-of-seven series, 2-0. Now the Clippers will play Games 3 (Thursday night)

Obadiah Harris is president of the Philosophical Research Society and a former director of community education at Arizona State University. 1. "The Secret Teachings of All Ages," by Manly Palmer Hall It's a wondrous book that reveals the finest flowerings of Western esoteric thought. After reading its sections about Pythagoras, Francis Bacon and others, you feel like you know them. 2.

WASHINGTON - First came the letter-writing campaigns, then the protests at town hall meetings and now the television ads. The last several weeks in New Hampshire have had the feel of a heated electoral season - but the target of this siege, first-term Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte, isn't on the ballot until 2016. Welcome to Round 2 in the battle over gun control. The first round ended last month, when a proposal to expand the background check system to cover most commercial gun sales fizzled in the Senate.

Security concerns did not stop the London Marathon on Sunday, as a reported 35,000 participants ran through the streets of the city, cheered on by a tens of thousands of spectators. But the specter of last week's Boston Marathon bombing, in which three people died and scores were injured, weighed heavily on the race. Many of the London runners wore black ribbons and armbands. Organizers asked for a moment of silence at the starting line. "This whole weekend was dedicated to Boston, and we got huge support from London," wheelchair racer Tatyana McFadden told the Guardian . The American racer won her event in Boston and followed up with another victory in London.

Specktor will appear at the Festival of Books on Sunday at noon on the panel "Fiction: Inside Hollywood" with Adam Braver, Alex Espinoza and Nina Revoyr. More information: latimes.com/festivalofbooks Matthew Specktor knows the offices of talent agency CAA - past and present - like his own backyard. That's because, as son of top agent Fred Specktor, they practically were. He ran around in the hallways; he worked in the mail room. And although that it set him down the not unexpected Hollywood producer path, what he really wanted to do was write.