Academic approaches to mindfulness meditation

The New York times introduced mindful meditation. It is about new trend in classroom where mindfulness meditation has been used to teach children how to regulate their emotions.

“I was losing at baseball and I was about to throw a bat,” Alex Menton, 11, reported to his classmates the next day. “The mindfulness really helped.”
As summer looms, students at dozens of schools across the country are trying hard to be in the present moment. This is what is known as mindfulness training, in which stress-reducing techniques drawn from Buddhist meditation are wedged between reading and spelling tests.

It is not restraining or suppressing emotions. It is volunteering emotion regulation. So far, children have not had chance to learn how to regulation thier emotions and pay attention.

At Stanford, the psychology department is assessing the feasibility of teaching mindfulness to families. “Parents and teachers tell kids 100 times a day to pay attention,” said Philippe R. Goldin, a researcher. “But we never teach them how”

Mindfulness meditation can be a way of teaching emotion regulation and attention.

“He doesn’t know what to do with his energy,” his mother, Towana Thomas, said at a session for parents. “But one day after school he told me, ‘I’m taking a moment.’ If it works in a child’s mind — with so much going on — there must be something to it.”

The New York times introduced three academic institutions that study mindfulness meditation and apply it to psychotherapy.

The first one is the University of Massachusetts where Jon Kabat-Zinn pioneered the use of mindfulness meditation. Kabat-Zinn run the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society (CFM).

The second one is the Mindful awareness research center(MARC) at the UCLA. They provide free guided introduction of mindfulness meditation on their web site.

The third one is Clinically Applied Affective Neuroscience (CAAN) at the Stanford University.

The NYT article quouted two researchers from CAAN, Goldin and Saltzman. They are postdoctoral researcher and doctoral student at Dr. Gross's lab at the Stanford University. Gross lab's one of main research topics is emotion regulation.

Goldin maintains his webpages on his research on mindfulness meditation.

There is an instituion that dedicate to mindfulness education, mindfulness in education.