UCLA ONLINE: Mindfulness Meditation @ MARC (Mindful Awareness Research Center)

Free Weekly UCLA Meditation Class with MARC Director Dr. Diana Winston and Guests
Join UCLA Mindful’s Director Dr. Diana Winston live online for a weekly opportunity to practice together and learn about different aspects of mindfulness.

Each week explores a new theme on mindfulness (sati). Topics may include

• self-compassion,
• working with judgment,
• obstacles to meditation,
• dealing with difficult emotions,
• mindfulness in challenging times,
• the spectrum of awareness,
• and much more.

ALL levels of practice experience and inexperience are welcome.

• Wednesdays, 4:00 pm-5:30 pm (Pacific Time)
• Mindful Awareness or MARC at UCLA: uclahealth.org/uclamindful
• https://uclahs.zoom.us/j/97878342670

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ON OTHER DAYS, ACCESS RECORDINGS OF GUIDED MEDITATIONS
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Meditate in many languages with UCLA's MARC (Mindful Awareness Research Center)
Translations of free guided meditations available in 15 languages, with more to come.
Sandy Cohen explains: Guided meditations can be a helpful way to begin or sustain a regular mindfulness practice.

Whether you speak American English, Armenian, Mandarin Chinese, Farsi, Tagalog, Korean, Hindi, Russian, or American Sign Language, find guided meditations in that language at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC).

Thanks to funding from CalHOPE and FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), MARC’s guided meditations are now available in 14 languages, in addition to English.

“We were in a great position to help because we have a program called Training in Mindfulness Facilitation, a teacher training program that we've done for 11 years, and we've actually had participants in that program from all over the world, speaking many different languages,” says MARC’s associate director, Dr. Marvin Belzer, PhD (external link), adding that graduates of the program helped create the translations.

“So it was easy to say yes. And, of course, we were also very excited about it.”

The guided meditations available through the MARC website and on the free UCLA Mindful app (external link) range in length from 3 minutes to 19 minutes.

They include basic breathing and body-scan meditations, a “loving kindness” (metta) meditation to generate compassion and a meditation for working with difficult physical or emotional sensations.

Focused on the present moment
Guided meditations can be useful for people new to mindfulness meditation, a practice that helps cultivate the ability to “pay attention to present-moment experiences with openness and curiosity and a willingness to be with what is,” according to Dr. Diana Winston, PhD, director of mindfulness education at MARC.

In the simplest terms, mindfulness meditation is the practice of focusing on something real, but something that isn’t too complicated, Dr. Belzer says, such as the feeling of the breath moving in and out, sensations in the hands or feet, or ambient sounds.

The aim is to place nonjudgmental attention on the object of focus, and when you notice the mind has wandered — which it will because this is normal — to gently guide your attention back to the chosen focus. "Begin again," as Sharon Salzberg says.

For novices, it’s often hard to sit still and stay connected to the present moment for more than a few seconds — because the mind quickly wanders, looking for something more stimulating, diverting, interesting, worrisome, dangerous, falling into the past or leaping into the predicted future.

We’re suddenly making imaginary shopping lists or thinking about what will be served for lunch. Hearing the voice of a teacher can be helpful for maintaining focus.

But guided meditations are far from the only way to practice mindfulness, Dr. Belzer notes.

• Continued: uclahealth.org/news/article/meditate-in-many-languages-with-uclas-mindful-awareness-research-center