Meditation for Everyday Living and Peak Performance for Mental Health, Medical, and Surgical Practices

Meditation for Everyday Living and Peak Performance for Mental Health, Medical, and Surgical Practices

This evidence-based course is an integration of the best of Western scientific research from peak performance and positive psychology with the great contemplative traditions of the East. The course addresses a gap in the Western psychotherapy traditions, which emphasize the eradication of negative emotional states, by instead focusing on the implications of various positive emotional states for psychological and physical health. Emphasis to understand the neurocircuitry of peak performance, sustain concentration, training positivity, and prosocial behavior. This course provides an up-to-date review of the theory and practice of concentration from its ancient origins to modern brain science to how it works to alleviate psychological and physical distress and provides opportunities for attendees to cultivate their own personal meditation practices. The course will also teach these tools in response to the COVID-19. The concentration aspects of this course hold great promise not only for clinicians’ own personal development and are also a remarkably powerful tool to augment virtually every form of psychotherapeutic and medical treatments. Through lecture, demonstration, Q&A and experiential exercises, you will learn how to use mind-training practices to enhance performance excellence, vital engagement in work and everyday activities, mastery over everyday living, and to enhance positivity and prosocial behavior. Participants with no meditation experience, as well as seasoned practitioners, will find this course helpful both personally and clinically.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this activity, participants will be able to:

Utilize meditative, concentration, and visualization practices to help enhance peak performance, mastery over everyday living, and vital engagement in life; Utilize meditative, concentration, and visualization practices in response to the COVID-19 pandemic; Review the neuroscience of performance excellence, positivity, and pro-social behavior; Develop meditation practices to bring optimal energy states to everyday living; Review the evidence-based foundations of meditation and visualization practice; Choose specific practices for performance anxiety and other things that interfere with performance excellence; Integrate Eastern meditation traditions with visualization practices and Western psychotherapy to benefit patients and yourself; Use concentration meditation to stabilize the mind so that it stays focused without distraction; Apply insight meditation training to cultivate continuous and complete presence to whatever you are doing at the moment; Use insight meditation practices to enhance creativity at work; Demonstrate the practices and principles of meditation to support personal wellbeing; Review the implications of positivity for patient and personal mental health and how to implement in everyday life; Evaluate new research on visualizations regarding gratitude and forgiveness; Incorporate visualization practices to develop sensitivity to and compassion for others.

Target Audience

This course is targeted to Physicians, Psychologists, Nurses, Counselors, Social Workers, and LMFTs.

Course Directors

Daniel Brown, PhD, ABPH

Lawrence E. Lifson, MD