Mind Program

The “Mind 2018” workshops are focused on Meditation, Mindfulness, and Career Exploration.

This is a collection of “Mind 2018” stuff.  There are blog posts, on the topic and about the class, links to each class website, and the most recent reading list.  /enjoy

Blog Posts

Workshops

Reading List (Current)

Here is the most up to date reading list from the “Mind 2018 Program”

Updated: June 6, 2019.

Reading Page

In our class you will not need to read these books.

I’ve found that many people are new to this topic, and want a reading list to learn about the material in this workshop.  If that is you, then look below to find a list of the “Core Books” used to construct this workshop.   I’ve also added a few more books that go deeper, and other books that widen the scope beyond the workshop.

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Core Books

The “Mindfulness in Plain English” book is an excellent introduction to meditation and how to use mindfulness to describe your experience.

The “Way of Council” describes circle practice and it’s many uses.

The “Designing Your Life” book describes a Stanford class that helps students explore themselves and their career opportunities.  We will use the “Energy Mapping”, “Compass”, and “Road-mapping” exercises.

 The “Breath of Awakening” has an Science-like description of a meditation practice.  It will make us Engineers happy. For example, in Science an experiment has an Objective, Instructions, Experiment, and Results.  In Namgyal Rinpoche’s view a meditation is a Science experiment.  He uses the words Aspiration (Objective), Instructions, Meditation (Experiment), and Review Experience (Results).  He asks us to state our Aspiration like an objective, “Why are we meditating?” He asks us to do a specific meditation and then to review our meditation experience using the lens of the four foundations of mindfulness (body, feeling, mind-states, and phenomena).  These observations are our results. This means that we use our meditation setting to observe our body, feelings, mind-states, and phenomena. We are the measurement device and the “object being tested”.  This will become clear via doing it.  You’ve been doing experiments for years.

More Books & Links

Science

In the last twenty years, meditation and mindfulness have gone from being kind of cool to becoming an omnipresent Band-Aid for fixing everything from your weight to your relationship to your achievement level. Unveiling here the kind of cutting-edge research that has made them giants in their fields, Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson show us the truth about what meditation can really do for us, as well as exactly how to get the most out of it. (from their promotional page)

One of my favorite concepts developed in “Altered Traits” is a classification of meditation styles and approaches.  They talk about Deep and Wide meditation styles.  In the Deep-style you have monks and lay people meditating for 1,000’s of hours for spiritual and health reasons, and you have the Wide-style which is focussed on health, performance, and accessibility (ie short meditations using Apps).  This results in 4 to 5 levels.  I’ve taken a stab at sketching this out.  The Mind Program is a combination of Level 2 style meditations and Level 4/5 style Leadership/Career Coaching.

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Google Mindfulness Class – Chade-Meng Tan

Meng’s books provide theory and explorations of meditation and mindfulness in the workplace in a very playful way.  Meng covers important topics like Listening, Handling Difficult Emotions, and Handling Difficult Conversations.  In his second book, “Joy on Demand”, he spends a lot of time on how to develop joy and finishes up with Loving Kindness meditations.

In our class we will do meditations that are at the core of Meng’s books. Having this meditation experience will make his books much more accessible and understandable.

Here is Meng’s Life Story (Singapore to early-Google-guy) and Objective (Achieve World Peace)
Life Story: Three Easy Steps to World Peace (Part II)

Going Deeper

The most accomplished Meditation and Mindfulness practitioners are monks.  Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche is famous for having one of the “happiest brain-scans” on earth.  The book “Altered Traits” notes that he has meditated for 69,000+ hours.  His book “Joyful Wisdom” is set apart from other introductory meditation books because of his skill with the English language and Western culture.  It is a pleasure to read.

In our class we use Yongey Mingyur Rinpoches instructions for “Open Awareness” meditation.

Next Steps In Meditation – Loving Kindness and the Four Immeasurables (Love, Compassion, Joy, and Equanimity).

An easy way to explore the next steps of meditation practice is via “The Book of Joy“. This is a beautiful book that documents a week of discussions between the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu exploring what “Joy” means to Buddhists and Christians.  The practice section of the book provides an introduction to the exploration of Love, Compassion, Joy, and Equanimity.  For an in-depth view of Love, Compassion, Joy, and Equanimity practice there is Sharon Salzberg’s “Loving Kindness“.

Mental Health

“Self Regulation” from York University’s Dr Shanker is used in hundreds of schools across Canada.  From his web-site — “Self-Reg begins with distinguishing between misbehaviour and stress behaviour, recognizing that something that we automatically assume is due to a lack of self-control is, in fact, a sign of an excessive stress-load.”
Self Regulation – Dr Stuart Shanker

Dr. Mike Evans at Reframe Health Lab has a great set of videos on Mental Health. The videos are produced using sketch-art, they informative and fun.  Here is one on Stress.  Doc Mike is now working at Apple with a focus on communications for medicine.

These are fantastic books.  They are very practical.  Each has a different approach to difficult conversations.

Practical Applications of Meditation and Mindfulness

Thich Nhat Hanh has many simple and practical books.

Tiny Little Books

Very Practical Books

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I had to include a couple entrepreneurship and exploration books 🙂
These are very practical.

Vancouver has many groups that support learning meditation.  I have experience with the Sunshine Coast Retreat House, the Crystal Mountain group and the Tergar group (Yongey Mingyur).

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