Mindfulness is the ability to fully attend to what is at hand and be in the present moment. Mindfulness is being applied to a variety of professional fields, including health care and education, to improve effectiveness and enhance well-being. The practice of mindfulness can increase our individual and collective resiliency to respond to changing personal and global situations in adaptive and creative ways.

The program will focus on mindfulness through theory, practice and its application in relation to developmental psychology and abnormal psychology. Questions to be explored include how is mindfulness being integrated into working with people at various developmental stages of life? How can mindfulness be applied to emotional health? How is mindfulness being integrated in working with physical and mental health?

Fall quarter will focus on developing a foundational understanding of constructive thought and emotion from both Eastern and Western perspectives based on philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. Students will also study developmental psychology of birth through adolescence in terms of emotional, physical and mental development. Winter quarter will focus on mindfulness, destructive thought and emotions through exploring habitual patterns of thought, emotion and behaviors. Students will also study human development from adult, geriatric and end of life perspectives.  Spring quarter will focus on how mindfulness is being applied in clinical settings to promote physical and mental health. Students will also study abnormal psychology and see how mindfulness is being integrated into the treatment of mental health, pain, addictions, hypertension and other health conditions. 

The four credit module will focus on mindfulness through constructive human experience (fall), destructive human experience (winter) and clinical applications of mindfulness (spring).  The sixteen credit program will look at how these dimensions of mindfulness interface with developmental and abnormal psychology.

Students will have an opportunity to learn in many ways using diverse modalities and multiple intelligences. We will integrate mindfulness practices into our studies, including movement, integrative health practices and expressive art workshops (no prior experience necessary). We will participate in community readings, rigorous writing assignments, theoretical tests and critical study of important texts. This program is designed as three-quarter program of study preparatory for careers and further study in psychology, philosophy of mind/emotion and the mental health field.