Dave Smith, a Buddhist meditation teacher, addiction treatment specialist, and co-founder of the Secular Dharma Foundation, is now offering a new online course, Mindfulness for Everyone. This self-paced course offers a dynamic and comprehensive understanding of mindfulness from a secular perspective. The course has modules and educational materials covering various aspects of mindfulness, including more than 20 guided practices. The course is designed for beginners and well-seasoned practitioners.

Over the last several years the current landscape of mindfulness practices has made great advancements in practice, theory, science and research, all of which point to the benefits people experience as they develop and sustain a regular practice of mindfulness. The course provides educational resources about the practice, drawing from practice techniques and applications, as well as science and research.

Mindfulness practices can have a transformative impact on our lives. They help us to:

1. Improve our capacity to focus and pay attention. Less mind wandering. The findings show that improvement in attention may last up to five years after mindfulness training. This suggests that trait-like changes are possible.
2. Improve our resiliency to stress. As we increase prefrontal activity, we become less reactive to stress triggers and we recover much more quickly from stressful events. These trait-like changes can become a baseline state for long term meditators, supporting the possibility that mindfulness improves our ability to manage stress more effectively and permanently.
3. Increase our compassionate concern for others. Doing compassion and forms of kindness meditation practices allows us to have more resiliency when faced with the suffering of others. It has also been shown to decrease and undermine tendencies for implicit bias. These practices also shows beneficial results most quickly.
4. Decrease self-focus and self-centeredness. When practices alongside mindfulness, the above practices of kindness and compassion help us to stop seeing ourselves as the "center of the universe." With long term meditators, the studies show less rumination about ourselves and our place in the world.

Through the course, participants will have a concrete framework for mindfulness that is instructive, educational and pragmatic. The material will allow participants to integrate what is learned in the course to their daily life.

For more information on the course, click here.