Session 6: Bringing Mindfulness to Our Relationships

In this session, we will take time to review your experiences of “falling down the hole”—having a sustained emotional reaction to something like a cognitive slip-up. This is connected to further cultivation of awareness as a way to track our experience without reacting to it. The discussion of reacting versus responding is broadened to incorporate our experiences with others, and how we communicate with others. We will then discuss different communication styles and for homework, you will be encouraged to track your use of these communication styles, as well as the tendency to respond versus react. Finally, you will continue with Open Monitoring practice and you are invited to track your mindfulness in daily life and to find ways of adding to your mental bank account.

Session 8: Final Session: Taking the Practice Forward

This final session provides a time and space for reflection – reflecting on the retreat experiences you have just had, your experiences with the program as a whole, and also your plans to take the practice forward. This might include how you could seek additional support (e.g., joining a local mindfulness group) or even how the group itself can support one other in continued practice. In particular, time is taken to troubleshoot potential difficulties in keeping up with practice, and you are reminded that, much like exercise, benefits will continue only with continued practice. If the optional booster session(s) will take place, time is spent scheduling and preparing for this final session.

Session 7: Be Your Own Meditation Instructor and Daylong Retreat

As we are nearing the end of the program, you will be invited to reflect on how you might sustain your mindfulness practice going forward (assuming you have found it helpful!). Taking responsibility for our own meditation practice is something we refer to as “becoming our own meditation instructor.” This chapter also contains information regarding the daylong retreat that will occur between this session and the final one. You will be given guidance on how to prepare for this silent day of group mindfulness practice, and time should be spent in session addressing any questions or concerns about the retreat. We will also review your homework experiences from the prior week, tracking reacting versus responding in relationships, and the final new practice of Loving-Kindness is introduced as a way to cultivate compassion for ourselves and ultimately for others.

Session 5: Reacting Versus Responding

In this session, a distinction is made between mindfulness (coming to the present moment) and awareness (what we find when we come to this moment). After a discussion of the prior week’s practices, you will then be introduced to a new practice, “Open Monitoring,” as a way to cultivate awareness and make space for our emotional reactivity. In this context, we will talk about the idea of “falling down a hole”—when we have a sustained negative emotional reaction, for example, in response to a cognitive slip-up. For homework, you will be assigned the practice “Emotional Weather” as a way to actively work with emotions. Walking meditation (“Aimless Wandering”) is provided as a third home practice.

Introduction to Wisdom Mind

This chapter provides the background to the Wisdom Mind program—why it was developed, the conceptual foundations on which it is based, and the results from the original empirical evaluation of the program. While the program is broadly influenced by Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness-based stress reduction, Wisdom Mind stands on its own as a unique program that is grounded in principles of clinical neuropsychology (specifically, cognitive rehabilitation) as well as lifespan developmental psychology. This chapter will introduce you to the concept of mindfulness, tell you more about some of the background work that has already been done on mindfulness, and how it may be helpful to you in particular as an older adult. This chapter will also prepare you for the program, with some information on what to expect and what kind of mindset to bring to your experience.

Session 3: Noticing Slips and Falls

The main focus of the current session is to introduce you to the connection between your cognitive slip-ups (which you were asked to track in the prior week’s homework) and the emotional reactions you have to those slip-ups (i.e., “falls”, as in “slips and falls”). You will have a chance to discuss your experience with the homework and what you learned about the kinds of slip-ups you experience and how that is related to your mood. Building on this, you will learn about the hierarchy of attention, and how Focused Attention mindfulness can help you decrease slip-ups. You will also be introduced to the first of two Mindful Yoga series as another way to experience present-moment awareness, and as a complement to sitting meditation practice. Tracking pleasant events is also assigned for homework as a way to make the bridge between mindfulness practice and daily activities and life experiences.

Session 1: Introduction to the Program

This first session covers the introduction to the program. It establishes the group context and will orient you to what to expect for the remainder of the program. Different people may have had varying levels of exposure to mindfulness, so time is taken to talk about what mindfulness is in the context of this program, and specifically how it is relevant to older adults. Mindfulness is both a practice/skill and also a way of thinking about our life. As such, you will be introduced to the first of several formal practices, as well as the “attitudes of mindfulness,” aspirational principles that you are invited to bring to your experiences in the program. Participants are introduced to the first homework exercises, and time is taken to troubleshoot when you will practice and how you will remember to engage in daily practice.

Session 2: Noticing Slip-Ups

The second session involves taking a deeper dive into mindfulness practice. We begin by having a discussion about your initial experience with mindfulness from the prior week. As this mindfulness might be quite novel for certain people, it is possible that you or others in the group may have strong opinions or emotional reactions to the homework. All of this discussion material is welcomed as a way to start exploring the topic of cognitive slip-ups as we age—something common to almost all older adults—and how mindfulness can be one way to offset those slips. You will then be introduced to the concept of cognitive reserve as a “mental bank account” that can be enhanced through mindfulness.

Session 4: Paying Attention to the Commentator

The main principle that we will talk about in this session is the idea of a “commentator,” the thoughts, opinions, and beliefs that go on in the background of our awareness, but can have a big impact on how we feel. Specifically, the emotional reactions we have to cognitive slip-ups. Through the homework you previously did related to tracking “slips and falls,” you will be invited to reflect on the aspect of your mind that is constantly commenting on your experience (i.e., the “commentator”). This, in turn, is connected to the concept of mind-wandering; this is a core concept in most discussions of mindfulness practices, and may become even more of an issue as we age. For homework, you will be introduced to the second of two Mindful Yoga series, and we will once again revisit the attention hierarchy in terms of the practices you are learning. Tracking unpleasant events is also assigned for homework.