Well-being is a trainable skill. Join us for a free guided meditation hour where we explore this.
Join us for a free guided meditation hour led by Dr. Richie Davidson and Dr. Cortland Dahl on Wednesday August 19th at 7pm CT free on Zoom.
Dr. Richard Davidson and Dr. Cortland Dahl are hosting a free hour of guided meditation on Wednesday, August 19. They will go through the four pillars of well-being and practice each one together.
We believe well-being is a skill you can train, the way you train juggling, or the way an athlete trains a specific movement. Nobody necessarily starts out being good at it. Like anything, it improves with practice, and the practice can be mapped to the dimension you are trying to build.
So which dimensions? There are four.
Awareness. Being present with your emotions rather than swept along by them.
Connection. Kindness and appreciation, trained deliberately, and the sense of belonging that follows.
Insight. Seeing your own story clearly enough that it stops running you.
Purpose. Knowing what you value, so ordinary decisions get easier.
They may feel different as experiential practices to cultivate these skills. We will explore these live in the free guided meditation.
A study out of the Center for Healthy Minds
In 2022, Dr. Matt Hirshberg and colleagues tested all four pillars together. 662 school system employees in Wisconsin, about two thirds of them teachers, in the worst stretch of the pandemic. Four weeks of training through the healthy minds program (a free app, named a best meditation app by The New York Times Wirecutter and Healthline), against a control.
Distress went down. Well-being and social connection went up. Three months later the difference was still there.
Come practice with us
Wednesday’s hour is mapping different practices to the four pillars. Which practice builds which pillar, how they work together, and guided practice in each of the four so you can feel the difference between them. You should leave with a sense of which pillar may be worth your attention right now.
It is free, it is on Zoom, and registering gets you the live hour, and the replay.
Wednesday, August 19. 7:00 PM Central. Zoom. Free.
Source papers
Dahl, C. J., Wilson-Mendenhall, C. D., & Davidson, R. J. (2020). The plasticity of well-being: A training-based framework for the cultivation of human flourishing. PNAS, 117(51), 32197-32206.
Hirshberg, M. J., Frye, C., Dahl, C. J., Riordan, K. M., Vack, N. J., Sachs, J., Goldman, R., Davidson, R. J., & Goldberg, S. B. (2022). A randomized controlled trial of a smartphone-based well-being training in public school system employees during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(8), 1895-1911.
Richie’s more elaborate discussion is also on Huberman Lab