Whether your new to mindfulness and meditation, looking for ways to widen your experience, or maybe looking to increase your understanding of how it fits in with life today, this De-mystifying mindfulness course from Universiteit Leiden (Leiden University) is a superb option.
The 6-week course is available online from Coursera and would be a great addition to your Mindfulness and/or Meditation toolbox.
The De-Mystifying Mindfulness Course
It doesn’t require any previous knowledge, or experience and is presented by Professor Chris Goto-Jones, His eligibility to speak on the subject of mindfulness is extensive. He is the Dean of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Victoria. He is also a Professorial Research Fellow at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), at the University of London, and guest Professor in the Honours Academy at Leiden University. He is also Director of the Mental Praxis project concerning Mindfulness and Philosophy.
The course is explained in the following…
…For millions around the world, mindfulness has become a life-style choice, enhancing and enriching everyday experience. Mindfulness is big business.
But, what actually is mindfulness? Is it really good for you? Can anyone learn it? How can you recognize charlatans? Would you want to live in a mindful society, and would it smell like sandalwood? What does it feel like to be mindful? Are you mindful already, and how would you know?
Evolving from the popular Honours Academy course at Leiden University, this innovative course combines conventional scholarly inquiry from multiple disciplines (ranging from psychology, through philosophy, to politics) with experiential learning (including specially designed ‘meditation labs,’ in which you’ll get chance to practice and analyze mindfulness on yourself).
In the end, the course aims to provide a responsible, comprehensive, and inclusive education about (and in) mindfulness as a contemporary phenomenon.
This Mindfulness course is written for beginners to mindfulness and meditation, but has something for everyone.
And the best part, because this course is currently free, you’ll also get all the true benefits of the interactions with other learners during the peer-assessed assignments. In a course like this, your fellow students bring a whole collection of different opinions and experience, together with different histories and viewpoints, putting the entire experience on another level.
In most of the courses from Cousera, if you want to reap the benefits of this additional interaction you have to pay for it. You can ‘audit‘ almost any course for free, but that’s just like reading a book on it.
Also, if you take the course, you also get the opportunity to take part in the Honours project at the end of the course. An extremely worthwhile addition.
I found this de-mystifying mindfulness course to be truly enlightening and the written information that comes with it is helpful to me every day.
A simplified version of the syllabus, is listed below to give you a quick idea of what you’ll learn…
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Introduction to Mindfulness
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Psychology of Mindfulness
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Philosophy of Mindfulness
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Politics of Mindfulness
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Mindfulness into the Future
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Honours Project
The course contains 74 videos (updated on 12th July 2021 with 2 additional, completely new modules – Mindfulness, Trauma and Social Justice and Mindfulness, Nature and Land) and two printable manuals.
One dedicated to the learnings of each module and one dedicated to the ‘Meditation Labs’ (one section of each available to download and print after each module). The course includes videos from interviews with, Stephen Batchelor and Willem Kuyken on various aspects of Mindfulness and Meditation.
Why not check it out? What have you got to lose? 🙂 The link again is https://www.coursera.org/learn/mindfulness/
NOTE: Leiden University are providing this entire, certificated course for FREE, Nada, Zilch, Nothing!! ( at time of writing 🙂 )
Why wouldn’t you do it?!?
Already taken the course, let us know how you got on. Taken a different course that’s similar? Let me know in the comments and I’ll check it out 😉
