Try These Meditations from UCLA

Drop-in meditation sessions at the Hammer Museum, led by UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC), are catching on. You can follow along with these podcasts. 

At noon every Thursday, MARC leads a 25-minute meditation session at the Hammer Museum. The sessions have caught on—attendance has risen from 50 participants when it was first offered in 2008 to an average of 200.

The program has provided a template for similar programs at other museums—read “25 Minutes of Silence in the City of Angels” to learn more.

In the article, Diana Winston, an instructor at MARC, describes mindful awareness as “the art of paying attention to the present moment with openness and curiosity. It’s really about teaching ourselves to live in the present moment and not to be lost in the past or the future.”

If you’re not in California, you can check out a podcast for the class and learn some mindfulness meditation practices. There’s also a treasure trove of meditation instruction from MARC on iTunes: “Mindful Meditation at the Hammer.”

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