Attention Training (ADD Alternative)

...The brain, like the rest of the body, can be altered intentionally. Just as aerobics sculpt the muscles, so mental training sculpts the gray matter in ways scientists are only beginning to fathom. - Richard Davidson

The popular view of meditation is that it is a relaxation technique. That is only one of its many values. Mindfulness, developed through meditation, is actually a very skillful quality of mind that encompasses many other skillful qualities, including ease of being, attention, focus, and flexibility of mind. Mindfulness prepares the mind for other valuable qualities such as clear comprehension and loving kindness, all necessary for insight or wisdom.

Mindfulness or aspects of mindfulness can be applied in many contexts. In the case of working with attention skills, we can learn to relax the mind, but also to sharpen it. - Mary Rees

Mary Rees teaches skills for developing the mind in groups and private sessions, in person and online. This mind training is a natural extension and expansion of her twenty years of teaching learning strategies in public education. Trainings include skillful and appropriate attention strategies as well as means for simply being happy and content in life - accessing and fostering innate wholesome qualities and defusing unwholesome qualities.


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Insight and Mindfulness Courses

There are a number of ways to begin working with the brain and training the mind to attend appropriately for different circumstances. Meditation is an especially accessible one - and it is something you can do at any time in any day to take responsibility for your own mind - no matter what your diagnosis. Different kinds of meditation result in different mind skills. The practice of Insight Meditation (Vipassana) is an especially clear and direct teaching for training the mind.

A Note from Mary - People have contacted me about meditation, concerned that attention problems would keep them from being able to meditate. Some require a little special attention at the beginning, but this is largely to gain confidence in their ability to be able to do it. The fact is, any mind can meditate, there are similarities in all minds, but no matter what is happening in the mind we can learn to know what it is doing and intervene in its processes.

• Take a course offered by an Insight Meditation teacher in your area (to get a list of available teacher see www.inquiringmind.com or google insight meditation and your state or city.
• Take a course with a meditation teacher that also has specialized with various perceptual and cognitive skills - including attention disorders. See Insight and Mindfulness Courses on this website.
• Work with the computer based meditation course on CD, Going Beyond-First Steps, available online at citta101.org/nutshell/goingbeyondcd.html. (This CD course includes options for teacher interaction!)