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Law school contemplative, mindfulness, and meditation programs

I am going to post here the law school programs about which I learn. Please let me know of programs I have missed.

• University of Miami School of Law: Program on contemplative practices and an ethics course incorporating mindfulness
• UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall: Course “Effective and Sustainable Law Practice: the Meditative Perspective"
• Roger Williams University School of Law: Course on integrating mindfulness into trial advocacy.
• CUNY School of Law: Course on contemplative practices, Contemplative Lawyering program
• William Mitchell College of Law: Course "Beyond Listening: Skills & Understandings Essential to the Practice of Law and Managing Conflict"
• University of North Carolina School of Law: Yoga during Preorientation Program and each Friday lunch
• University of San Francisco School of Law: Weekly meditation group and contemplative lawyering course
• University of Texas at Austin Law School: Samsara Yoga Club, page 33 here
• Brooklyn Law School: Yoga Club
• University of Connecticut: Course "Contemplative Lawyering"
• Georgetown Law: Lawyers in Balance (LIB)
• George Washington Law School: Mindfulness and Relaxation sessions.
• University of Florida Levin College of Law: Course "Tools of Awareness for Lawyering."

Blog Glob - Subsidizing inner peace: A lingerie designer uses meditation to help herself, her business and the world

Excerpt:

Growing up in New York City, [Jacalyn] Bennett was introduced to Eastern philosophies and practices by her father, a lawyer who took pro bono cases and was interested in Buddhism. But it was an offer to work in India after her graduation from the Fashion Institute of Technology in 1973 that set Bennett on the path to what she calls enlightened entrepreneurship. In India, Bennett taught women how to use sewing machines, a twist on the old "teach a man to fish" concept. She would later launch training programs for mothers and their children in both India and Sri Lanka.

...

After returning home in 1984 to launch her design business, she incorporated the Gandhian ideals she had come to embrace. "Meditation can encourage things that are often lacking in businesses -- like peace, compassion and sanity," she says. "If I've got something that keeps me from ripping my hair out daily, I'm a better boss for it."

Since 1990 Bennett has helped fund and build a dozen not-for-profit meditation facilities in the U.S. and abroad, including the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center in Massachusetts and the Vishva Niketan International Peace and Meditation Center in Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, where she established a training program in healing meditation following the 2004 tsunami.

Click to read the rest of "Subsidizing inner peace" (CNN Money).

More mindfulness events for lawyers and law students, including an ethics course incorporating mindfulness

Mindfulness continues to enter the legal profession through many doors. Earlier this school year, I told you about the U of Miami School of Law's eight-week program on contemplative practices. The Florida Bar News just published an article about that program. From "Mindfulness program aims to help law students live in the moment":

To be an effective law student or lawyer, it is important to be able to focus on the task at hand. Obsessing about the past or worrying about the future can diminish that focus and dilute effectiveness.

That’s one reason the University of Miami has decided to introduce law students to contemplative practices that provide tools for enhancing students’ effectiveness at school, their well-being, and — hopefully — their success and fulfillment in the practice of law, according to Scott Rogers, a University of Florida trained lawyer who also holds a master’s degree in social psychology.

...

Rogers said UM is not alone in integrating contemplative practices into their curriculums. Charles Halpern at Boalt Hall at Berkeley and Professor Leonard Riskin at UF are also part of the growing, national trend of teaching mindfulness at law schools. Major corporations like Google have also instituted mindfulness programs for their employees.

Next semester, University of Miami Law will be offering a course entitled "Professional Responsibility & Mindfulness in the Digital Age" taught by Rogers and Jan Jacobowitz. The course description (found here):

The Impact of New Media on Lawyer Conduct: Mindfulness and Professional Responsibility in the Digital Age

A Judge's decision upsets a lawyer and he vents his frustration by blogging and characterizing the Judge as "an evil witch" on a Halloween posting. A young attorney excited about her practice

Attention: The way to immunize against other people's moods

Of course we catch moods from other people; doing so is often a good lubricant of social interaction. Sometimes we want to catch moods—and sometimes we do not. For when we don't, there is a method of strengthening our emotional immune system which I will mention in a moment.

The contagion of moods is well-researched. For example, from "Emotional pandemic creates herds of bulls, bears" (St. Petersburg Times):

Peter Totterdell, a professor at the University of Sheffield in England, says, "If you put two people in a room facing each other, without talking to each other, their moods will converge, or more likely, the mood of the less expressive person will move toward the mood of the more expressive person."

But it turns out that for emotions to spread, two people don't have to be in the same room. They don't even have to know each other. Emotions can be transmitted through mass media and can extend far beyond their originators.

This emotional contagion can affect the financial landscape.

Studies show that in good times, when an optimistic mood pervades, speculative stocks do best, while in bad times investors' emotions push them to seek greater safety. And preliminary research suggests that the mood reflected in media coverage of the stock market after the closing bell tends to presage stock movement at the next morning's opening, even when you control for more tangible factors.

"Unquestionably," [Sigal] Barsade says, "people's moods are influencing large-scale systems."

I was happy to see that the antidote of which I was thinking as I read the article was eventually mentioned by the writer.

How, then, do you stop yourself from catching a bad bug?

Immunity is impossible, and probably not advisable, since some amount of emotional contagion is integral to social interaction ... . As Totterdell, the professor, says, "Emotions would serve no purpose if they didn't help us learn and be attuned to our environment."

But if you want more control, first know that to catch emotions from certain people, you need to be paying attention to those people, so choosing where you place your attention is key. ...

Once again the power of attention is affirmed. As a ardent advocate of the importance of attention (here's a past post on attention), I applaud this mention of its use. To whom are you paying attention?

How do I conquer the wild things inside of me? Depends upon which theory of personality I believe

David Brooks recently looked at two theories of personality. One he attributed to philosophers and the other to psychologists. From "Where the Wild Things Are" (New York Times):

In ... what you might call the philosopher’s view, each of us has certain ingrained character traits. An honest person will be honest most of the time. A compassionate person will be compassionate.

...

But, as Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Princeton philosopher, notes in his book “Experiments in Ethics,” this philosopher’s view of morality is now being challenged by a psychologist’s view. According to the psychologist’s view, individuals don’t have one thing called character.

The psychologists say this because a century’s worth of experiments suggests that people’s actual behavior is not driven by permanent traits that apply from one context to another. Students who are routinely dishonest at home are not routinely dishonest at school. People who are courageous at work can be cowardly at church. People who behave kindly on a sunny day may behave callously the next day when it is cloudy and they are feeling glum. Behavior does not exhibit what the psychologists call “cross-situational stability.”

Brooks says the new movie Where the Wild Things Are illustrates the psychologist's view. He goes on to compare the way in each view one conquers the wild things inside.

In the philosopher’s picture, the good life is won through direct assault. Heroes use reason to

Living in the zone: Another article about physicians learning mindfulness

Pressures have increased in the medical profession. From "How Mindfulness Can Make for Better Doctors" (New York Times):

All of us [physicians] had had the experience of “disappearing” into the meditative world of a procedure [in the OR] and re-emerging not exhausted, but refreshed. The ritual ablutions by the scrub sink washed away the bacteria clinging to our skin and the endless paperwork threatening to choke our enthusiasm. A single rhythmic cardiac monitor replaced the relentless calls of our beepers; and nothing would matter during the long operations except the patient under our knife.

We had entered “the zone.” We were focused on nothing else but our patients and that moment.

But my more recent conversations with surgical colleagues and physicians from other specialties have had a distinctly different timbre. While we continue to deal with many of the same pressures that my mentor dealt with — decreasing autonomy, increasing administrative requirements, less control over our practice environment — the demands on our attention have gone, well, viral.

Extreme multitasking has invaded the patient-doctor relationship.

After describing the problems associated with these demands on attention, the writer then goes on to talk about a mindfulness program for physicians (which I have blogged about here at idealawg).

It turns out that working and living in the zone, not just getting into it on occasion, may be one solution.

Last month, The Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of a study examining the effects of a year-long course for primary care physicians on mindfulness, that 

Talk at U of Colorado biz school - Tuning In: Mindfulness in Teaching and Learning

Wednesday Nov. 4, from 4:30 – 5:30pm, Richard [Brady] will offer a talk, Tuning in: Mindfulness in Teaching and Learning, at the University of Colorado Boulder Leeds School of Business, Room 300. He will speak about how mindfulness-based activities support learning in three ways. They provide students tools to reduce their stress, focus their attention, and encounter material in a deeply connecting way. In this talk each of these benefits will be examined and activities leading to them will be presented. This event is free and open to the public. To learn more about MiEN, visit http://www.mindfuled.org/.

From Colorado Community of Mindful Living.

Watch mindful kids and hear their parents: These videos are great

Remember Susan Kaiser Greenland? She's the corporate lawyer who moved on to teach kids to be mindful. She just put up several videos of the kids here so we all can watch them.

Also here's the first clip of a three-part series on InnerKids, Susan's organization. Links to the other two parts of the series are also at that page. In addition to showing some of the InnerKids programs, the narrator looks at the benefits of mindfulness for the children (and their parents).

What a valuable gift to these kids. And a gift to them as they grow into adulthood. Maybe some will become mindful lawyers.

Stress reduction may not be of interest to lawyers

The employee program is called SIY (Search Inside Yourself). The goal is bringing mindfulness to the people working at Google. Click "Google Searches" (Shambala Sun) [pdf] to learn about SIY.

I was particularly interested to read that stress reduction, one benefit of mindfulness, was not of much interest to the Google employees. From the article:

[Program founder] Meng’s fIrst foray into marrying meditation and google was mindfulness-based stress reduction, but it didn’t attract much attention. “Stress reduction didn’t really fly here,” ... . The hiring process at Google, Meng pointed out, is designed to draw out high achievers and idealists who have done something a little different, like hiking in Patagonia or going to war-torn areas to help children. “For high achievers, stress can be a badge of honor, and not many people will sign on for stress reduction, particularly those who need it the most. So I needed to go beyond stress reduction.

From my experience, I believe this is true of many lawyers, too. As I have written in the past, I fully support lawyers who find stress and hard work badges of honor; the choices are individual and for each lawyer to make for him- or herself. For the lawyers to whom stress reduction is not a benefit, the increased focus and clarity of attention that mindfulness brings are often appealing.

Ever think of WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE as a book about mindfulness?

Stanton Peele (you may remember him from his long-selling Love and Addiction) thinks so. From a post at his Psychology Today blog:

Maurice Sendak's classic children's book, Where the Wild Things Are, is a model of mindfulness. Here is a description of the book's plot from the Times:

Max, a young boy in a wolf costume, makes mischief of one kind and another, is called "wild thing" by his unseen mother, and is sent to bed without supper. As he stews, his room transforms into a jungle. He finds a boat and sets sail across the sea to discover a land full of real wild things - big monsters with "terrible teeth" and "terrible roars." Max tames them, plays with them, sends them to bed without their suppers and then returns home, where he finds dinner waiting for him. "And it was still hot," the book concludes - a lovely and reassuring grace note.
 
"What an empowering, psychologically astute parable about a child learning that his anger, while sometimes overwhelming and scary, can be safely expressed and eventually conquered."

... I and a colleague, John Conway, with whom I discussed the story (he has just bought it for his young son) both thought, "What an uncanny illustration of mindfulness - of an imaginary battlefield for combating unhealthy urges which then feeds back into Max's real life."

Note (added October 20, 2009): Related post: ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ Expresses Value Of Mindfulness (kidglue).