Last winter, whilst exploring ideas for a possible research proposal, I wrote a prototype desktop web application to help people learn the Mindfulness of Breathing. It formed the basis of an assignment that you can read about in a previous blog post. The application, BreathFollower, is still running on Google App Engine at http://breathfollower.appspot.com/ . Almost as soon as I started developing that application I began to regret not developing it for the mobile phone. BreathFollower won’t even run on an iPad. I thought that if you could cradle the application in your hands, in a similar position to the cosmic mudra, and tap the screen with your thumb to interact with it, it would be more effective. As soon as my assignments were out of the way I started on a phone based application. Continue reading »
You will see from previous posts that I have been on the Mindfulness MSc at Bangor University for the past year. This will be the tenth post that comes in that Bangor MSc category. If you were to read through all the older posts you would see that I have become disenchanted with the course and will not be surprised that I am stopping. I have now completed the Foundation module and the Research module and have sufficient marks to exit the course with a Post Graduate Certificate in Mindfulness Approaches. Continue reading »
Find attached my fourth and final assignment for the Bangor Mindfulness course. This one is for the Research module. It is supposed to be a description of a research project that you intend to do later in the course in a form close to what would be suitable for submission to the ethics panel.
The proposal makes reference to a prototype application I developed that you can access at http://breathfollower.appspot.com/ if you would like to try it for yourself. I have done some work to take this further as a mobile application and will blog on it if I get it to a state worthy of release.
By the time I was writing this up I had decided I wouldn’t proceed with the course so it was a kind of fantasy proposal rather than a serious one. I did a ten minute presentation on it and the tutors pointed out that they didn’t think it would produce an effect in the two week duration of the experiment but I did nothing to change this and the marked me down accordingly. I got 69% which is just 1% short of an ‘A’ – always the bridesmaid never the bride I guess 
I hope you enjoy reading the assignment.
I’ll put another post together in the next few day summarising my reasons for leaving the Bangor course.
Attached is my second assignment from the Bangor Mindfulness course which has now been marked. This is the document as submitted but with my name and copyright information added.
I got 64% which translates as a ‘B’. The marker made some kind comments about my “highly original ideas” but rightly points out that this becomes the focus of the essay and marks me down accordingly. You can judge for yourself what you think of the assignment. Continue reading »
If I start to talk about how the world is and therefore how we should best live there is a danger you will dismiss what I say as either playing with ideas that have no relation to real life (philosophy) or trying to impose some mumbo jumbo from a possible imaginary deity (religion). Many people are reluctant to explore this stuff because it will either prove a complete waste of time or overturn a belief system that they have accepted since childhood.
Despite this I do need to create a narrative explanation of why you should try mindfulness meditation. The rationality at the heart of our culture requires that this comes first. Please treat what follows as a pragmatic way of viewing the world for the purpose of living the good life rather than just a set of ideas or a religious doctrine.
Things arise in dependence on conditions and when those conditions cease the things cease. This is the root of the philosophy. This is easy to accept because when we look we can see it is true. This should not be confused with “cause and effect” which is more a product of language. To have a “cause” and an “effect” we need to define one thing as being the cause and something else as being the effect which is useful when we want to use words to represent these things but involves isolating them from the rest of the universe. Drawing a line around them if you like. So we could talk about it raining because it is cloudy but this conveniently leaves out the causes of clouds and the processes within the clouds. Continue reading »
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