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IONS President Cassandra Vieten, who is the co-author of Spiritual and Religious Competencies in Clinical Practice talked to Emma Bragdon, PhD, about why it is important to increase public awareness and also the training of mental health workers so those in crises can obtain the support they need.
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IONS President and Senior Scientist Cassandra Vieten was honored to be interviewed on the All Possibilities podcast this Fall. On the All Possibilities podcast, intuitive life purpose coach, Yale and MIT alum and founder of Being My Purpose, Julie Chan, talks with entrepreneurs, business executives, scientists, educators, and leaders to hear their stories of transformation, and examine the science behind them. She also explores what it means for anyone to unlock one’s potential in life and career.
IONS Director of Research, Helane Wahbeh, ND, MCR, recently published an article exploring the use of an online intervention using mindfulness meditation as a treatment for depression in older adults in the special issue “Mind-body Medicine Approaches,” of the journal Medicines.
IONS would like to celebrate the long life of a remarkable woman who for the last two decades, contributed to making the work we do here at IONS possible. Dr. Ruth Lofgren passed away in her home in San Antonio, Texas, on October 31, 2018 one month before her 102nd birthday.
What are we doing?
The science of how people change (and why they don’t) has not yet made it to the front lines of people fighting the good fight. Until now…The Consciousness, Communication, and Change (C3) workshop brings together the findings of social, cognitive, neuro, worldview, and behavior change research, and unites them with wisdom practices from the world’s spiritual traditions.
It’s a new year — a time time for reflection and setting new intentions. There are many practices one can choose to aid in doing this. One powerful option is to use a labyrinth as a tool for a walking contemplative practice. Veriditas, a friend of IONS, offers a simple practice that you might enjoy.
We are thrilled to announce that the IONS Discovery Lab is up and running and our doors are open! IONS is conducting what will be the largest study ever conducted on how transformative practices and experiences influence well-being, creativity, intuition and extraordinary human capacities. This groundbreaking project is based on IONS’ research over the past 45 years which tells us that when people recognize how we are interconnected, they take better care of themselves, each other, and the planet. We are the only retreat center in the world that provides the opportunity for workshop leaders and retreatants to be a part of groundbreaking science of this scope. Our work at IONS is committed to discovering how each of us can access that place of interconnection — accelerating the creation of a more just and sustainable presence on this planet.
The research department at IONS organized a three-day “hackation" at our Earthrise campus. Hackation is a term we coined a couple years ago that combines a hackathon with a vacation. We started Hackation events as an enjoyable way to hack away at interesting problems related to Noetics. We invited scientists, students in engineering, and programmers to participate. This year, we had 17 programmers who participated, mostly from the San Francisco Bay Area but also a few from around the country. We focused mostly on analyzing Twitter data to see if we could use group collective consciousness to predict events. The participants analyzed 1.6 million Tweets from one week preceding and up to one week following the Dallas October 2017 shooting. This represents 10% of Tweets sent in the US during that period. Participants were experts in big data analysis and used their expertise to analyze these Tweets.