Mindfulness Revolution
'The Mindfulness Revolution: Zombie Apocalypse or Productive Peace in a Frantic World' is a credit-awarding course at Leiden University. Worth 5 European Credits, the course is offered in the context of the university's inter- and multidisciplinary Honours Academy, which brings together talented students from all across the university, open to students in any Department or Faculty. The course has been tried in two formats, as both an intensive, retreat-style programme outside regular term-time (for one full-week, all day everyday), and as an extended term-long programme meeting for full days once per week. The classes are capped to maintain a responsible, small-scale, and intensive format. The success of this course inspired the development of the MOOC, DeMystifying Mindfulness.
The Mindfulness Revolution combines theory and practice in an innovative and unusual way, providing university students with training in the techniques and practices of mindfulness (following the standard MBSR curriculum) and engaging the students in rigorous scholarly interrogation of those techniques and the experience of practicing them. That is, the course challenges students to weigh, juxtapose, and cross-interrogate the significance and meaning of subjective (first person) knowledge gained in practice and the ostensibly objective (third person) knowledge gained through theoretical investigation. In the end, students seek to synthesize these kinds of knowledge in an original final project.
