The use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) has grown in popularity since the 1990’s. One possible explanation is the Western medicine’s inability to adequately treat pain and chronic diseases. Hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes and obesity each pose significant public health challenges, and effective treatment requires lifestyle modification. Meditation, by attenuating the...
BACKGROUND: The use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has dramatically increased over the years since 1990. It is one of the fastest growing fields in healthcare and it is widely used today in the United States. Most people utilizing CAM approaches are seeking ways to improve overall health and well-being to relieve symptoms associated with body aches such as neck and back pain,...
A naturalist wanting to understand our conscious experience of free will may find it difficult to judge exactly what content is present in that experience. I provide an approach for how naturalistic theories of consciousness can be used to go about that, and then I apply David Rosenthal's HOT theory to that approach. After explaining HOT theory's framework, I review the literature on the...
Theoretical and empirical work suggesting associations between (1) mindfulness and depression and (2) cognitive biases (CBs) and depression lay the groundwork for novel questions about how to model mindfulness, how mindfulness and CBs are linked, how CBs are associated with one another, and how CBs may explain the association between mindfulness and depression. The present study derived a model...
Contemplative Studies is an emerging field within higher education and American culture that is blurring the boundaries of modernity by bringing seemingly religious practices in spaces such as scientific laboratories, classrooms and corporate workplaces, which are often understood as secular environments. This thesis studies the field of Contemplative Studies in higher education by organizing...
In late 19th century Great Britain, there was a revival of interest in the magic and occultism that emerged during the Renaissance. Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was a product of that revival, one who had an ironically long afterlife, despite all of the controversy that has surrounded him. Crowley should also be remembered as a significant influence upon the founders of a variety of New...
Attention Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is one of the most prevalent childhood disorders in the United States. Although many children with an ADHD diagnosis are prescribed medication to control symptoms, behavioral concerns are still regularly noted in the classroom, home, and other settings. Therefore, school psychologists are often called upon to assist teachers and families with...
Mindfulness, a set of techniques for engaging with stimuli in the present-moment environment, has recently received considerable attention in the literature. Mindfulness is drawn from Eastern, Buddhist traditions and has been integrated into contemporary psychology, in part, as a technique for improving the ability to respond skillfully to emotionally distressing stimuli and processes (Bishop,...
The purpose of this study was to make explicit the essential structure of the experience of dreaming a droam which changes one's life. The study examined the total dream experience of a person, which included the dreamer?s report of his or her rolevant experience prior to the dream, the dream itself, and the subsequent waking experience of the dream. Because this study sought to discover the...
American literature has an established history of interrogating subjective experience and what it means to be a person. As a result, American writers have a produced a pattern of thought that expresses a fascination with both the possibilities and devastating consequences that attend to competing visions of the self. This dissertation explores various attempts to theorize and tolerate...