Date/Time
Date(s): Feb. 8 - Mar. 1
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm (Wednesdays)

**This is a Zoom class that meets on Wednesdays at noon**

Mindfulness is a living awareness practice that you can bring with you into your day-to-day life to enliven and enrich it.  Although it’s often considered serious and austere, mindfulness also has a fun, playful side.  In this class, we will adventure together through different facets of mindful awareness and touch into the insights and wisdom they offer.  We’ll explore how to sow the seeds of mindfulness in everyday life by engaging in enjoyable, simple, down-to-earth mindfulness exercises presented by Jan Chozen Bays, MD, in her book, How to Train a Wild Elephant & Other Adventures in Mindfulness. In this lighthearted way, we can seriously cultivate more presence, awareness, wisdom and ease in our lives.  This class is suitable for you whether or not you already have a formal practice of meditation.

Each class will consist of:

• a practice period of formal guided meditation with instruction
• the introduction of an informal mindfulness practice that you are invited to explore throughout the following week
• small group discussion of our experience and opportunities for collective inquiry and community-building in a supportive space

Teacher bio:

Allyson Pimentel, Ed.D., Co-Director of Mindful USC 

Allyson Pimentel is a psychologist and long-time insight meditation practitioner and teacher who works at the intersections of mindfulness, mental health, education, and social justice. Dr. Pimentel has been teaching mindfulness in university, medical, secular and spiritual settings, as well as in private clinical psychology practice for nearly twenty years. Formerly, she was the training director of the Mind-Body Psychiatry Clinic at NYU-Bellevue Hospital Center in New York City, Associate Director of UCLA Campus & Student Resilience, and Program Director of Mindful UCLA. 

Dr. Pimentel holds a bachelor’s degree from Brown University and a doctorate in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard University. She has completed numerous professional mindfulness training programs in the Vipassana/Insight meditation tradition and also is a registered yoga teacher. 

In addition to her work with Mindful USC, Dr. Pimentel teaches at the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) and at Insight LA, where she serves on the Board of Directors. She loves sharing the practice of mindfulness meditation as a tool for transformation, connection, well-being, wisdom, and individual and collective liberation.