Abbey Sussell, Missourian: In an overcrowded Acuff Auditorium at MU on Monday night, there was a moment of complete silence. The speaker, Sara Lazar, didn’t say a word as she stood in front of a group of people with eyes closed, sitting in chairs and on the floor.
“Scan through your body,” she said to the group. “What do your legs feel like? Your back?”
Lazar, a Harvard-affiliated researcher and an instructor in the psychiatry department at Massachusetts General Hospital, was demonstrating a large component of her work: mindfulness meditation.
Mindfulness meditation focuses on bodily sensations,sensory stimuli and a conscious awareness of the present…
