Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Our Time: A Curriculum that is up to the Task.

There is current heightened public consciousness of the intersecting challenges of social and racial injustice, other forms of inequity, and the climate and biodiversity crisis. We examine how these current realities influence how we engage as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Program (MBP) teachers and researchers. Although Kabat-Zinn developed MBSR as a vehicle to enable engagement with both the individual and the collective drivers of distress and flourishing, predominant research and practice trends within the MBP field have prioritised individual wellbeing, and have not been accessible to the full societal demographic. Furthermore, there is increasing recognition that the systemic social inequities that influence access to public services have not been addressed in the MBP field. In response, there is now an increasing trend exploring how MBP participation can influence 'bigger than self' concerns, with research, practice and theory suggesting that the inner personal transformation that mindfulness practice enables, supports individuals to compassionately reconnect to self, other and the natural world in ways that foster prosocial behaviour change, and enables awareness building of personal bias and conditioning. In this paper we present perspectives on ways of both retaining fidelity to the existing MBSR program, and simultaneously embracing anti-oppression teaching methods and content, and an inclusive recognition of the micro, meso and macro causes and conditions that drive distress and flourishing. We are a group of racially diverse MBP teachers and trainers from both sides of the Atlantic, who are engaged in training initiatives with people from Black, Latinex, Indigenous, Asian, and People of Color communities.

Purification of active RNA polymerase I from yeast.

Eukaryotic cells employ at least three nuclear, DNA-dependent RNA polymerase systems for the synthesis of cellular RNA. RNA polymerases I, II, and III primarily produce rRNA, mRNA, and tRNA, respectively. In a rapidly growing cell, most RNA synthesis is devoted to production of the translation machinery, with rRNA synthesis by RNA polymerase I representing more than half of total cellular transcription. The fundamental connection between ribosome biogenesis and cell growth is clear; furthermore, recent studies have identified transcription by RNA polymerase I as a key target for anticancer chemotherapy. Thus, efficient methods for characterizing transcription of the ribosomal DNA and its regulation are needed. In order to describe enzymatic features of an enzyme, in vitro assays are critical. Here we describe a method for purifying RNA polymerase I. This approach yields enzyme of sufficiently high quantity and activity for an array of experiments directed at describing the enzymatic properties of RNA polymerase I in detail.