MEMORANDUM
To: USC Faculty, Staff, and Students
From: Charles F. Zukoski, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs
Varun Soni, Vice Provost for Campus Wellness and Crisis Intervention and Dean of Religious Life
Date: August 26, 2020
Subject: Mindful USC
The global pandemic has challenged us in so many ways in our personal and professional lives, and in our mental, emotional, and spiritual health.
As a way of empowering our university community toward well-being and resilience, we are pleased to offer Mindful USC – a university-wide mindfulness initiative focused on positive health outcomes and learning experiences, especially in terms of stress reduction, workplace happiness, emotional intelligence, and artistic expression.
Mindful USC offers free mindfulness courses for students, faculty, and staff, and since its inception, more than 7,000 members of our university community have taken a Mindful USC course. The overwhelming majority of participants report significant improvements in terms of addressing stress and anxiety, and in developing more meaningful interpersonal relationships. Indeed, research studies have shown that mindfulness practices help us to be aware of ourselves in ways that increase attentiveness, deepen the quality of teaching and learning, encourage creativity and innovation, and improve our ability to collaborate effectively.
This semester, we will offer two online sessions of the popular courses Mindfulness Lab, Mindful Creativity, Mindful Writing, Mindful Parenting, and Mindful Self-Compassion. The first session starts on August 31st and the second session begins on October 12th.
We are also offering three additional well-being courses online: Click! (cultivating healthy friendships and relationships), Sleep (developing healthy sleeping habits and perspectives), and Happiness (examining the causes and conditions that lead to personal happiness). And we are excited to introduce our new initiative, Yoga USC, which offers free online yoga classes and other yoga opportunities for our university community.
If you are interested in taking any of these free courses online, please visit the Mindful USC website as enrollment is open now. We also encourage you to download our free Mindful USC app , which offers guided meditations and other mindfulness resources. For more information about Mindful USC, please contact mindful@usc.edu.
cc: Office of the President
Academic Deans
President’s Senior Leadership Team
Provost’s Leadership Team
Academic Senate
Staff Assembly
GSG President
USG President