Friday 27 April 2018

Responding to Change with a Wise Heart - Tara Brach


An intrinsic part of spiritual life is facing the truth of impermanence. When we open to the changing flow without resistance, we naturally cherish this passing life, and realize the timeless, changeless awareness that is our true home. Yet we are conditioned to grasp on to the passing pleasures (and all that we love) and resist the inevitable arising of stress and unpleasant experience. This talk includes teachings and guided reflections that help us identify the ways we are reacting to major changes in our life. We explore how to shift from reacting to meeting impermanence with an allowing presence, and then responding to our circumstances with wisdom and compassion.

image: jonathanfoust.com

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Teaching Kids How to Meditate — and Getting Schools on Board, Too

Dr. Michael Gervais has a podcast series called Finding Mastery built around a central goal: unpacking and decoding how the greatest performers in the world use their minds to create amazing journeys while they pursue the boundaries of human potential.

He recently sat down with Ali Smith, executive director of the Holistic Life Foundation. Ali has helped develop and pilot yoga and mindfulness programs at public and private schools, drug treatment centers, juvenile detention centers, mental crisis facilities, and retreat centers, both nationally and internationally. In this episode, Michael and Ali discuss how he got schools to believe in his mission, and the ways in which the foundation has made a big impact in many kids’ lives.

Michael: Ali Smith, how are you?

Ali: Doing wonderful Mike, how are you doing?

Michael: Fantastic. Fantastic. Ok, so where are you? We’re in different parts of the world right now, where are you?

Ali: I’m in Charm City—Baltimore, Maryland right now.

Michael: Ok. You called it Charm City?

Ali: Charm City, that’s what Baltimore is known as, Charm City.

Michael: I didn’t know that, where did that name come from?

Ali: I don’t know, I think it’s from all the charming and handsome people that live here, actually

Michael: Ok. So you’re going to drop this in the conversation, aren’t you? How wonderful and sexy you are.

Ali: I mean if it comes up, I’m not going to push the situation. But if it comes up I’ll definitely throw it out there.

Michael: Alright Ali, It’s been great to see your work, to feel your vibe over the years. And to celebrate around what you’ve been able to do in this city for young people, and you’re the co-founder of the Holistic Life Foundation, you kicked that off back in 2001. And can you give us a quick insight on what it is that you’re doing right now in the foundation, and then also add in some of the buzz that you’ve been receiving from a media standpoint as well.

Ali: OK. So the Holistic Life Foundation’s whole mission, when Andy and I first started, it was to bring yoga, mindfulness, and environmental education advocacy to under-served communities. But it’s gotten a lot bigger than that since 2001. Now we’re just bringing it to everyone. Our focus is Baltimore, but we do programs nationally and internationally as well. Yoga and mindfulness have become the crux of what we do. Most of the programs that we do offer school-age children in K through 12. In Baltimore City alone, we were working in this past school year, 17 or 18 schools, working with about 7,500 kids a week and that’s just in Baltimore City public schools alone. And a lot of what we do is around reciprocal teaching, so we’re not just teaching kids to use the skills and tools, but we also teach them to be teachers, because they’re more likely to take the skills home and teach the parents, to teach people in their community, and that’s how we’ve seen the biggest change we made.

Michael: So there is a thought that’s been important in my life, which is meet them where they sweat and it’s a way to think about having such a regard for the person that you’re willing to go to where they go, you’re willing to meet them in the condition that they’re in. So you’re doing the exact same thing for people, for kids, in schools. You’re going to the place that they’re naturally there, and you’re teaching mindfulness and teaching yoga as strategies. Why are you doing this?

Ali: I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that Andy and I really got into these practices when we graduated college. Andy and I had some introduction to them as little kids, like little, little kids. But when we finished up in college we really delved deeper into the practice, and it was pretty much what most of our time was, experimenting on ourselves with yoga, mindfulness meditation, Pranayama, any contemplative practice we could get our hands on we were practicing, and we felt amazing. So we’re like well, we have to share this with as many people as possible. And the first outlet that just happened to pop up was a bunch of fifth graders at an elementary school. You know, the universe puts you on a path and if you can silence your mind enough to see where you’re being led it will lead you to these awesome places if you put in the work. I think we just put in the work, and the universe led us to things, kept expanding and expanding, that’s working with more kids, but then it expanded into us working with the teachers at the school, the principals and drug treatment centers, in mental illness facilities and homeless shelters and private schools, in retreat centers here and overseas, so it’s just like we really believe in what we’re doing and we really love the practice, so I think it’s just, we want to teach as many people in as many different walks of life as possible.

Michael: And what do you want to teach them?

Ali: I’d say, how to be inwardly happy, I think is what we really want to teach. You feel like a lot of the suffering that’s going on is created in like, the mind and all the things that are going on around us. But I mean, life is going to be stressful, life is going to be hectic. But if you can find that place of inner peace within you that you can always tap into, you can deal with life and the struggles inwardly and outwardly, because I mean, that life on the outside is going to beat you up. I feel like most people get beat up or in their own minds, more  than they do on the outside, so like worry gets in, gets in anger gets in, jealousy gets in, sadness gets in, and that’s where your mind stays. But if you have some options to catch those thoughts and switch them into something more positive, put them in perspective through the practice, you can gain that inner peace, that inner happiness. I think that’s what we really want to bring to people.

Life is going to be stressful, life is going to be hectic. But if you can find that place of inner peace within you that you can always tap into, you can deal with life and the struggles inwardly and outwardly.

Michael: And what does your practice look like. What does your training look like?

Ali: My personal training was a learning meditation from my dad. When I was around four or so, maybe five, I learned meditation from my dad and then we grew up in like a self-realization Fellowship Church, which was based on yoga, so there was a practice there. We got out of the practice as adults, but my dad’s best-friend, me and my brother’s godfather, he had gotten into yoga in like, the 60s so then we went to him and said we want to learn some yoga. So he taught us a lot of different forms. It started off more physical like hatha, and then it moved into like pranayama and a lot of the off the matt practices, meditation—and I’m still learning to this day.

Michael: And then how do you take the things that you’ve learned, and structure it in a way that little kids can learn?

Ali: I think that the way you put it was perfect, like meet them where they sweat, like we meet them where they are with the practices. We make the practices applicable to the struggles that they’re going through in their lives. We figure out ways to make them fun. I mean, because you don’t want to go back to something you see as drab or boring, but if we can make it fun and make it engaging, and also empower them with the practice so that they know how to use it when to use it in their own lives, and they can take control of their their reactions or get shifted into responses to what people are doing to them, the thoughts they’re going through in their mind. They feel more powerful and they can walk into their life with more confidence and be able to handle the situation that the world’s throwing at them.

Michael: And then what would be a specific practice that you ask people to train?

Ali: The first place we always start is with a deep breath. Most people don’t know how to take a deep breath, a full deep breath like down to their lower lungs, or a lot of people call it a belly breath and then incorporating their entire lung capacity. Most people know that there’s a lot of physiological and neurological benefits to just taking a deep breath and it’s very relaxing. Like I mean it’s amazing, we might walk into a school and teachers are stressed out, we show them how to take a deep breath, and they open their eyes and they’re like, I have not felt this calm in a really long time. And it’s just from being able to slow things down and take a deep breath. And that’s always where we start. Your life starts with the first breath and ends with your last breath, so it must be really, really important.

We might walk into a school and teachers are stressed out, we show them how to take a deep breath, and they open their eyes and they’re like, I have not felt this calm in a really long time.

Michael: I think there’s some recent research, or at least I think it’s recent, that at 18 deep breaths is when the parasympathetic nervous system begins to get triggered. And that’s the fancy phrase for the response to relaxation, or that the system that kicks in to find a more relaxed state in the body. So, can you walk us through like how do you train somebody to take a deep breath?

Ali: Most people are used to taking a deep breath, they do the stomach and chest out thing, and but you’re not using your lower lungs where most of your lung capacity is. So it’s usually just getting someone to sit up straight, as long as your spine is straight and taking a hand to put it on your belly. All the breaths are going to be in and out of your nose, because your nose is the filter so you get a lot of benefits just by breathing it out through your nose. You’re just going to inhale and expand your belly as much as you can, you feel like you’re filling your belly up with air, it’s actually your lower lungs expanding with the help of your diaphragm. Then you get to hold onto that breath for a second and you leave your hand where it is, and you exhale and pull your belly away from your hand, creating space between your belly and a hand on that exhale measure, pulling your belly button to your spine. And most people think the inhale is really important, which it is, but the exhale is just as important because it’s pushing all that stale CO2 out of your body and it’s also get rid of all those ruminating thoughts, just like a link between your breath and your thoughts. Those stale thoughts are usually like stale air in your body and you can push the stale air out, you can push the stale thoughts out, you kind of hit the reset button and clear your mind. So it’s just a movement of your belly and the expansion of just a slow, long deep breath, as long and as deep as you can make it, and you’ll feel yourself start to slow down down.

Michael: And then do you have a particular cadence, like four up, six out, anything?

Ali: I mean, when we’re first starting we just let them go, because most people aren’t used to taking a deep breath. So we just let them go for whatever is comfortable. Ideally, it’s a one to two ratio. So if you inhale for five, you exhale for ten.

Listen to the full podcast to hear Michael and Ali discuss: 

  • What inspired him to create the Holistic Life Foundation
  • Their unique method for teaching yoga and mindfulness to children
  • Why it all begins with learning the value of one deep breath
  • Making a big impact in schools with “The Mindful Moment”
  • The backlash they faced as they rolled out mindfulness programs in public schools
  • How they found the money to launch their foundation
  • Their plans to make a bigger impact going forward

This podcast originally appeared on findingmastery.net

Raising Baltimore

Point of View: Should We Teach Mindfulness In Public Schools

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Thursday 26 April 2018

Meditation: Cultivating a Clear and Relaxed Presence (22:01 min.) - Tara Brach


This guided meditation begins with a calming breath to quiet the mind and relax the body. Following this, we establish our presence with an anchor – the breath, sound or sensation – and practice “coming back” from distractions, and including whatever direct experience asks for our kind attention. The meditation ends with a short loving kindness prayer.

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What Does It Mean to Be Grateful?

The breaking day was shimmering with the buzz of nature going about its business. Breathing in, I felt awakened by the delicate bite of the early spring air. Breathing out, I felt my warm breath rise like a morning prayer. There was nothing special going on, only gently bubbling stillness and beauty all around. A moment of peace. I felt grateful to be present and noticing.

What does it mean to be grateful? Thankfully, it doesn’t mean convincing yourself of some bogus notion that everything’s fine and dandy. Living your life with gratitude means choosing to focus your time and attention on what you appreciate. The goal is not to block out difficulties, but to approach those difficulties from a different perspective. Appreciation softens us. It soothes our turbulent minds by connecting us with the wonderfully ordinary things, great and small, that we might otherwise take for granted.

Go ahead and take gratitude for a spin right now. Think of anything at all in your life that you can feel thankful for: that driver who yielded when you realized you were in the wrong lane, the fact that the sun rose this morning, any quality in yourself that you admire. When you’re thankful, how does your body respond? Is there a sense of lightness? Tingling? Warmth? In what way does expressing gratitude change your outlook? Might there be a connection between gratitude and happiness?

Gratitude can help us see that not everything is terrible—not all the time, anyway. Practicing gratitude can keep our hearts open to the tenderness in our daily experiences. There are so many things to be grateful for. Take trees, for example. Trees freely provide fruit and shelter and even offer themselves as climbing gyms for the young, the old, and what-the-heck-are-you-thinking-get-down-from-there Nana! The wild kingdoms of plants and animals are exuberant, colorful, and extravagant. We are surrounded by abundance and yet mindlessly whirl into automatic pilot, losing sight of life’s nourishing wonders.

The same is true of people. Have you ever picked up someone else’s socks, or stayed late at the office to help out, or held a door open for a stranger, or let someone else have the remote? When no one bothers to thank you, how does it feel? And who do you fail to thank? Remember: Offering our appreciation to one another is a powerful way to strengthen and even repair emotional bonds. Try it. It’s free.

Offering our appreciation to one another is a powerful way to strengthen and even repair emotional bonds.

As we cultivate greater appreciation for what is around us, we can include being thankful for what’s inside of us. We can delight in and feel grateful for our own unique talents and strengths. Perhaps you have a knack for making people laugh, or for being an astute listener. Or maybe you can thank yourself for just getting out of bed and making it through the day. We can be grateful that we have a heart, a mind, and the wisdom to know how to live with kindness and compassion.

Here are some simple gratitude tips that you can try starting right now:

    1. Say “thank you!” Who doesn’t want to be appreciated for their efforts? Saying thanks can be a gift, and one that feels pretty good, too!
    2. Remember what you appreciate most. When you’re feeling low, take a moment and write down some things that spark gratitude in you, like:
      • The pleasure of the spring sun
      • A stirring piece of music or art
      • A delicious or nutritious meal
      • A child’s laughter, a stranger’s sweet smile, a shared moment of joy
    3. Pay attention to your emotions. Describe in as much detail as possible how your body feels when you express gratitude. Which emotions accompany these bubbly feelings? What kind of thoughts do you notice? When you begin to turn more frequently toward the things you appreciate, the world increasingly opens to reveal that there is always some small thing for which you can be grateful.
This article appeared in the April 2018 issue of Mindful magazine.

A 5-Minute Gratitude Practice: Focus on the Good by Tapping into Your Senses

What the Brain Reveals about Gratitude

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Tuesday 24 April 2018

Three Simple Ways Parents Can Practice Self-Compassion

When was the last time you beat yourself up for a parenting failure?

Perhaps your daughter got a D+ on the math test—and you regret some harsh words. Maybe you’re telling yourself that you bungled advice to your fifth-grader about how to handle an annoying classmate. You couldn’t keep your promise to attend your son’s music recital—and there’s a voice in your head telling you that you’re a terrible parent.

But there’s an alternative to that harsh self-talk: self-compassion. According to researcher Kristin Neff, “self-compassion provides an island of calm, a refuge from the stormy seas of endless positive and negative self-judgment.” As she defines it, self-compassion entails three components:

“First, it requires self-kindness, that we be gentle and understanding with ourselves rather than harshly critical and judgmental.”

“Second, it requires recognition of our common humanity, feeling connected with others in the experience of life rather than feeling isolated and alienated by our suffering.”

“Third, it requires mindfulness—that we hold our experience in balanced awareness, rather than ignoring our pain or exaggerating it.”

How is self-compassion related to parenting?  A recent study found that self-compassionate parents of adult children with developmental disabilities tend to have lower levels of stress and depression. In a 2015 study of parents of kids with autism, self-compassion is linked to more life satisfaction, hope, and re-engagement with life goals. Another study found that self-compassion may act as a shield against internalizing stigma—the negative evaluations and feelings others have about parenting children with autism.

A recent study found that self-compassionate parents of adult children with developmental disabilities tend to have lower levels of stress and depression

A new study by Amy Mitchell and colleagues provided Australian mothers with self-compassion resources and exercises, such as imagining how you would support someone else, remembering that you are not alone, and giving yourself a small act of kindness. Mothers who used the resources reported feeling more self-compassionate compared to mothers who did not—and they were less stressed and more satisfied with breastfeeding after the intervention.

Taken together, these studies suggest self-compassion may be a resource for resiliency and a protective buffer against both internal and external criticism. Can parents learn to be more self-compassionate? Of course.  Here are three steps you can take to build compassion for yourself.

1. Take routine self-compassion breaks

During the exhaustion and confusion of being a first-time parent, you may wonder how they even let you leave the hospital with the baby! Why isn’t breastfeeding magically easy? Where did you put the diapers? I stink! When am I going to be able to take another shower?

Those are the moments when you might try to take a self-compassion break. What does that look like?

First, accept the moment of suffering with a statement like, “This hurts.” Next, acknowledge that other first-time parents have felt this way—probably every first-time parent in the history of world! Last, offer yourself kindness, such as by saying, “May I give myself the compassion that I need as I try to care for my baby.”

Of course, it’s not always possible to take a break when you’re struggling to calm a weeping toddler. In that case, take a moment after the crisis has passed to give yourself a few kind words. Neff also recommends putting your hand over your heart, as a gesture of comfort toward yourself, or even giving yourself a hug. That might sound strange—but try it. See if it helps.

2. Practice loving-kindness meditation

It’s Monday. You’re trying to leave the house with your child so that you can get her to preschool and yourself to work for a 9:00 am meeting. She’s oblivious to the fact that even a five-minute delay would lead to a 15-minute difference in your commute time. She wants to put on her shoes and socks by herself. That takes a long time; you get impatient. Pretty soon, both you and your child are having a meltdown. After the meeting, you beat up on yourself for losing it.

This is where a preemptive, early-morning loving-kindness meditation can help. The idea is quite simple:

Think of a person close to you who loves you very much. Imagine that person sending you wishes for your safety, for your well-being and happiness. Feel the warm wishes and love coming from that person towards you.

Send your love back to that person. You and this person are similar. Just like you, this person wishes to be happy.

Next, think of an acquaintance, someone you don’t know very well. You and this person are alike in your wish to have a good life.

Then expand your awareness and picture the whole globe in front of you as a little ball. Send warm wishes to all living beings on the globe, who, like you, want to be happy.

In a recent study, Australian researchers James Kirby and Sarah Baldwin randomly assigned over 60 parents, mostly mothers in their mid-30s, to listen to either a 15-minute loving-kindness meditation or a focused imagery recording (a control condition). Before and after listening to the recordings, parents completed questionnaires on self-compassion and compassion motivation, and they provided their emotional responses to common parenting scenarios, such as children insisting on and crying loudly about having a candy bar during a shopping trip.

The results? Parents in the loving-kindness meditation group were more self-compassionate, more calm and sympathetic, and less angry and frustrated compared to the focused imagery control group. Kirby and Baldwin suggest that loving-kindness meditation “might help to support parents’ well-being, their capacity to be less reactive in responding to child distress, and their capacity to cultivate compassionate responses to their child.”

Parents in the loving-kindness meditation group were more self-compassionate, more calm and sympathetic, and less angry and frustrated compared to the focused imagery control group.

3. Visualize the presence of someone important to you when you need parenting support

Is there anything worse than an airplane meltdown? When your young child is crying about needing to sit still for hours on end, the glares of other people from the seats around you can make you feel very alone and despondent.

Try this: Displace those glares by visualizing a dear friend, partner, parent by your side, giving you support and help.

2015 study by Christopher Pepping and colleagues randomly assigned college freshmen to one of two groups. Students in the control group focused on reflecting on interpersonal skills that did not include security or compassion. The researchers asked students in the “attachment security priming group” to call to mind a person they are close to, that they could rely on to help them if they were in need. Perhaps not surprisingly, those students felt more self-compassion afterward than their counterparts in the control group.

I often call to mind the warmth of my own mom’s voice when I’ve struggled with parenting. I even use her nicknames and endearments in my self-compassion self-talk to marshal the power of her (and my own) tenderness to sustain me when I’m overwhelmed. Her presence in my mind’s eye reassures me even though she may not be physically beside me.

Indeed, our capacity for self-compassion is often formed by our relationship with our own parents. The 2015 study by Pepping and colleagues also found that college students who remembered parents as cold and rejecting were more likely to feel anxious about their close relationships, and in turn, tended to have lower levels of self-compassion.

Even if you didn’t grow up with good models of compassion, try to remember that self-compassion is a skill you can develop through practice. When you feel self-criticism rising in your head, put your hand on your heart—and talk to yourself as you would a dear friend who is suffering.

This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, one of Mindful’s partners. View the original article.

Teens Are Better Off When Parents Practice Self-Compassion (Study)

5 Steps to a Better Relationship With Yourself

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Thursday 19 April 2018

How Mindfulness May Change the Brain in Depressed Patients

In 2015, 16.1 million Americans reported experiencing major depression during the previous year, often struggling to function while grappling with crippling darkness and despair.

There’s an arsenal of treatments at hand, including talk therapy and antidepressant medications, but what’s depressing in itself is that they don’t work for every patient.

“Many people don’t respond to the frontline interventions,” said Benjamin Shapero, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital’s (MGH) Depression Clinical and Research Program. “Individual cognitive behavioral therapy is helpful for many people; antidepressant medications help many people. But it’s also the case that many people don’t benefit from them as well. There’s a great need for alternative approaches.”

Shapero is working with Gaëlle Desbordes, an instructor in radiology at HMS and a neuroscientist at MGH’s Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, to explore one alternative approach: mindfulness-based meditation.

In recent decades, public interest in mindfulness meditation has soared. Paralleling, and perhaps feeding, the growing popular acceptance has been rising scientific attention. The number of randomized controlled trials — the gold standard for clinical study — involving mindfulness has jumped from one in the period from 19951997 to 11 from 20042006, to a whopping 216 from 20132015, according to a recent article summarizing scientific findings on the subject.

Studies have shown benefits against an array of conditions both physical and mental, including irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, psoriasis, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. But some of those findings have been called into question because studies had small sample sizes or problematic experimental designs. Still, there are a handful of key areas — including depression, chronic pain, and anxiety — in which well-designed, well-run studies have shown benefits for patients engaging in a mindfulness meditation program, with effects similar to other existing treatments.

Still, there are a handful of key areas — including depression, chronic pain, and anxiety — in which well-designed, well-run studies have shown benefits for patients engaging in a mindfulness meditation program, with effects similar to other existing treatments.

“There are a few applications where the evidence is believable. But the effects are by no means earth-shattering,” Desbordes said. “We’re talking about moderate effect size, on par with other treatments, not better. And then there’s a bunch of other things under study with preliminary evidence that is encouraging but by no means conclusive. I think that’s where it’s at. I’m not sure that is exactly how the public understands it at this point.”

Desbordes’ interest in the topic stems from personal experience. She began meditating as a graduate student in computational neuroscience at Boston University, seeking respite from the stress and frustration of academic life. Her experience convinced her that something real was happening to her and prompted her to study the subject more closely, in hopes of shedding enough light to underpin therapy that might help others.

“My own interest comes from having practiced those [meditation techniques]and found them beneficial, personally. Then, being a scientist, asking ‘How does this work? What is this doing to me?’ and wanting to understand the mechanisms to see if it can help others,” Desbordes said. “If we want that to become a therapy or something offered in the community, we need to demonstrate [its benefits]scientifically.”

Desbordes’ research uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which not only takes pictures of the brain, as a regular MRI does, but also records brain activity occurring during the scan. In 2012, she demonstrated that changes in brain activity in subjects who have learned to meditate hold steady even when they’re not meditating. Desbordes took before-and-after scans of subjects who learned to meditate over the course of two months. She scanned them not while they were meditating, but while they were performing everyday tasks. The scans still detected changes in the subjects’ brain activation patterns from the beginning to the end of the study, the first time such a change — in a part of the brain called the amygdala — had been detected.

In her current work, she is exploring meditation’s effects on the brains of clinically depressed patients, a group for whom studies have shown meditation to be effective. Working with patients selected and screened by Shapero, Desbordes is performing functional magnetic resonance imaging scans before and after an eight-week course in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, or MBCT.

In her current work, she is exploring meditation’s effects on the brains of clinically depressed patients, a group for whom studies have shown meditation to be effective.

During the scans, participants complete two tests, one that encourages them to become more aware of their bodies by focusing on their heartbeats (an exercise related to mindfulness meditation), and the other asking them to reflect on phrases common in the self-chatter of depressed patients, such as “I am such a loser,” or “I can’t go on.” After a series of such comments, the participants are asked to stop ruminating on the phrases and the thoughts they trigger. Researchers will measure how quickly subjects can disengage from negative thoughts, typically a difficult task for the depressed.

The process will be repeated for a control group that undergoes muscle relaxation training and depression education instead of MBCT. While it’s possible that patients in the control part of the study also will have reduced depressive symptoms, Desbordes said it should occur via different mechanisms in the brain, a difference that may be revealed by the scans. The work, which received funding from the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, has been underway since 2014 and is expected to last into 2019.

Desbordes said she wants to test one prevalent hypothesis about how MBCT works in depressed patients: that the training boosts body awareness in the moment, called interoception, which, by focusing their attention on the here and now, arms participants to break the cycle of self-rumination.

Desbordes said she wants to test one prevalent hypothesis about how MBCT works in depressed patients: that the training boosts body awareness in the moment, called interoception, which, by focusing their attention on the here and now, arms participants to break the cycle of self-rumination.

“We know those brain systems involved with interoception, and we know those involved with rumination and depression. I want to test, after taking MBCT, whether we see changes in these networks, particularly in tasks specifically engaging them,” Desbordes said.

Desbordes is part of a community of researchers at Harvard and its affiliated institutions that in recent decades has been teasing out whether and how meditation works.

In the 1970s, when transcendental meditation surged in popularity, Herbert Benson, a professor at Harvard Medical School and what was then Beth Israel Hospital, explored what he called “The Relaxation Response,” identifying it as the common, functional attribute of transcendental meditation, yoga, and other forms of meditation, including deep religious prayer. Benson described this response — which recent investigators say is not as common as he originally thought — as the opposite of the body’s adrenalin-charged “fight or flight” response, which was also identified at Harvard, by physiologist Walter Cannon Bradford in 1915.

Other MGH researchers also are studying the effects of meditation on the body, including Sara Lazar, who in 2012 used fMRI to show that the brains of subjects thickened after an eight-week meditation course. Work is ongoing at MGH’s Benson-Henry Institute; at HMS and Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Osher Center for Integrative Medicine; at the Harvard-affiliated Cambridge Health Alliance, where Zev Schuman-Olivier directs the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion; and among a group of nearly a dozen investigators at Harvard and other Northeastern institutions, including Desbordes and Lazar, who are collaborating through the Mindfulness Research Collaborative.

Among the challenges researchers face is defining mindfulness itself. The word has come to describe a meditation-based practice whose aim is to increase one’s sense of being in the present, but it has also been used to describe a nonmeditative state in which subjects set aside their mental distractions to pay greater attention to the here and now, as in the work of Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer.

Among the challenges researchers face is defining mindfulness itself.

Another challenge involves sorting through the many variations of meditative practice.

Recent scientific exploration has largely focused on the secular practice of mindful meditation, but meditation is also a component of several ancient religious traditions, with variations. Even within the community practicing secular mindful meditation, there are variations that may be scientifically meaningful, such as how often one meditates and how long the sessions are. Desbordes herself has an interest in a variation called compassion meditation, whose aim is to increase caring for those around us.

Amid this variation, an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction course developed in the 1970s by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center has become something of a clinical and scientific standard. The course involves weekly two- or 2½-hour group training sessions, 45 minutes of daily work on one’s own, and a daylong retreat. The mindfulness-based cognitive therapy used in Desbordes’ current work is a variation on that program and incorporates elements of cognitive behavioral therapy, which involves talk therapy effective in treating depression.

Ultimately, Desbordes said she’s interested in teasing out just what in mindful meditation can work against depression. If researchers can identify what elements are effective, the therapy may be refined to be more successful. Shapero is also interested in using the study to refine treatment. Since some patients benefit from mindfulness meditation and some do not, he’d like to better understand how to differentiate between the two.

“Once we know which ingredients are successful, we can do more of that and less, maybe, of the parts that are less effective,” Desbordes said.

Reprinted with permission from The Harvard Gazette.

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy May Reduce Recurrent Depression Risk

When You’re Depressed: Is There Room to “Let Go”?

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Tuesday 17 April 2018

How to Be a Resilient Parent

Imagine two equally talented graduates at their first jobs. Within a year, downsizing gets them both laid off. One becomes caught up in thinking he’s failed: I was never good enough. My boss hated me. The other decides, I wanted this job so badly. I better fix my resume and learn how to deal with a difficult boss better. Who moves through adversity more quickly?

The same attitude carries over for parents around daily routines, school, or anything else. If one parent expects bedtime to be stressful and another feels it should happen without much adult effort, who has a harder time sticking to sleep training when it gets challenging? Our perspective toward whatever we encounter in life fundamentally changes how we experience it.

Stress itself can be defined as the perception that something is more than we can handle. When we frame challenges as surmountable, we surmount them more easily. When we frame them as opportunities for failure, we more often fail. That may sound like the most hackneyed, clichéd advice ever, but it is a foundation of resilience research.

What is resilience?

Resilience relies on how we perceive our lives. So maybe we get queasy watching our child on stage for the first time; anxious and concerned, we start ruminating. Within those thoughts exist layers of assumptions, perspectives, and mental filters—I didn’t prepare her enough; she’s going to embarrass herself; I must do something to save her. If we feel our role is to protect kids from everything, that moment on stage becomes miserable. If we recognize we cannot shield our children from every hurt, but we’ve done our best, the experience changes—I’m almost as stressed as she is! Hope it goes well, but I’m here if it doesn’t.

Perception itself is malleable. In fact, this idea is a focus of the military’s resilience training for soldiers. Participants explore mental traps—habitual distortions that undermine emotional well-being. These pitfalls might represent thoughts like Asking for help is an admission of failure. They include catastrophizing the worst possible outcome of every situation or, alternatively, minimizing and ignoring whatever overwhelms. An overly active inner critic may continually let us know we are not good enough to manage. All these distortions represent filters that twist perspective and pull us away from resiliency.

With mindfulness practice, we learn to hold these patterns to the light and question ourselves: What is valid, if anything, and what isn’t useful? Is our view inflexible, reactive, or full of doubt? Without belittling ourselves or forcing ourselves to be unnaturally positive, we observe with curiosity and redirect ourselves until new habits develop: She’s on her own up on stage now; I’m nervous but need to let go.

Uncertainty and change are inevitable in life—doubly so for parents. Instinct drives us to worry and protect endlessly because we care more than anything about our families. But if the only relief we seek is striving to battle uncertainty into submission, that causes needless stress, as certainty never happens—and too much stress undermines not only how we feel but the choices we make day to day.

Laboring under the misperception that parenting worry is ever going away only makes us feel worse. We cannot and should not aim to control everything. Rather, we can shift our perspective to accept that stressful things happen over and over again. When we try to fix everything we face and reach for a perfect picture of happiness, we undermine our best intentions. The perception that parenting or any other part of life can be anything other than imperfect and changing pushes us far from our most skillful and resilient selves.

Laboring under the misperception that parenting worry is ever going away only makes us feel worse. We cannot and should not aim to control everything.

You can begin to separate your perspective from the experience itself. Many attitudes toward adversity seem like factual statements: Those people are like that. My child will never . . . I’m not the sort of person who ever . . . Notice those habitual thoughts, and ask of each, Is it true? Drop your assumptions and predictions for a while, and see what changes.

Try catching yourself with this simple STOP practice: Stop whatever you’re doing; take a few slow breaths; observe what’s going on around you and in your mind; and pick how to proceed. For a longer practice, follow the instructions below.

Follow the STOP practice

Stop what you’re doing; put things down for a minute. Get comfortable in the position you’re in, almost as if you’re relaxing into this moment.

Take a few deep breaths. See if you can tune in to the subtle sensations involved with inhalation and with exhalation, as if this were the first time you’ve ever noticed your breathing.

Observe your experience just as it is. If your mind wanders, gently guide it back to this moment. Notice any feelings present and how they’re being expressed. Research shows that just naming your emotions can turn the volume down on the fear circuit in the brain. Turn your attention to your body. How is your posture? How does it feel?

Proceed. As the stress response begins to calm, ask the question: What’s most important right now to pay attention to? Whatever comes up in your mind, that’s what you’ll continue with.

Six steps to shift perceptions

The following suggestions, adapted from recommendations of the American Psychological Association, provide a framework for shifting perceptions and building resilience:

1. Make connections and accept help. Value relationships with close family members and friends, prioritizing time with them, and reach out for support when needed.

2. Monitor for mental traps. Whenever undermining habits appear, pause, label them catastrophizing again, and redirect. For example, if you feel shut down by fear, acknowledge that fact, then refocus on something useful to be done as a first step: If nothing else, I’m calling the pediatrician today and getting a referral.

3. Nurture a positive view of yourself. Catch your inner critic in action, set it aside, and focus on your own strengths instead: Thanks anyway, I wish I’d done it differently but I didn’t. What would be the best thing to do now?

4. Aim to accept that change and uncertainty are a part of living. One common misperception that undermines well-being and resilience is fighting with whatever is truly beyond our control. Even when something upsetting happens, separate that experience from a broader expectation that it “shouldn’t” have happened in the first place.

5. Develop step-by-step goals and take decisive action. Rather than detaching and wishing stress away, stay proactive. When tasks seem unachievable, ask, What’s one small thing I can accomplish that moves me in the direction I want to go?

6. Take care of yourself. Engage in activities that you enjoy and find relaxing. Taking care of yourself helps to keep your mind and body primed for resilience.

Tune in to your experience

Children learn more from what you do than what you say, so your resilience—the way they watch you approach adversity—affects theirs. Pay attention to how you experience challenges. Note how your body feels, your emotions, and where your thoughts go. Are you projecting your fears about the future? Are you caught up in regret or resentment? We often add to unpleasant moments in ways that make them even more difficult.

Adapted from How Children Thrive: The Practical Science of Raising Independent, Resilient, and Happy Kids by Mark Bertin, MD. Copyright 2018 by Mark Bertin. To be published by Sounds True in May 2018.

4 Strategies for Mindful Parenting

5 Ways to Build Resilience Every Day

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The Mindful FAQ: When to Make a Meditation Session Longer

I meditate for 15 minutes every morning, and I’ve become pretty comfortable with that routine. Should I increase the length of my sessions?

If you’ve developed a solid routine like this, of sitting for any amount of meditation every day, the first thing you should do is to pause and take that in. That is an important and noteworthy accomplishment that many people only dream of. Great work!

There is some emerging evidence that more benefits may result from spending more time in mindfulness practice, but I would suggest letting your experience be your guide. What feels right to you? Do you notice the impact of your practice on the rest of your life? Would you appreciate more of what- ever it is that you notice? That could be the answer to your question.

There is some emerging evidence that more benefits may result from spending more time in mindfulness practice, but I would suggest letting your experience be your guide.

But curiosity should really be your guide in this situation. See if you might look at extending your practice as a kind of experiment or adventure—try adding 5, 10, or 15 minutes—letting go of specific expectations about what that longer practice might yield, and simply show up and be curious. See what you notice, just like you always have. Some people find that when they practice for longer than 15 minutes, they face challenges that never arise in shorter practice sessions. That may or may not be your experience, but you’ll never know unless you try. And as far as science knows, you’re very unlikely to overdose on a little bit of regular meditation practice!

This article appeared in the June 2018 issue of Mindful magazine.

5 Questions to Keep Your Meditation Practice Going

Which Style of Meditation is Best for You?

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Using Science to Start a Conversation

A thousand years ago, when I was in grade 12, I had a physics teacher, Mr. Weeks, who was legendary for the powerful experiences that took place in his classroom. Until Mr. Weeks’s class, I found science tedious and boring, but he changed everything. His class was focused not on the answers, but on the questions. He injected awe and wonder into our mutual explorations of how the world worked. I hope we have all had a teacher like that.

When I disputed one of the core tenets of physics, he didn’t respond with the kind of implied put-down I was used to: “How could a high school student know better than the great minds of the ages?” Instead, he started out from the assumption that I may be right, and engaged me in a debate. The second law of thermodynamics did not fall that day, but I did come to a better understanding by being allowed to question it.

Science is always a balancing act between explaining and exploring, between curiosity satisfied and curiosity stoked. When the most popular explanation for something becomes well established, it turns into dogma, until someone comes along to challenge it. Everybody thought they knew how the universe was put together until Galileo came along and said, “I’m not so sure.” He lost his life for that.

Science is always a balancing act between explaining and exploring, between curiosity satisfied and curiosity stoked.

How we use science matters. Just think of all the attempts to use “scientific” arguments to prove one gender or race as superior to another. When that happens, the spirit of inquiry and exploration are long gone. Science just becomes a convenient way to end the conversation.

In the past several decades, neuroscience—or at least jargon that is loosely based on neuroscience—has been used to explain what’s going on with mindfulness and meditation or why we need it. Sometimes explanations come in the form of graphic stories about how we get hijacked by the ancient, “reptilian” part of our brain and need the new, improved parts of the brain to come to the rescue. And these newer parts are associated with mindfulness, which, like a superhero, takes care of the villainous emotional region of the brain that has once again gotten us into trouble.

It’s a nice parable, and some grains of truth probably reside there somewhere, but the idea of the reptilian brain was dismissed long ago in mainstream neuroscience. It was simply a hypothesis. And the idea that brain regions have one job to do does not accurately reflect how all the parts of the brain work together in a complex web of millions of interactions.

In trying to explain how mindfulness works, let’s not lose our sense of wonder and stray into fixed ideas and dogma. Mr. Weeks would not be pleased.

This article appeared in the June 2018 issue of Mindful magazine.

Meditators Under the Microscope

What is the Science of Mindfulness Missing?

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The Mindful Survey: Like Body, Like Mind

What is your strongest sense perception?

The most acute sense among respondents was hearing, with 34%. Sight is the runner-up (28%), followed by the mysterious sixth sense, at 17%. Smell and touch were tied with 10% each, and only 1% chose taste.

What is your favorite exercise to do mindfully?

  • Walking
  • Weight lifting
  • Hiking
  • Kayaking
  • Mindful aikido
  • Karate
  • Dancing
  • Cleaning the house
  • Barre classes
  • Reiki
  • Biking

Body and mind: What’s their relationship?

Mindful survey results

When do you feel most centered?

 Do you practice mindful eating?

23% say they cultivate the habit of eating mindfully. 36% have tried it once or twice. 16% eat mindfully only when they’re not too hungry (we’ve all been there!). 20% have never tried a mindful eating practice. Finally, 5% make the case that mindfulness shouldn’t relate to pressures about so-called right and wrong ways to eat.

What is your favorite food to eat mindfully?

  • “Peanuts.”
  • “Baby carrots…or potato chips.”
  • “My first cup of coffee in the morning!”
  • “A Malteser.”
  • “Dessert.”
  • “If I have to eat something mindfully, it needs to be chewy and/or sticky, like dried fruit.”
  • “Biryani.”
  • “Salad—so many things grown from the earth, picked by hand, and made available to me with nutrients to fuel my body.”
  • “Wine and cheese.”
  • “Anything crunchy and juicy and fresh.”
  • “Chocolate!”
  • “Probably something smooth like yogurt.”
  • “Sushi.”

Do physical cues (e.g., sitting up straight, deep breathing) help you to practice mindfulness?

Mindful survey results

Hugs are …

  • 58% A genuine way to connect physically and emotionally. Hugs all around!
  • 37% Nice, but only with good friends or family members.
  • 1% Reserved for family reunions or under duress.
  • 4% Awkward. I want my personal space.

What emotion creates the strongest feeling in your body?

The least powerful physical response comes from relief, with only 3%. Sadness and happiness also scored low (7% and 8%), and love only a little higher at 11%. Unpleasant emotions had the highest scores: fear (18%), anger (19%), and anxiety (34%).

In one word, how would you describe the relationship between your mind and body?

  • “A journey.”
  • “Complicated.”
  • “Attuned.”
  • “Strengthening.”
  • “Progressing.”
  • “Overrated.”
  • “Compelling.”
  • “Struggling.”
  • “Integrated.”
  • “Tentative.”
  • “Give-and-take.”
  • “Inextricable.”
  • “Mysterious.”
  • “Scattered.”
  • “Balancing.”
  • “Compassionate.”
  • “Can’t do a word…a love in progress.”
This article appeared in the June 2018 issue of Mindful magazine.

Body and Mind Integration

How the Mind Helps Heal the Body

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The Quest to Live Forever

When the respected physiologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard extolled the rejuvenating properties of mashed-up puppy and guinea pig testicles before Paris’s Société de Biologie in 1889—describing how injections of the liquefied gonads allowed him to perform experiments for hours on end while standing, lift 100 pounds with ease, and expel a jet of urine 25% farther than he could before—he was not the first scientist who claimed to have discovered a way to turn back the biological calendar. The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 BC), for instance, recounted the king’s search for eternal life (it turns out to be a thorny marine plant, but he doesn’t manage to hang on to it). And the “recipe for transforming an old man into a youth” can be found in an Egyptian medical text from 2500 BC. I’ll save you the trouble: It’s a fruit-infused mudpack for the face.

Nor, of course, was Brown-Séquard’s the last such discovery. A few decades after his death at age 76 (oh, well) in 1894, other fountain-of- youth fads swept Europe and America. Implants of goat testicles into men’s scrota became all the rage in the 1920s, and the “Steinach operation,” basically a one-side vasectomy, promised to increase vigor, reduce fatigue, and slow aging. Among the recipients was poet William Butler Yeats. I leave to your imagination why these early efforts focused on men and their reproductive organs and ask a different question: Why are some people obsessed with extending life span?

For obsessed is what many are. In the last few years anti-aging research has been attracting buckets of public and private funding, the United Kingdom’s Nuffield Council on Bioethics pointed out in a report released in January 2018. Tech billionaires have been sinking money into what is variously called life extension, the end of aging, a search for immortality, or, as longtime biology-of-aging scientist Cynthia Kenyon put it more modestly to The Guardian, a way to “have a healthy life and then turn out the lights.”

That describes the goal of some in the anti-aging world. Health spanners want to discover genetic tweaks, medications, and other interventions that will give people a healthier life and, in particular, a healthier late-in-life life—by postponing or eliminating disease, decrepitude, and dementia—followed by a quick and painless death. In 2016 the US National Academy of Medicine launched a “Grand Challenge for Healthy Longevity,” which will award at least $25 million for breakthroughs in increasing health span. That, however, wouldn’t necessarily extend life span, or not more by than a few years.

Even if we conquered all disease, cellular aging baked into our DNA and made inevitable by the laws of thermodynamics would eventually “turn out the lights.” That’s where other anti-aging warriors come in. Immortalists like PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel talk about living forever. The credo of most immortalists, though, is better summed up by British researcher Aubrey de Grey, whose TED talk on conquering biological aging has been viewed some 3.5 million times: The first humans who will live to 1,000, he argues, are alive right now. Dr. Joon Yun, who runs the Palo Alto Investors healthcare hedge fund, has said, “Thermodynamically, there should be no reason we can’t defer entropy indefinitely. We can end aging forever.” He didn’t say “end death,” but eliminating aging and overturning entropy would probably get us at least to de Grey’s 1,000-year-olds.

Dr. Joon Yun, who runs the Palo Alto Investors healthcare hedge fund, has said, “Thermodynamically, there should be no reason we can’t defer entropy indefinitely. We can end aging forever.”

Thanks to both health spanners and immortalists, “We are seeing huge market demand for aging research,” funded primarily by private investors, according to neuroscientist Terrie Moffitt of Duke University, who contributed to the Nuffield Council’s report.

The investment is driven, in part, by legitimate advances in understanding the biology of aging. Although there is no consensus about its precise cellular or genetic causes, scientists have made significant strides in identifying key components of aging, such as the shortening of telomeres (stretches of DNA at the ends of chromosomes) and the activation or suppression of different genes.

They are also identifying ways to target the drivers of aging. A clinical trial of metformin, a diabetes drug, is expected to start this year: The drug boosts the activity of an enzyme called AMPK, which not only lowers blood sugar (hence diabetes) but seems to also prevent diseases of aging. Other studies are examining the super-low calorie regimen called dietary restriction, which can extend healthy life span in a range of animals and slow biological aging in people. Here, the focus is on finding molecules that mimic the molecular effects of an 800-calorie-a-day regimen (which few of us can manage, even if eternal life beckoned). In a similar vein, the craze for resveratrol, a compound in red wine, peaked a decade ago once studies began showing that people who took resveratrol pills didn’t live longer or healthier. Nevertheless, research continues, buoyed by the fact that the compound affects the activity of aging-related enzymes called sirtuins.

Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page spent a reported $1 billion to launch the bio-technology company Calico, whose mission is to slow or stop cellular aging and thus “enable people to lead longer and healthier lives.” Unity Biotechnology, which also seeks to thwart aging, has drawn investments of at least $116 million from Thiel and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Some people are so optimistic that scientists will eventually vanquish aging and possibly death—although perhaps not soon enough for them personally— that 150 people have paid to preserve either their heads ($80,000) or their entire bodies ($200,000) in liquid nitrogen at the Scottsdale, Arizona, facility of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, including de Grey and the futurist Ray Kurzweil. The obsession of tech billionaires with defeating aging even became a plot point in the HBO series Silicon Valley, with one particularly odious executive hiring a strapping youth to give him regular infusions of young blood.

Elysium Health, cofounded in 2014 by MIT biologist Leonard Guarente to extend health span and slow biological aging, raised $20 million in 2016 alone, valuing the private company at just north of $150 million. Although Guarente, who discovered how sirtuins affect aging, is sometimes portrayed as an immortalist, he views his anti-aging research “as a branch of medicine,” he said. “I hope that what comes out of it is a way to improve our health… To think that we can program immortality is ludicrous.”

Why do tech billionaires believe otherwise? “There is a kind of hubris there, the hubris of powerful men,” said Julian Hughes, professor of Old Age Psychiatry at England’s University of Bristol and a coauthor of the Nuffield Council report. That hubris nurtures a belief that they are too powerful and too important to die. Philosopher David Archard of Queen’s University Belfast, chair of the Nuffield Council, said he wouldn’t be surprised if “the denizens of Silicon Valley take themselves seriously enough to believe their immortality or delayed death is in humanity’s best interests.”

Yet many people face the prospect of their demise with equanimity. “A lot of people think death will be a release and even welcome it,” said Hughes. “Their spouse has died, their friends have died; they’ve had enough, really.”

The realization that drives those who accept the inevitability of death can also kick in well before one has “had enough.” Most people agree that death as such “is bad because it deprives us, finally and irrevocably, of what gives value to life,” including pleasure, happiness, friendship, knowledge, and love, Archard said. “On that view, the longer you live—with infinite extension of life as best of all—the more of these goods or constituent pleasures you can enjoy. If one more day of life is preferable, then surely an infinite number of further days is optimal?”

But an enduring strand in philosophy answers, surely not. What gives our activities, work, and relationships meaning and purpose and value “is that they are pursued with a finite life,” Archard said. “An immortal existence would run out of purpose.”


Craze or crazy?: Young blood

One of the anti-aging schemes sprouting up in Silicon Valley harvests the blood of teenagers, extracts the plasma, and injects it into older clients.

The Monterey, California, start-up Ambrosia charges $8,000 for plasma transfusions, 1.5 liters at a time, over the course of two days. Founder Jesse Karmazin, MD, is conducting trials on his patients and claims to have demonstrated improved sleep and reductions in proteins associated with cancer and Alzheimer’s disease—although mainstream scientists have criticized the trials for lacking a control group and drawing its cohort only from those who can afford the steep fee.

This article appeared in the June 2018 issue of Mindful magazine.

Mindfulness: The Antidote to Anti-Aging

3 Ways to Power Boost Your Aging Brain

https://www.mindful.org/mindfulness-the-antidote-to-anti-aging/

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Finding Beauty Inside

At 15, Dubliner and self-described tomboy Alison Canavan was entered into a modeling competition by her mother. It marked the start of a whirlwind career that found her traveling the globe, featured in the pages of international fashion magazines, walking runways for leading designers, and living the high life in cultural hubs like New York City, Paris, and London. But there was a shadow of sadness following her, which had emerged in her teens and haunted her throughout her twenties. And it was made worse by the nonstop partying lifestyle she threw herself into, with alcohol her drug of choice.

When she drank, she says, “I felt free, I felt good, I had confidence, and I had no worries.” Drinking soon became her obsession: when she could drink, how much she could drink, feeling remorse about something she’d done while drinking—that is, when she could remember what had happened. She tried to stop on occasion, including by attending AA meetings, but couldn’t admit she belonged there. As the years wore on, her “lows got lower,” she recalls. She began relying on Xanax “just to leave the house and get on the subway,” and took Valium to sleep. “Whenever I felt an emotion, I swallowed it with a pill,” she says.

This is an excerpt of Mindful’s feature on Alison Canavan from the June 2018 issue of Mindful magazine. Subscribe to the digital issue of Mindful to read Kelle Walsh’s full interview and get immediate access to the June issue.

Can Mindfulness Help Stop Substance Abuse?

4 Strategies for Mindful Parenting

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Monday 16 April 2018

We Don’t Need Silencing, But We Do Need Silence

Emma Gonzalez—the high school student who survived the Parkland school shooting and became an activist seeking changes in America’s response to gun violence—stood in silence for six minutes and twenty seconds on March 24 at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, DC. She wanted to acknowledge the amount of time it took for 17 students to be murdered and 17 students to be maimed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine’s Day.

Her lengthy moment of silence made the words she had chosen to say up to that point even more eloquent. It was a brave and a bravura moment. It takes courage to stand resolutely in front of people and tacitly ask them to join you in silence. Silence in public can be very awkward, but it can also be powerful.

In these times when our communities are divided along many lines, perhaps we need more silence. Perhaps we need more quiet.

Yes, we need to speak up—without question.

People who haven’t been heard need to be heard. We don’t need silencing, but we do need to find little bits of time free of noise, and free of talking.

Words can convey deep meaning, obviously. They can help us to understand others. They can help us to be understood. But words can also obscure and overcomplicate. Words can become empty. They can become noise.

And when words become noise, the noise distracts us. We are tempted to always respond in kind, to have something to say, to offer a counterargument—and that may be needed—but sometimes not saying is helpful. It helps us to have moments to listen to our own mind, to listen to our own heart, and to take the time to feel, deeply. When we are able to do that, we may be able to find the space to uncover the openness we need to accept changes and to make changes.

It helps us to have moments to listen to our own mind, to listen to our own heart, and to take the time to feel, deeply.

Given a chance, all of us respect the power of silence, even if we have to pass through some discomfort to get there. Listening to Emma Gonzalez say exactly nothing for over six minutes, many people grew restive and started to interrupt the quiet to ease the tension with small pockets of noise. And yet, the majority of people did not break the silence. They sensed it would be breaking something precious.

Silence not only can provide space and peace, it can also disrupt our complacency by demanding our full attention with something bigger than words alone. When someone chooses not to speak, as the saying goes, the silence can “speak volumes.” Nearly 50 years before the landmark March on Washington that thrust Martin Luther King, Jr. into the limelight, in July 1917, over 8,000 African-Americans marched through the streets of Manhattan wordlessly, to call attention to lynchings, shootings, and mob violence perpetrated against African-Americans. It is regarded as a key element in the birth of the modern civil rights movement.

Let’s all try to share more quiet. It may help us sort out what is worth sharing and what we need to listen to, particularly in fractious times. It may help us respond to others—particularly those with whom we disagree—more genuinely rather than simply reacting in a standard way. Our words, when we choose them, may have more power. We may listen with more of ourselves.

Meditation is often thought of as fancy and complicated, and maybe even hard to do. But a lot of meditation, of mindfulness, has simply to do with being truly quiet for a time. Underneath all the noise, we may touch in with a natural restfulness and clarity that can help us find our way.

Why Listening is the Most Radical Act

Point of View: The Radical Act of Creating Space

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Friday 13 April 2018

Cultivate a Mindful Attitude with These New Books and Podcasts

THE MIND OF THE LEADER

How to Lead Yourself, Your People, and Your Organization for Extraordinary Results
Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter (Harvard Business Review Press)

For years, Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter have been tirelessly promoting mind training as the secret sauce for those who want to lead people in the pursuit of big aims. All great aims, be they commercial or societal, require great leadership, and The Potential Project, a global leadership and corporate training group, tries to foster better leadership through mindfulness. Hougaard is its founder and managing director, and Carter its North American director. They teamed up on a first book in 2015, One Second Ahead, which focused on how a culture that equates moving fast with productivity can cripple our brains and hamper creativity and genuine productivity.

This second book lays out succinctly and in clear language a three-part approach to leadership, as indicated in the subtitle: yourself, other people, the organization as a whole. The book begins with some core principles, such as that the most vital element to manage is attention, and proceeds to dissecting the anatomy of our daily habits, including how our focus fluctuates and why it helps to understand these diurnal rhythms. The book goes on to give compelling advice in short sections bolstered by illustrations and examples from people the authors have worked with. For instance, they expand on the motto “give credit, take blame” with a short story of how a partner at an accounting firm was able to help an employee rectify a BIG mistake with a client (to the client’s satisfaction) without having to bite the employee’s head o or even speak harshly to them. Books like this should be required reading in business schools everywhere.

ATTITUDES OF GRATITUDE

How to Give and Receive Joy Every Day of Your Life
M.J. Ryan and Mark Nepo (Conari Press)

As most of us have heard by now, gratitude is a free, immediate, yet quickly forgotten way to feel happier. This book, belying the cutesiness of its title, offers considerable wisdom on that most underrated superpower. The plural attitudes captures the deeper understanding of gratitude that runs throughout: Being thankful, Ryan counsels, fits perfectly wherever you find yourself. She brings in a mish-mash of anecdotes, teachings, and quotations— some of them spiritual, some scientific, and others that land in a weird gray area (do bacteria actually grow better when you pray for them?). No matter your perspective on life in this moment, the gentle compassion of this book offers many ways to make the view a little brighter.

TRANSFORMING JUSTICE, LAWYERS, AND THE PRACTICE OF LAW

Marjorie A. Silver (Carolina Academic Press)

Few would think of law as a “healing profession,” but Marjorie Silver—a law professor at the Touro College Law Center in Central Islip, New York—does. In fact, she wrote the book on it: The Affective Assistance of Counsel: Law as a Healing Profession. In this follow-up book, she and 15 other legal minds explore more compassionate ways to resolve disputes and achieve justice. It looks at changes we can make in our courtrooms, classrooms, and communities to bring our justice systems more in line with deeply held values. An essay by Rhonda Magee considers how mindfulness-based “learning communities” can be an incubator for new ways of practicing law.

WHAT NOW?

Meditation for Your Twenties and Beyond
Yael Shy (Parallax Press)

“Young people in their twenties and thirties are rapidly becoming the ‘meditation generation,’” writes Yael Shy. As the main mind behind MindfulNYU—the country’s largest campus-wide meditation program—and as someone who began meditating in college to assuage her crippling anxiety, Shy is well qualified to recommend the practice. This is particularly true if you’ve felt like mindfulness or meditation are out of touch with the instability and unrelenting freakiness of the challenges that young people have to navigate. What Now? offers her steady, compassionate advice on tech–life balance, mindfulness in relationships, social justice, mental health, and more. Shy’s set of meditative exercises at the end ties it all together, so that you can start right now.

THE JOY OF DOING NOTHING

A Real-Life Guide to Stepping Back, Slowing Down, and Creating a Simpler, Joy-Filled Life
Rachel Jonat (Simon & Schuster)

Rachel Jonat, who also blogs on minimalism and parenting, takes a stand against the assumed virtuousness of a maxed-out schedule when she encourages us to “create time and space for that most luxurious of activities: doing nothing.” Just like having less stuff lets you enjoy the stuff you have more, she writes, making time to zone out enables you to be more fully present, for yourself and loved ones. Sound familiar? For context, experienced practitioners say being mindful eventually becomes effortless. So will practiced effortlessness also make you mindful?

DESPERATELY SEEKING SELF-IMPROVEMENT

A Year Inside the Optimization Movement
Carl Cederström and André Spicer (OR Books)

Back in the day, engineers at Toyota invented a manufacturing and teamwork methodology called kaizen, which is still popular today. It’s often translated as “continuous improvement,” which would lead you to believe that it would be just perfect for the self- improvement, optimization, and life-hacking movement currently sweeping the planet. There’s only one hitch, though. One of kaizen’s guiding principles is sufficiency, making do with what you’ve got, adding as little as possible, and using imagination to let simple solutions emerge. The optimization movement seems generally to be driven by the opposite notion: insufficiency. You are never enough. There is never enough. There’s something wrong with you, and you’ve got to fix it. And when you’re done with that, find something else to fix. It’s not based on teamwork, either. It’s individualistic and even narcissistic at times: What the world needs now is a better me.

Carl Cederström, a professor of organization studies at the Stockholm Business School, and André Spicer, an organizational behavior professor at the Cass Business School, City University of London, first teamed up to write their 2015 book, The Wellness Syndrome, which expanded on this very point. In the unending pursuit of the holy grail of “wellness,” it’s easy to detach from seeking solutions together with others and retreat into a moralistic, blaming culture where the greatest sin is to not take perfect care of yourself. They’re not suggesting we stop eating our vegetables and exercising and just let ourselves go. They are suggesting that we let go of the obsession and the fault-finding, though, and start focusing on community more. After all, the planet is crying out for group solutions.

In Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement, which serves as a kind of sequel, the two professors decide to research the phenomenon more deeply by making themselves the guinea pigs for all manner of optimization schemes, including electric-shocking to improve concentration, meditation-improving headbands, memory- boosting regimens, plastic surgery, and master cleansing, to name just a few. The book is a satirical take on the same territory covered in their first book, but this book, which chronicles their improvement schemes in daily journals running in parallel, leads them to some very funny—and also very painful and even a little disturbing—places. Do not try this at home.

STRONG IN THE BROKEN PLACES

A Memoir of Addiction and Redemption Through Wellness
Quentin Vennie and Jon Sternfeld (Rodale Books)

Quentin Vennie’s memoir does many things. It recalls a life wrenched by generational pain, fear, and self-doubt. It evokes being poor and black in Baltimore, and the instability and discrimination that plague poverty and blackness. And it especially captures the nightmare of addictions, some of them medically sanctioned.

Yet it also affirms how Vennie—aided by his wife, Nicole, and their son, Jayden— fights the odds to find healing. Green juice, yoga, and meditation become his “wellness trio,” the path he advises for vibrant living. “Your reaction to the pain will not change the fact that it exists,” he writes, “but it will change the impact that it has in your life.”

HOW TO FIGHT

Thich Nhat Hanh (Parallax Press)

No matter how regularly we practice mindfulness, we’re bound to lose our cool once in a while. Nobody’s perfectly calm and collected all the time—that’s not what being human is all about. The human experience is rife with emotions, which can be rather messy but can also open up opportunities to cultivate compassion.

Thich Nhat Hanh’s concise, beautifully illustrated book contains straightforward insights for how to work with conflicts in a more compassionate, openhearted way. Each page stands alone, so the reader need only flip to a random page to access a little snippet of wisdom. This book probably won’t prevent the occasional emotional outburst or defensive reaction, but it may make those moments more manageable—and even fruitful.

OUR SENSES

An Immersive Experience
Rob DeSalle (Yale University Press)

Since forever, philosophers and ordinary people alike have been wondering how it is we come to know something, since whatever we experience seems to come to us through the gateways we call “the senses.” Our sense organs—noses, ears, eyes, tongues, skin—are pretty bizarre-looking objects, which is why sci-fi cartoonists have such fun reshaping them to create alien life-forms. Without these receptors, the world is just a chaotic blizzard of events. Our senses give them form and significance and enable us to make our way around without doing serious damage (usually). But as Rob DeSalle—curator at New York’s famous American Museum of Natural History—makes clear in this wonderfully detailed account, we’re not all sharing the same exact world. Ever known someone who can’t stand cilantro (maybe that’s you)? They may be a “supertaster,” which means they experience an overwhelming bitterness, where you’re tasting pure joy. (DeSalle shares a theory that some great chefs are supertasters who use their highly attuned taste buds to create great dishes that may not actually taste all that good to them!)

He explores each of the main senses in intricate detail, but does not limit himself to “the big five.” Defining what is and isn’t a sense is tricky, he admits, and he steers clear of enumerating the 33 discrete senses that some researchers have posited, but he does focus on a few that he feels are critical to add: balance, pain (nociception), and hot-cold sensing. He also touches on proprioception (knowing where our body is in space) and sensing time of day. It’s key, though, to understand, he points out, that senses perform in concert, not as independent operators. They’re orchestral players, not soloists.

This book is, as the title suggests, an immersive sensory experience. Anatomical illustration is a high art, and it’s put to wonderful use here. In fine line drawings and diagrams, DeSalle paints for us a world that is an interplay between the structures within our bodies and thingies “out there,” such as “musk molecules,” resulting in our intimate connection with everything around us. The treatment of the senses is not limited to humans, but also explores how other organisms sense and make sense of the environment. It’s also not limited to ordinary experience, delving into hallucination, strokes, and other alterations to the standard sensory repertoire. This is a big book worth feasting on.

Three Podcasts on Rethinking How we Think

DESIGN MATTERS WITH DEBBIE MILLMAN

Episode: Tim Ferriss

His 4-hour-everything followers may be surprised to hear Tim Ferriss open up about his experience with depression and suicidal ideation while still a postgrad at Princeton University. But, just as with the more hackable areas of life, Ferriss has a straight-up view of exactly what the struggle is: “It’s very difficult to think your way out of things that you didn’t logically think your way into.” He shares some of his favorite ways to stay well, including: “curating” his social circle, a writing exercise for overcoming fears, and working out really, really hard. Another of his keys to maintain recovery? Daily meditation, as an opportunity for “observing your thoughts without getting tumbled by them.”

Q

Episode: How Sarah Slean’s musical and philosophical evolution led her to Metaphysics

Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah Slean shares how she was practicing meditation one night while riding the subway home, when she felt a “very menacing presence” beside her: “This terrifying- looking human being with this harsh look in his eyes, like he was going to hurt me and enjoy it.” Instead of reacting to a natural spike of anxiety, Slean struck up a friendly conversation. Gradually, the stranger opened up to her about his hardships. Their brief chat ended in exchanging email addresses; years later, Slean would write a song (on her newest album, Metaphysics) that reflects the profound effect each had on the other.

FREAKONOMICS RADIO

Episode: Why Is My Life So Hard?

Psychology professors Tom Gilovich, of Cornell University, and Shai Davidai, of The New School for Social Research, here investigate humankind’s pessimistic tendencies: Why do we often think we have it worse in life than anyone else? And why is it so hard to practice gratitude consistently? Their “headwinds/tailwinds asymmetry” theory says we are biased to underestimate what helps and overestimate what hinders us. If we can learn to notice “the invisibles,” taken-for-granted things that boost spirits—like having coffee with a friend—we’ll feel happier, longer.

This article appeared in the April 2018 issue of Mindful magazine.

 

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