Mindful Creation

Thursday, 20 February 2020

How Compassion at Work Ripples Out Into Communities

Greyston Bakery makes more than great-tasting brownies. Greyston, New York’s first registered Benefit Corporation, is making an impact on the community, society, and the environment. At the very heart of Greyston’s operations are the tenets of nonjudgment, embracing uncertainty, and loving action. It’s a philosophy that extends beyond the bakery floor into the offices of the executive leadership team and the board of directors meeting room.

“It’s imperative that business leaders think about their communities. This is our time,” says Greyston’s President and CEO Mike Brady. “How are we ever going to close this income inequality gap if we’re not progressive?”

The commercial brownie bakery pioneered Open Hiring, a system that guarantees a job to anyone willing and able to work. By answering two questions about their legal status and physical ability, an applicant’s name is added to a first-come-first-serve hiring list. When a position opens, the next person on the list joins a 6- to 10-month paid apprenticeship where they learn the skills to work in a commercial kitchen. If they complete the program successfully, they’ll earn a permanent position.

Greyston has created more than 3,500 job opportunities and employed as many people over its 38-year history, including former prisoners who struggle to find work once they finish their sentences. Almost half of ex-prisoners have no reported earnings in the first years after incarceration, and of those who do find work, half earn less than minimum wage, according to a 2018 report by the Brookings Institute.

Out of the bakery’s 100 current employees, 70 came through open hiring, says Brady. “We trust that everyone can be successful on a job, and we invest in that trust,” he says. “Everyone gets a chance.”

The model has certainly proved successful for the business. Sales have doubled over the past five years, from $10 million to $21 million.

It also provides a compelling story to other companies getting “woke” to their role in society.

Compassionate Roots

In the early 1980s, Zen Buddhist teachers Bernie Glassman and Sandra Jishu Holmes started a bakery named after their teaching center and home, Greyston Mansion, as a way to employ their students. Inspired by the concept of right livelihood, or an ethical path to success that does not cause harm, Glassman also envisioned it as an opportunity to support the surrounding community, especially those struggling with homelessness or other barriers to employment.

“We trust that everyone can be successful on a job, and we invest in that trust,” says Brady. “Everyone gets a chance.”

The mayor of Yonkers caught wind of the idea, and asked Glassman if he’d consider launching his community development experiment there. Homelessness was at the time widespread in the city, among other social issues. Glassman sold the mansion and closed the bakery, and moved operations a few miles up the Hudson River into an abandoned lasagna factory. A few years later and funded by the bakery’s success, he and Holmes launched a nonprofit community development organization to address needs beyond employment that keep people from thriving, including housing, childcare, social services, and more. Today this work is supported by the Greyston Foundation, which distributes bakery profits back into the community.

By the time Brady joined the team, first as a volunteer, then getting involved with the board, and then taking over operations for the bakery before moving into his current position, Greyston had long enjoyed the support of conscious capitalism vanguard Ben & Jerry’s, providing the key ingredient for its popular Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream. But while attending a Social Venture Circle conference, Brady realized how far Greyston’s story had traveled. “I was blown away by the reception of others when I told them where I worked,” he recalls. “I didn’t appreciate how highly regarded it was.”

He also realized that “there were a lot of business assets that were being under-realized.”

Today Greyston is the official brownie vendor to Delta Airlines, and has developed a line of products, including vegan brownies and blondies, for Whole Foods, among other clients. Some 35,000 pounds of brownies are baked each day at the Yonkers facility—that’s 6.5 million brownies annually.

Brady also often heard from business leaders intrigued by Greyston’s hiring model but unsure how it might work in their companies. “I saw that there was a lot more opportunity to make impact,” he says.

In June 2018 the Greyston Foundation launched the Center for Open Hiring to develop best practices and advise other businesses on how to extend their definition of who is employable. The goal, says Brady, is to “make Open Hiring a common practice throughout the world.” The center has already partnered with a similar foundation in the Netherlands, which is facing its own issues around refugee and senior employment discrimination.

Brady says that companies there are hungry for solutions to remedy social inequality, but American businesses tend to be more cautious. And while more and more have embraced corporate philanthropy and social benefit initiatives, Brady believes these efforts only go so far. “That volunteer day is great,” he says, “but it doesn’t change people’s lives.”

Instead, he wants to flip the narrative about who is employable on its head, and create pathways for more people to enter and thrive in the workforce. “I want to inspire every business in the country to hire 10 people who need a break. To say ‘Let’s take a chance to hire someone who doesn’t fit,’” he says. “Now I’m solving some real problems around income inequality and poverty and criminal justice.”

Mindfulness in Action

“Mindfulness is, for lack of a better term, fully baked into the business,” Brady says.

Brady explains the organization’s foundational belief in the concept of PathMaking, or that everyone is on their own individual life journey. If an employee is struggling in any area outside of work, such as with housing or childcare, the company is invested in trying to support them. Greyston works closely with social-service providers in the community, to make sure that employees get the help they need—something that hearkens back to Bernie Glassman’s original vision.

Brady acknowledges that this level of involvement in an employee’s life might seem like more than what many companies are willing to do, but he’s pragmatic. “We need our business to be successful,” he says. “I want this team member to overcome this issue so they can be successful in life, but also so they can come to work. If someone is concerned about childcare, are they going to be mindful on the line? The answer is no.”

On the other side of this human-to-human support, Brady says, “What I get is a team member, for as long as they’re at Greyston, they’re committed. They’re working hard.” He notes that retention levels at the bakery are higher than the industry average.

Not everyone who comes through the program ends up working for or staying at the bakery. “We take people in without judgment; we also let people go without judgment,” Brady says. The company will even connect employees to other types of job training if they’re ready to move on. “We often say the success isn’t when we give someone a job in Greyston. The success is when they leave Greyston for another job,” he adds.

Retaining or losing employees, especially ones that you’ve invested so much time in, is a concern Brady hears often from business leaders. “There’s a lot of discussion about ‘churn’ at organizations,” he says. “But, if you think that you’ve given someone job skills, what a great thing to celebrate.”

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Following the Path of Mindfulness

One of the things I love about mindfulness is the constant invitation to go deeper. Even a few breaths can get you started, shifting from hectic and harried to calmer and more peaceful as you gain perspective on the thoughts and emotions racing around.

As you spend more time practicing, and perhaps experiment with different types of mindfulness, your experience can be as varied as the landscape of your mind, the contours of your life events, the intentions you bring to your practice, and the environment of your present moment.

Walt Whitman famously said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Indeed, we all contain multitudes—an ever-changing kaleidoscope of thoughts, feelings, and perspectives—and we are surrounded by worlds of opportunities for growth.

I’ve been practicing variations on mindfulness since my early twenties. One of my first introductions came when I was a young editor, researching an article about something called Morita therapy that was based on three tenets: Accept your feelings, know your purpose, and do what needs to be done. I loved the idea that our feelings were like clouds in the sky, worth observing, but fleeting and impermanent. Experimenting with this view, I would walk to work in the morning along the East River in New York City, my footfalls and breath like a metronome anchoring me in the present, while I allowed my thoughts, feelings, memories, and fantasies to arise, moving across the sky of my mind. (Oh! The clouds that appeared on those walks!) I knew that by the time I was crossing First, Second, and Third Avenues, I needed to check in with my purpose and by the time I was at Park and Madison, arriving at the office, I had a clear sense of what needed to be done.

What started, then, as a daily experiment of observing my thoughts and feelings has shape-shifted over time. I‘d like to think that my perspective has shifted, too, perhaps to a state of “less me” as founding editor Barry Boyce describes in his deep tour of mindfulness—but always with an appreciation for the opportunity to go deeper, to feel more alive and aware of what is going on inside and around me.

With mindfulness, you are always invited to explore with curiosity and kindness as your companions. For inspiration and a sense of the possibilities, I hope you’ll check out Barry’s piece and the beautiful accompanying tree of practices to see what beckons you.

— Anne

Meditation

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How to Let Go of Your Inner Control Freak

Life offers many uncertainties that can threaten our safety and well-being. Controlling the mayhem makes a certain amount of sense, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if everybody just did what you said? Sadly, not everyone responds positively to being told what to do and how to do it. Even by you. The puzzling thing is, the more you try to control people—even for their own good—the more they push back. Why won’t they follow the route you so carefully Mapquested for them? Why don’t they eat their greens or vote the way you want them to? The more they resist, the more you lean in—and then it’s resentment all around.

My mother once turned to me in the middle of a busy street and told me to stop trying to take her over. Wha? All I was doing was insisting that I carry her heavy bag of books from the library. She’s in her 80s! Helping her is a good thing. Why was my helpfulness making her so testy? As I clung tightly to her bookage, refusing to give anything back to her, I suddenly noticed my dogged determination to do right, come hell or high water. I paused. I hadn’t checked in with whether she even wanted my help—I just assumed I knew best and took control.

My mother told me nicely but firmly to back off. That gave me the opportunity to be curious about my self-righteous presumption that my way was the right way, instead of waiting to hear what she wanted from me.

Catching the Need to Control

Stopping me in the middle of the street is one way to get my attention. My body also signals me when I am battening down my hatches and getting ready to go in for control: Jaw-clenching, stomach-tightening and an audible in-breath just before I launch in to offer my “great” suggestions are often my signature moves when I’m getting ready to take charge. Sometimes, if I really pay attention, I can hear my inner shower-voice belting, “You’ll do it My Way!”

The beauty is that once I catch myself playing the role of master and commander, I can do what I did with my mother. I can pay attention to where my need to control is really taking me.

Here’s the thing about our inner control freak: It is doing a valiant job trying to keep us, and those around us, safe. Sometimes. But other times, if we are acting out of habit, we close ourselves off from seeing and experiencing new things. We don’t necessarily need to banish our inner control freak, but we do need to stay mindful of how it’s motivating us to behave.

More than likely, your desire to control springs from the best of intentions. Please thank yourself. You probably do see a better, faster way, and that’s wonderful. Just remember to pay attention. Notice the body sensations that fire up when your inner controller starts to freak. Ask yourself if you really do need to take over or whether you can let things develop on their own. Learn to love letting go.

Small Steps to Letting Go

We can start this by practicing with small or large acts of letting go. We could allow someone else to load the dishwasher (their way!). We could relinquish control of the TV remote (occasionally!). We could allow for more noise—music, traffic, animals—in our environment than we think we are able to tolerate. When you let go of control, you give yourself permission to stop feeling that you need to do everything! Isn’t that a relief?

Control mechanisms can even show up in our mindfulness practice. We bemoan the times that our minds wandered a lot, or that we were edgy or restless. On those days we can remind ourselves that we don’t need to control anything. Not even our breath.

It is a tasty fantasy to hope that mindfulness will get rid of pesky humanness. At the end of the day, our practice is not there to tighten control or prevent us from thinking, but to help us watch the ever-changing, uncontrollable, remarkable flow of life, coming and going. We cannot control the flow, but we can be there and be present to it all—wanted and unwanted.

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The Science of the Bystander Effect

With apologies to Dickens, let’s call these Two Tales of One City, unfolding within the span of a single week last September. In one, dozens of onlookers do nothing (except film the horror with their cellphones) while at least seven assailants stab a 16-year-old boy to death in broad daylight in the New York City suburb of Oceanside. In the other, two onlookers jump onto a subway track in the Bronx to save a 5-year-old girl whose father had jumped in front of an oncoming train with her in his arms. He died, she lived. The Good Samaritans knew neither the father nor the girl nor each other.

For half a century psychologists have wrestled with what they call the bystander effect. Although the phenomenon is almost certainly timeless, as a subject of scholarly study it took off after an infamous 1964 episode, also in New York, in which at least half a dozen people witnessed the fatal nighttime stabbing of 28-year-old Kitty Genovese. The research reveals a simple alarming occurrence: The greater the number of people who witness a stranger in peril (or simply need), the smaller the likelihood that any will come to her aid. If a single person had witnessed the attack, the chances would have been greater that that person would have intervened.

The bystander effect provides a window into the mind, showing us a shameful side of human nature that undermines the sense of self-decency most of us hold. In probing its causes, researchers are shining a light on our default ways of thinking and feeling, hoping to raise awareness that those defaults are not inevitable—only the result of mindlessly failing to rise above our baser instincts. And after decades of ascribing the bystander effect simply to diffusion of responsibility, researchers have identified an additional underlying cause. Understanding it may help us, collectively and individually, mindfully overcome the bystander effect rather than being mindless slaves to it.

The greater the number of people who witness a stranger in peril (or simply need), the smaller the likelihood that any will come to her aid.

When psychologist and expert on the bystander effect Jay Van Bavel of New York University was on a Manhattan subway platform recently, he saw a man beating up a woman who appeared to be his girlfriend. Van Bavel is no weakling, but neither would you mistake him for an offensive tackle. Scores of people scurried by, almost embarrassed at what was happening, without intervening. But Van Bavel and a friend grabbed the attacker and pinned him to the ground, at which point someone finally did call for help.

Van Bavel’s awareness that a greater number of bystanders lowers the chances of anyone intervening was certainly a motivation for him to step up. But so was the presence of his friend, and not only because it decreased the risk that the assailant would pummel them, too: It also increased the “reputational cost” of walking on by. “You’re more likely to intervene if you think you’ll be diminished in the eyes of someone you know if you don’t,” Van Bavel said.

That offers a lesson for someone who is in distress, whether from schoolyard bullying or sexual assault or any other attack, Van Bavel said. “Call out an individual rather than just yelling ‘help’ into the abyss.” Doing so increases the reputational cost to bystanders who, research suggests, would otherwise shrink from intervening, while also questioning their self-image as caring individuals. Calling out a specific bystander can therefore raise the likelihood of being helped.

When Are We Less Likely to Help Others?

The absence of reputational costs is a big reason the bystander effect exists at all. That explanation emerged when researchers began probing the bystander effect after the Kitty Genovese murder. In classic experiments starting in 1968, John Darley and Bibb Latané at NYU found repeatedly that when lone individuals witnessed someone in need of aid, they almost always intervened. In groups of five, 62% did. That’s not zero. But whether it’s a serious accident or a simple request for help in a chat room, there is “a reduction in helping behavior in the presence of others,” concluded a 2018 study revisiting the bystander effect.

Decades of studies have confirmed that, so let me describe just one. Scientists in Germany had 86 participants watch what they thought was a live video feed from an adjacent room (in fact, a prerecorded video) where a man became violent and abusive toward a woman (both professional actors). When the participants were alone, half shot out of their chairs to help the woman in distress, the scientists reported in 2006. When they were with another person (who was, unbeknownst to them, a researcher) only 6% did.

The consensus explanation is that when many people witness a suffering individual, even one with simply a roadside flat, any sense of moral responsibility to intervene is spread over so many that no single witness feels enough responsibility to do so. Just to be clear, the bystander effect does not mean that when a crowd witnesses someone’s distress no one will offer to help; it says that the more onlookers, the less the likelihood that any single bystander will do so.

Bystanders may run away without helping, if only to dissipate their own distressed feelings. In contrast, empathic concern can put the brakes on personal distress.

I emphasize that because of a 2019 study that inspired stories claiming it had overturned the existence of a bystander effect. European researchers examined 219 recordings from closed-circuit cameras in Amsterdam, Lancaster (England), and Cape Town capturing aggressive behavior, from animated disagreements to grave physical violence, they wrote in American Psychologist. Richard Philpot of the University of Lancaster and his colleagues counted the number of onlookers and observed whether any intervened. Bottom line: in 91% of the situations, someone did.

Here is why it would be a mistake to think the study disproves the bystander effect: The scientists considered as “interventions” not only blocking an assault but also “pacifying gestures, calming touches,…[and] consoling victims of aggression.” Those matter, but they’re not really what the bystander effect is about: intervening during a time of need, not after. And the study did not test whether the number of bystanders affected the number of Good Samaritans. “Their study just says that if there are a lot of people around at least one will intervene,” Van Bavel said. “But it doesn’t address the fundamental meaning of the bystander effect, that any one individual’s likelihood of intervening decreases the more onlookers there are.”

Distress Can Override the Responsibility to Act

Although diffusion of responsibility has dominated explanations of the bystander effect, a recent resurgence of research—inspired by the seemingly endless examples of bystander indifference, from the Rwandan genocide to horrors like that in Oceanside—suggests additional explanations. One of the most intriguing comes from Ruud Hortensius of the University of Glasgow and Beatrice de Gelder of Maastricht University. They showed study participants a video of an elderly woman (in fact, an actor) collapsing. As the number of watchers—bystanders—in the video rose from zero to four, activity in the participants’ medial prefrontal cortex, which directs prosocial behavior, fell. That’s a good candidate for the neurological basis of diffusion of responsibility.

It wasn’t the only brain change, however. Observing one person threaten or harm another also activated the bystanders’/participants’ premotor cortex. That should have primed them to act. But the presence of many bystanders also increased each one’s personal distress, overriding the helping instinct and reducing the likelihood of intervening.

Distress “is not a pleasant state and most people will try to rid themselves of it,” said psychologist William Graziano of Purdue University. If that feeling dominates, “observers will run away without helping,” he said, if only to dissipate the distress. In contrast, empathic concern, “seems to put the brakes on personal distress,” he said. Emotional intelligence skills like facing (rather than fleeing) difficulty and empathic concern are more likely to be activated in people who are skilled at perspective taking. More important, these skills can be cultivated with mindfulness practice. If more of us did so, fewer of us would be do-nothing bystanders.

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Top of Mind News and Notes: April 2020

Five Mindful News Stories

1. Conscious Curation

Many major museums—like the Smithsonian, the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the British Museum—are using 3D technology to replicate artifacts from prehistoric cave art in France to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, making art and artifacts broadly accessible—and repatriating objects stolen from colonized societies. The Smithsonian, for example, 3D printed a whale hat from the Tlingit clan in southeastern Alaska. Museums can display objects concurrently, and anyone with access to a 3D printer can get the digital files online and make their own copy. Plus, archaeologist Néstor Marqués says, “3D printing [can] create perfect replicas of the objects, or resize them if the objects are so small that their details can’t be seen properly,” a boon for education and research. And, since 2019, Google’s Arts and Culture Institute, nonprofit CyArk, and 3D printing company Stratasys have collaborated on the Open Heritage project, which aims to “bring important monuments and artifacts around the world to life” by reproducing small-scale versions of cultural heritage sites.

2. The Spoilers You’re Looking For

When choosing what to watch, it’s often good to look both ways, so to speak. The site doesthedogdie.com helps film and series buffs do just that: It’s an online database for content warnings. Users contribute info on what’s in a film or a show, from violence to strobe effects, ableism to clowns, and of course, dogs or other animals dying. Crowdsourcing lets viewers support each other in making informed decisions about their entertainment.

3. There is such a thing as a free ride

Kansas City is on track to become the first major US city with free public transit, after city council agreed to waive the fare on city busses for all riders. The joint initiative between the city and the local transit authority aims to make life easier for those on a low income, while encouraging others to make the eco-friendly choice to leave their cars at home. Doing away with transit fares is estimated to cost the city eight million dollars, and will save the frequent commuter one thousand dollars a year. Kansas City’s streetcars are already fare-free.

4. Play, by the rules

To grow a garden and eat fresh produce; to play in vibrant neighborhoods, schoolyards, and parks; and to splash in the Chesapeake Bay are among the legal rights of children in Baltimore. The city adopted a Children’s Outdoor Bill of Rights in May 2019, one of 18 cities funded by Cities Connecting Children to Nature, which aims to fuel systemic shifts to make nature more accessible for children and families, especially those in underserved communities. Mary Hardcastle, director of the Carrie Murray Nature Center, helped develop the Bill of Rights and says it’s led to the start of a Nature Daycare, as well as bubbling up throughout government a proactive vision for nurturing healthy families through exposure to nature. “In providing access to nature, we also want to address issues of equity, trauma, and healing,” adds Hardcastle.

5. Put Your Worries to Sleep

A Guatemalan tradition—where children tell sorrows to tiny “worry dolls” before sleep— inspired Peter Wieben to develop the free Worrydolls app for smartphones. It displays adorable illustrations of worry dolls, along with space to type your troubles in. It’s simple, yet powerful: Studies show describing difficult emotions can help to resolve “an undefined cloud of anxiety,” notes Wieben. By observing that most worries tend to go away over time, Wieben says, we learn that we can “simply watch the worry arise and fall,” not taking it too seriously.

Recent Acts OF Kindness

Got You Covered: Jeremy Locke drove past Jeannette MacDonald’s home in Glace Bay, Canada, regularly and noticed her roof was in terrible shape. Last spring he knocked on MacDonald’s door and offered to fix it for free, but MacDonald wouldn’t accept. Months later, Locke was back, saying MacDonald had won a raffle for a new roof. (The raffle was entirely made up.) Locke says MacDonald reminds him of his grandmother, and he’s hoping she’ll cook a meal for his crew. “I was betting she made homemade bread and was probably a good cook,” he told the Cape Breton Post.

Extra-curricular KindessA primary school in County Cork, Ireland, assigned its students a different kind of homework in December. Students were asked to perform acts of kindness, and to write kind notes to each other to be read aloud at a weekly school assembly. The school’s vice principal wrote on Facebook: “Our message to the children is very simple: They can be the reason somebody smiles today and they can definitely help make this world a better place for others and for themselves.”

#My Mental Health in 3 words

In early December, many Twitter users decided to break down the silence around mental health by sharing their experiences with mental illness and recovery using the hashtag #mymentalhealthin3words. The answers ranged from lighthearted to profound, with each providing an honest look at the nuances of mental health.

“Struggling but fighting”@Weltzchmerz

“Just keep swimming”@clemserrell

“Dogs. Exercise. Therapy.”@ ninaandtito

“Happiness is internal”@JPBrown5

“Searching for change” @buzy263”

More Ways to Enjoy the Moment

You’ve gotten hygge with it, now check out these other hard-to-translate ways to take a refreshing pause.

La Passeggiata:

This Italian tradition translates directly to “the walk,” but it’s so much more than a simple excursion on foot. Italians get dressed up to “fare la passeggiata” in the evenings on weekends and holidays, when the whole town takes to the streets to see and be seen. While you may find it more comfortable to wear sneakers and stretchy clothes, you can still get the benefit of moving your body, feeling part of your community, and greeting passersby, no matter where and when you fare your own passeggiata.

Fika:

Translated as a “coffee and cake break,” the Swedish tradition of fika is about more than just getting your daily caffeine fix. Fika can be done at any time of day, and involves sharing a pause with friends, family, or coworkers while savoring a treat. It serves to both strengthen your relationships and give you a break to refresh your mind and body.

Niksen:

The Dutch practice of niksen involves doing nothing at all—that’s right, nothing. The idea is to let go of the need to be productive and give yourself permission to simply be in the moment, so you can reduce stress and relieve symptoms of burnout. How exactly do you practice niksen? Try taking a long break to look out the window, listen to music, or sit down.

Beginner MIND

Question from a reader: I reacted with anger, rage, and frustration when a difficult friend ignored my request for space. This person punishes and is unlikely to forgive. Do I apologize even though my words will likely fall on deaf ears?

Answer from Diana Winston, Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center.

It sounds as if you’ve already made the leap into more compassion through your own practice—you recognize you reacted in a way that doesn’t feel right. So it may feel helpful for you—to set your heart at ease, and if it feels like the ethical thing to do for your own self—to say to this person, “I’m really sorry I responded with so much anger, I lost touch with myself and I realize that was not fair to you,” or whatever you want to say. The trick here is to apologize without being attached to the result. If you’re hoping that they’re going to say, “I totally accept your apology, I love you, our relationship is wonderful,” you’re probably going to be in trouble. There’s another option, from the 12-step world. They talk about the concepts of direct amends—when we directly ask a person for their forgiveness—and living amends, when we make a decision to live our lives differently. It may just be that in a case like yours, that’s a better, kinder approach.

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Mindfulness Fights Inflammation in Stressed Adults

Chronic stress undermines health by increasing inflammation throughout the body, increasing the risk for heart disease, cancer, arthritis, and Alzheimer’s disease, among others. A pair of studies, published in PLOS ONE, find that mindfulness practice may help lessen this risk in those most vulnerable to stress: midlife-to-older adults, and those with a high body mass index (BMI).

The first study included 153 people between the ages of 18 and 70 who reported moderate to high levels of stress. Each was randomly assigned to one of three groups: Monitor+Accept training, Monitor Only instruction, and a stress management program control group.

Monitor+Accept training focused on monitoring present-moment experiences, like physical sensations and emotions, and “welcoming and accepting” them. The Monitor Only program also emphasized paying attention to experiences in the present, but did not include teachings about acceptance. The stress management program taught coping strategies like reappraising thoughts, and practicing skills for solving personal problems.

Participants in each group listened to a 20-minute recording plus three- to ten-minute practices on their smartphones each day. They also provided blood samples before and after the two weeks of training to test for changes in C-Reactive Protein (CRP), a commonly measured biomarker of inflammation. (Research convincingly shows that chronically stressed people have higher levels of CPR compared to those who aren’t stressed, which places them at greater risk for illnesses like cardiac disease, diabetes, arthritis, and dementia.)

Mindfulness practice lowers stress biomarkers for older and overweight adults

Results of the first study showed no differences in CRP after two weeks of training for either of the three groups. The researchers concluded that two weeks of meditation may not have been enough to lower biological stress markers. Researchers conducted a second study where they assigned a new sample of 137 adults to either a Monitor+Accept course based on mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), a MBSR-based program focusing on monitoring only, or a no training control group.

This time the MBSR-based programs involved eight weekly, two- to three-hour-long in-person sessions, as well as a day-long retreat and approximately 45 minutes of daily meditation practice. Members of all three groups provided blood samples at the beginning of the study, then again eight weeks later. As in the first study, the groups who practiced meditation showed little change in the inflammatory biomarker CRP compared to the control group.

Mindfulness practice was not directly linked to lower inflammation levels, but may have bolstered stress resilience among at-risk adults by preventing an increase in inflammatory biomarker levels.

This led researchers to examine whether adults classified as overweight or obese by the CDC (BMI greater than or equal to 25), or those over age 45 (both of whom generally have higher levels of CRP than younger adults and those with a BMI of less than 25), might be more positively impacted by meditation practice. They combined the data from the first and second studies, and compared results of younger adults with those aged 45 and older. They then compared results of adults with a higher BMI to those with a BMI of less than 25.

How mindfulness reduces biological damage from stress

What they found was that older adults in the control groups of both the two- and eight-week studies had higher levels of CRP compared to those who attended the mindfulness programs. There were no differences in CRP levels between the mindfulness training groups. This suggests that mindfulness practice was not directly linked to lower inflammation levels, but that it may have bolstered stress resilience among at-risk adults by preventing an increase in inflammatory biomarker levels.

The picture for overweight or obese adults was slightly different. In both studies, participants in both meditation groups showed decreases in CRP following training, while control group members showed an increase. Again, there were no differences between the Monitor+Accept and Monitor only groups.

Authors of the studies concluded that, while mindfulness meditation programs may not lead to the significant decrease of inflammatory biomarkers in all adults, stressed older adults or those with a higher BMI may experience some health benefits from mindfulness training.

Science

One Week of Mindfulness Meditation May Help You Process Your Emotions

New research finds that just one week of mindfulness practice may improve our emotional memory and boost resilience to difficult emotions. Read More

B Grace Bullock PhD
February 13, 2020

Mindfulness Research

How the Body Scan Meditation Practice Reduces Biological Stress

A daily 20-minute body scan practice may reduce your mental and physical stress levels, according to new research. Read More

B Grace Bullock PhD
January 9, 2020

Physical Health

The Science of Chronic Stress, Inflammation, and Mindfulness

Physical and psychological stress can ignite the slow burn of inflammation deep within the body fueling chronic disease. Mindfulness may help us put out that flame. Read More

Sara Altshul
July 15, 2019

The post Mindfulness Fights Inflammation in Stressed Adults appeared first on Mindful.

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Wednesday, 19 February 2020

Mindfulness Poet of the People

Diego Perez—better known as yung pueblo—offers poetic insights on love, attachment, craving, and freedom. But he’s not a meditation teacher—just a meditator who has something to say, and a way with words. He spoke with Mindful.org’s Stephanie Domet about life before meditation and the hope that fuels his work.

Q: What compelled you to start meditating?

A: I think basically my own inner misery and dissatisfaction. I was just dominated by my sadness and anxiety and I felt a sense of inadequacy with my inability to love myself and felt just generally lost and unhappy. When I started seeing that some of the biggest parts of my unhappiness were related to me allowing my craving to just dominate my action, and I saw how unhealthy I had become by consuming a lot of different drugs, not taking care of myself, using drugs as a vehicle to get as far away from myself as possible, it all came to a screeching halt. One day I just felt like I was dying. And I decided that was enough. I felt miserable enough that I decided I would try anything to get myself out of that hole.

Q: How did you lift yourself out of that level of despair?

A: I wanted to add new value to my life, so I went over to Oregon, to a farm that my friend was working on, and I spent three months out there, so literally my day to day was simply farming, working in the gardens. It was good because it helped me get more in touch with being present, living a simple life. I stopped doing hard drugs about a year before, in the summer of 2011, and really started switching my life around, taking better care of myself—just practicing honest observation, honestly observing myself without running away, trying to see where all my discomfort was coming from. And then it was the summer of 2012 when I did my first meditation course. It really hit home in a way that nothing else ever has. I felt—even though it was very difficult for me, the course—I felt like I had lost a hundred pounds in my mind if that makes sense. I had lost so much mental weight and I felt better than ever, much more in touch with myself, much more at home in my own body and mind. I was just scratching the surface of how much more there was to really let go of.

Q: What does “letting go” mean to you, and when did you first realize it was something you could do?

A: It took time to realize that letting go was even happening. I think a year or two into my practice I started realizing that with really keen observation, real equanimity there was no grabbing, there was no attachment there, there was just this being able to accept what I was observing, with no active attachment. There’s so much we’re attached to, so much that’s driving all the tension and stress in the mind, and the act of letting go is really what unbinds all these tangled up patterns. To me letting go is just decreasing all these patterns that have been embedded throughout our lifetime in our subconscious mind and doing that through some sort of practice.

Q: You write under the name yung pueblo—young people. You’ve said this name refers to how young humanity is—and how much potential we have. What have you seen that gives you hope we’ll lean into that potential?

A: Before university, I spent a lot of time in the world of activism and I saw how powerful people could be when they came together around a common cause. But I always felt like something big was missing—what else can we add to our movements that could make everything much more powerful and effective in the long run? And then I started seeing that maybe it’s this aspect of wisdom, maturing, cultivating our minds—when I started doing my own personal cultivation, I saw that there was so much I did not know, there was a lack of maturity there. And when I started looking at the world, I saw how craving and aversion and ignorance really created this whole social-political system that we live in. To create a global peace, there needs to be more and more people who are able to feel a deep inner peace because inner peace comes with mental clarity, and with that mental clarity comes more creativity, more energy that we can use to better problem-solve and to look at the world much more clearly which makes all of our actions that much more effective.

There’s a threshold we cross when we start doing this inner work when we fundamentally begin to feel that to harm another is to harm one’s self.

I’m still walking on the path, I have much more to learn. Knowing that we don’t have to be perfect to make a certain degree of change, gives me hope. I’m not asking people to be perfect. I just think that there’s a threshold we cross when we start doing this inner work when we fundamentally begin to feel that to harm another is to harm one’s self. Not just intellectually but in my lived experience, it is literally to my benefit to not harm other people. As more and more people actually feel that, our world will change radically.

Q: You talk a lot about relationships—how to have healthy relationships, how to recognize when you’re not in one. How does your practice inform the advice you give?

A: I think just by trial and error. I’ve been married for five years. We’ve been together since we were young—she was 18 and I was 19, now I’m 32 and she’s 30. We have so much love for each other, but we learned that some of that love came with attachments that caused so much friction in our relationships. In the beginning of our relationship we just had no conception of being able to do inner work, know ourselves, or love ourselves, so there were a lot of arguments, and unnecessary conflict, but as we started meditating we started realizing that once we became serious about our personal individual growth and freedom it created so much more harmony in our relationship. Of course, we’re not perfect, but we’re learning how to just essentially better love each other, and better love ourselves, and that has really informed a lot of my writing on relationships.

Q: What are some things you do to maintain healthy boundaries in your life?

A: The primary thing that I do that helps me maintain healthy boundaries is that every day I have time to myself when I meditate. Every day I meditate two hours a day, one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening—like two pillars that hold up every single day. I’ve been doing that now for about four years and it has not only radically changed my life, but it helps me see myself, rejuvenate myself, and it helps me grow and maintain a sense of mental clarity. Even though there are ups and downs every day, I feel that it gives me so much that it would be foolish not to do it.

Q: What do you most want people to know about the value of mindfulness practices?

A: What I’ve come to understand through meditating is that a lot of our habit patterns are so deeply embedded in our subconscious and if we just think about things intellectually yes, there is a certain degree of progress we can make, but if we’re able to actually figure out through a practice how to really unbind those deeply embedded patterns, that conditioning over our entire lifetime, it helps so much, and I think that’s really done through meditation. If you can go on a long course, it just is truly invaluable. If it’s not something you can do, to go to a course, then practice to the degree that you can.

Q: You talk a lot about freedom, liberation. I think you’re talking about a kind of self-liberation, internal liberation—but how can our own mindfulness help dismantle the external systems of oppression that bear down on so many of us?

A: When I speak about freedom, there are these two words that I use often, they don’t necessarily equate, but one is healing and the other is freedom. And to me healing is doing what you need to do to decrease your mental tension so that you feel better, feel a little bit happier, feel a new sense of mental stability and a lot of that revolves around healing your personal traumas. Traumas become so dense they become these massive things that we have to live with and walk with but at the other end of that is real true liberation. By that I mean moving forward on the path in a way where you’re totally eradicating all deep conditioning that is stopping you from being totally loving, totally compassionate, having real sympathetic joy and real equanimity. To be able to do that—that’s a very long path.

Healing isn’t a forever thing, eventually there is an end to it.

I’m a mediator, but I’m not a meditation teacher. My writing is for people who are entering this world of personal transformation. Healing isn’t a forever thing, eventually, there is an end to it. I think as our personal liberation grows, as we cultivate our freedom and enhance it, that can only add to our movements to make this world a much better place, to really create a humane society, a world where we can all live well without harming each other—which is completely possible if we can imagine it, it’s possible. There have been so many groups of people who have tried to change their social structures and some of them have been successful, but a lot of times these movements crumble from within or become unstable. There’s so much inner work that hasn’t been done. You can have this ideal that you want to create a better world, but if you have not done your personal inner work, then there’s a big chance that these deep cravings or aversions, some ignorance or ego will come up—especially in moments when you have power—and it becomes really difficult to continue with your ideals in a virtuous way.

But there’s something that makes this moment in time very special. If you look historically there have been no other moments like this, where not only eastern practices but also western therapy have become global. If you live in a major city, you have so much more access. I mean, we have a ways to go in regards to accessibility, but we have so much more access than ever before to actually take up an introspective practice that will truly meet us where we’re at, so we can dig deep, decrease whatever it is that’s causing us so much mental tension. And in that decrease in mental tension, we’re going to be not only much kinder to ourselves but much more gentle and peaceful with those around us and much more creative in our solutions. More and more we’re seeing that people who are active in social movements are also meditating and getting serious about their own mental healing, their own self-liberation, and to me, that’s really exciting. It couldn’t have happened at a more perfect time when we have these monolithic challenges in front of us, climate change, racism, sexism, things we have to undo so that we can all live much happier lives. Now we have that missing piece, the ability to build inner peace which will later support global peace.

yung pueblo will be speaking at the Wisdom 2.0 Conference, happening March 5th through 8th in San Francisco. Tickets and scholarships available.