Cheryl Fraser, Mindful.org: Our brains can’t help but compare the imperfect human snoring beside us to the ideal hunk in our heads. But around the corner there isn’t someone better—only someone different.
Shaun Cassidy, teen singing idol and one of TV’s sexy Hardy Boys, was my soulmate. There I was clad in the kilt and knee socks of a private school girl, lusting over this blue-eyed heartthrob and completely convinced we would fall in love. He …
Sandy SB, Vajra Blue: A few years ago I went through a difficult period with stress and depression. At this time my partner commissioned this brush painting for me. It shows a bamboo leaf falling, twisting in the air, full of life, while at the same time it is suspended in a single moment. A moment in which anything is possible, a moment that is full of possibility and in which nothing can be taken for granted.
It serves as a reminder that nothing lasts, that everything is transient, and that I …
Rachel Pugh, The Guardian: As two young constables dash into the room of silently seated police men and women, making breathless apologies, one of them asks: “Have you started yet? We’ve been out on an eviction but we didn’t want to miss the meditation.”
This is lunchtime in inner-city Salford’s fortress-style Pendleton police station, and the man with a pair of Tibetan chimes facing the group is neighbourhood police officer, PC Ewen Sim, poised to deliver a session of mindfulness.
The bearded 39-year-old is one of 13 Greater Manchester police (GMP) officers …
Karen Pace, Michigan State University Extension: Do you experience feelings of anxiety? If so, how does it tend to express itself in your mind and body? Does your thinking become rapid and spinning—or do you have difficulty concentrating? Do you notice muscle tension in your neck, shoulders or another part of your body? Do you feel fatigued, restless or “keyed up”? Do you have difficulty breathing or experience shortness of breath? Do you feel irritable—or do you have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep? These are all …
Kristina Tipton, The Stir: The scientifically proven benefits of meditation are numerous and include everything from stress and anxiety reduction and improved memory function to increased feelings of well-being. If that means I can find my keys and cell phone easier, then sign me up. But while the benefits make meditation seem like a no-brainer, when it comes to actually practicing, it’s easy to turn to excuses.
Here are some of the most common excuses, and how you can overcome them to start reaping the benefits of meditation.
Excuse 1: Meditation is …
Jeena Cho, Above the Law: I teach a lot of workshops on incorporating mindfulness into everyday life, both in and out of law practice. Often, the lawyers in the room have very idealistic expectations about what meditation will do for them and how their minds will behave during meditation.
The lawyers expect to “ace” meditation on the first try. They think during meditation, their mind will be completely free of thoughts and they’ll experience instant-stress-free-state on demand. This would be akin to having a model-like body after going to the gym once. Meditation practice, much like law practice …
Adam Frank, NPR: Let’s be honest. When most of us talk about philosophy — the hard-core, name-dropping, theory-quoting kind — we’re talking about a particular lineage that traces back to the Hellenistic Greeks.
But consider, for a moment, the fact that over the last few thousand years there’ve been a whole lot of smart people born into a whole lot of highly sophisticated cultures. It is, therefore, kind of silly that we limit “philosophy” to mean “philosophy done by dudes who lived in Europe a long time ago.” That gripe was the main point of a very pointed piece in The New York Times last month titled: “If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is.”
Of course, given how much my field of physics owes to the rich philosophical tradition of “The West,” I do count myself as a big fan. From Plato’s Doctrine of Ideals to Spinoza’s Ethics, Western philosophic perspectives laid bare core issues that were transformed into really good things, like science and democratic political thought. But as The Times piece shows, it doesn’t do much good imagining that Europe cornered the market on creative thinking about being human.
Britni de la Cretaz, SheKnows: When I arrived at rehab for my alcohol and cocaine addiction, one of the first things I was handed was a schedule with the day’s activities on it. It included groups and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings I would need to attend, as well as meal times — all the usual things you’d expect to find on a daily rehab schedule.
But I was a little taken aback to see that the first thing on the agenda every morning — from 8 to 8:10 — was meditation. The idea of having to meditate for 10 minutes every day was baffling to me. I immediately chalked it up to hooey or some woo-woo crap.
I skipped as many mornings as I could. When I did participate, I did anything but focus on my breath for the 10 minutes. How could I? My brain had too many other things to think about, and I was pretty sure those things were far more interesting and important than sitting quietly and counting in breaths and out breaths.
I thought about how stupid it was that I had to sit quietly for 10 minutes. I thought about how badly I wanted to peek at the clock so I could see how much time I had left. I thought about how I would probably most definitely drink again when I left treatment. I thought about the fact that I absolutely would not move into a sober house after rehab. And maybe once, maybe twice, over the course of those 10 minutes, I’d focus on my breathing.
While I was sitting there thinking about all the things that were much more interesting and important than meditation, something funny happened. Progressively, I had fewer and fewer thoughts that seemed all that important. Slowly, my brain began to quiet. Instead of focusing on one or two breaths over the course of the 10 minutes, I found myself coming back to that breath every 30 seconds or so. Four months later, when it was time to leave treatment, meditation had become like a sigh of relief for my brain. It became something I looked forward to every morning instead of something I dreaded.
Meditation, it turned out, was something I could carry with me into my day. When I first arrived at rehab, my mind was always racing. It jumped ahead to three Thursdays from now. It played an endless stream of what-ifs. That, in turn, caused a great deal of anxiety because I can’t control the future. I don’t know what will happen in an hour, let alone tomorrow or next week. Inevitably, that stress and uncertainty led to me to pick up alcohol and drugs to quiet my mind.
Meditation gave me the ability to stay present, to find the here and now. It taught me how not to get ahead of myself. To sit with my emotions and my discomfort instead of running from them or numbing them with substances. By learning to sit through uncomfortable feelings, I also got to learn that those feelings — all feelings, in fact, both good and bad — would pass. Candice Rasa, clinical director of Beach House Center for Recovery, says that my experience is a common one.
“During meditation, you focus your attention and eliminate the stream of jumbled thoughts that may be crowding your mind and causing stress,” Rasa explains. “This process may result in enhanced physical and emotional well-being.” For me, that looked like an overall calmness and a decrease in my anxiety levels. I also began to explore different kinds of meditation — guided meditations using phone apps, practicing yoga, and repeating a mantra over and over again. Each of these forms of meditation provided something different.
Yoga allowed me to connect my meditation practice to my physical body. As a trauma survivor who often drank and used drugs to cope with my post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, I wasn’t used to feeling present in my body. Yoga and progressive muscle relaxation — a form of meditation where you systematically relax every muscle in your body — helped me learn to be present in my body again and to really feel it.
Rasa says that this benefit of meditation, of keeping people in the present, is very important for those of us who are recovering from addiction because “it allows for greater self-awareness… and reduces negative emotions, which leads to [fewer] destructive behaviors, such as picking up drugs and alcohol.”
The most helpful thing anyone ever told me is something that Rasa stresses, too: There is no wrong way to meditate. During those first few weeks when I was thinking about anything other than my breathing, someone told me that if I had focused on my breath even once during those 10 minutes, then I had meditated. Meditation, like anything else, is a practice. The more you do it, the better you get at it.
Ultimately, meditation became just one of many tools that I use in my recovery. It’s something that I can use at any time, in any place, and I can tailor it to my needs. It’s given me the ability to quiet my brain and find the time to just breathe, which helps bring me back to center — and makes it less likely that I’ll need drugs or alcohol to cope with how I’m feeling. And that, truly, is a gift.
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Jeena Cho, Forbes: In social settings involving other people, such as the first day of school, giving a presentation in front of coworkers or joining a new social group, it’s common for people to feel a little nervous or anxious. Usually, those feelings dissipate as you grow comfortable with the people you’re with or the setting in general.
But if the thought of being in social settings makes you feel overwhelmingly stressed, uncomfortable or even stops you from participating at all, you might have social anxiety disorder.
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is defined as “a fear of social situations in which embarrassment may occur or there is a risk of being negatively evaluated by others,” according to the American Psychology Association (APA). Also referred to as social phobia, the condition is characterized by the constant fear of one or more social situations in which a person thinks they will say or do something to humiliate themselves. About 7% percent of people in the U.S.—15 million adults—are affected by social anxiety disorder[1].
Essentially, it’s anxiety about what other people think, says Angela Neal-Barnett, a psychologist and director of Kent State University’s Program for Research on Anxiety Disorders among African Americans. “Social anxiety can occur because we believe that when we are with or in front of other people, they will think negatively about us,” says Neal-Barnett.
Wildmind is a Community-Supported Meditation Initiative. Click here to find out about the many benefits of being a sponsor.
Heather Goldstone, WCAI: In 1971, Jon Kabat-Zinn finished his Ph.D. in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate, Salvador Luria, at M.I.T. Then, he took what might be considered a left turn – he went to study with Buddhist masters. Several years later, he drew on both his training in both biology and Buddhism when he founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at U. Mass. Medical School and created the first course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.
“It seems like ‘wow, what a gigantic shift from molecular biology to Buddhist meditative practices,'” says Kabat-Zinn. “But it wasn’t so much of a shift for me because ever since I was very young, I was interested in consciousness, and how it evolved, and the biology of consciousness.”
Kabat-Zinn says he’d gone into biology to try to answer some of those questions, and that meditation offered another way to study oneself and explore what fundamentally makes us human.
Of course, in the 1970’s, when Kabat-Zinn began his work, there were no scientific studies about mindfulness. He credits his M.I.T. credentials with convincing colleagues to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“Of course, I didn’t know what I was doing,” he says. “I was feeling my way with that intuition that came from just being young and wanting to understand things that nobody was looking at.”
Now, there are hundreds of increasingly rigorous studies showing that mindfulness training and the practice of meditation can produce measurable biological changes. Meditation changes the structure of the brain, enhancing regions responsible for learning and memory processes, emotion regulation, and perspective taking, while thinning areas involved in stress responses. In clinical trials, mindfulness training also appears to suppress inflammation pathways, boost cell-mediated immunity, and slow some aspects of biological aging.
Kabat-Zinn says that it’s important to realize that the science of mindfulness is “really, truly in its infancy.” While much of the research is “rigorous, out of very reputable labs, published in top-tier journals,” he acknowledges that some of the studies out there are not top of the line. And, he says, this is a complex subject that will take decades to work out.
“What people are trying to do is drill down to the mechanism,” he explains “Mindfulness seems to be beneficial on so many different levels, it’s like ‘how can that be?'”
As with anything that seems to good to be true, Kabat-Zinn says it’s important to question whether there are any potential risks from mindfulness meditation.
“The biggest negative effect, so to speak, would be that you run into mental states that you really don’t want to pay any attention to – like boredom, or anxiety or panic – because you’re going to be welcoming and embracing any state of mind and body to arise.”
While that may not be a good idea for some people, Kabat-Zinn says that the quality of the teacher can be important in determining the outcome of mindfulness training.
For himself, Kabat-Zinn says he’d still be practicing mindfulness – even if there were no science to back it up – simply because of the enhanced quality of life he experiences as a result.
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Wildmind is a Community-Supported Meditation Initiative. Click here to find out about the many benefits of being a sponsor.
