Dr. Frank Lipman, The Epoch Times: Nearly twenty years ago, I did a workshop with Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., whose first book “Full Catastrophe Living” and overall teachings have had a lasting influence on me. This book is a classic on the topic of mindfulness and it has played a spiritual role in both bringing this practice into the Integrative Medicine World as well as in developing the method we teach our patients on how to deal with stress.
I would like to share with you the Seven …
Doug Smith, The Secular Buddhist Association: With Anderson Cooper’s enthusiastic endorsement on 60 Minutes last night, mindfulness practice is well into the mainstream. Cooper’s segment included interviews with mindfulness gurus Jon Kabat-Zinn and Chade-Meng Tan, Google employee with the job title “Jolly Good Fellow”.
As the movement has grown, there has been pushback. Some has focused on the scientific claims, but much has focused on the nexus between traditional and secularized practice. Candidly, I find myself on both sides of this issue. While there is no reason to accept the supernatural claims of traditional …
Richard C. Frank, MD, WebMD: I have just returned from the Omega Institute in Rheinbeck, NY, where I was a participant in an intensive retreat on mindfulness, “Mindfulness Tools for Living the Full Catastrophe: A 5-Day Residential Intensive Program in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).” The course is based on the methods of mindfulness meditation pioneered by Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, founder of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society.
I was one of 150 participants from around the world who sat in chairs or lay on mats and willingly gave their bodies and minds over to two leaders…
Kat Dawkins, PsychCentral: These days, many people are turning to natural health aids to help compliment the use of medication and therapies.
When someone is being treated for bipolar disorder, their psychiatrists often recommend a strict diet and regular exercise to help combat the depression, anxiety, and mood swings that come with the illness.
The use of meditation is another way that many people deal with the troubling symptoms of depression and mania.
History of Meditation
Meditation has been used for thousands of years to renew the spirit and calm the mind.
Buddhist meditation and yoga have helped evolve other modern relaxation techniques.,,
Carole Carson, AARP blog: Is Mindfulness the Latest Fad? Are the Benefits Too Good to Be True?
Would you be skeptical if I told you that without taking a pill or seeing a therapist, you could lower your blood pressure, raise your self-esteem, experience equanimity in the face of stress, improve the quality of your sleep, reduce chronic pain, get greater enjoyment from eating even while eating less, increase your energy and make better decisions? That you could be happier and see the world around you more positively?
The practitioners of mindfulness make these and other remarkable claims—and their claims are not…
A sticking point some people have with lovingkindness practice is what it means to wish someone “well.” This came up the other day with someone who has health difficulties that just aren’t going to go away. What does it mean for him to wish himself well? He’s not ever going to be completely healthy, so wellness is never going to be attained. What’s the point of wishing yourself something you can’t have? Isn’t that just a source of suffering. Yikes!
And the same applies to others. If you have a friend who’s, say, dying of cancer, what does it mean to wish them well?
There’s a nice little dialog that the Buddha has where he does some self-commentary — basically going over a teaching he’d previously passed on, and saying what he’d really meant. And it’s rather fascinating, because when you read the original verse you think you know what the Buddha meant, but you’re wrong:
Health is the most precious gain
and contentment the greatest wealth.
A trustworthy person is the best kinsman,
Nibbana the highest bliss.
That’s from the Dhammapada, and it’s verse 204. It’s hard to imagine anything more straightforward than the first line, which basically is equivalent to the old saying, “if you have your health you have everything.”
But in a discussion with a healthy man (who says he’s therefore happy), the Buddha says that’s not what he meant at all.
The body is “a calamity and an affliction” even when it’s healthy, he points out. You might say that a healthy body is an unhealthy body waiting to happen. The “health” that the Buddha’s talking about is freedom from mental suffering, which ultimately is enlightenment. Now even the enlightened get physically sick and experience physical pain and discomfort, but they don’t have the secondary suffering that comes with having aversion to sickness, and for craving for things to be otherwise. Think about the self-pity we commonly experience when we’re sick. That resistance to sickness, that “poor me” attitude, is far more painful than the actual illness itself. So this is all dropped when we’re enlightened, and there’s no more aversion or craving. Now we don’t have to be enlightened to experience this freedom (although you have to be enlightened to permanently experience it).
When we say “may I (or you) be well” we’re wishing ourselves or others freedom from the secondary suffering of aversion and craving with regard to the sickness. We’re wishing that the discomfort of illness be borne mindfully. We’re wishing that we, or the other person, be at peace with whatever is happening with the body.
Jon Kabat-Zinn puts this very nicely:
Healing does not mean curing, although the two words are often used interchangeably, While it may not be possible for us to cure ourselves or to find someone who can, it is always possible for us to heal ourselves. Healing implies the possibility for us to relate differently to illness, disability, even death, as we learn to see with eyes of wholeness. Healing is coming to terms with things as they are.
Of course if there’s a cure, that’s great. You can wish someone well in the sense that you hope they’ll be back to health. But in the long term we’re all headed for sickness and death, and true peace and happiness is going to come from patient acceptance of those things we cannot change. We “learn to see with eyes of wholeness” and accept, without resistance or aversion, even the most painful experiences.
[See the previous 100 Days of Lovingkindness Post : See the next 100 Days of Lovingkindness Post]Wynne Parry, LiveScience. Throughout life, even shortly before death, the brain can remodel itself, responding to a person’s experiences. This phenomenon, known as neuroplasticity, offers a powerful tool to improve well-being, experts say.
“We now have evidence that engaging in pure mental training can induce changes not just in the function of the brain, but in the brain’s structure itself,” Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told an audience at the New York Academy of Sciences on Thursday (Feb. 6) evening.
The brain’s plasticity does change over time, Davidson pointed out. For instance, young children have an easier time learning a second language or a musical instrument…
Jason Ashley Wright, World Scene: Rebeka Radcliff struggled with anxiety for a long time.
She started running marathons to try to manage it. The long distances helped, she said, but it wasn’t enough.
“I would go for a run, feel relaxed for a few hours or even for the rest of the day, but then the anxiety would be back again,” Radcliff said.
Eventually, she realized that running couldn’t be her ultimate anxiety solution. She didn’t feel it was severe enough to warrant medication, and she believed there was a way to use mind over matter to manage it.
Then, she became pregnant …
Nancy B. Loughlin, news-press.com: Baby steps will help you learn how to live in the moment and quiet your restless mind.
A profound irony of stress is that the best way to manage it is to get deeper into it.
This is called “mindfulness,” and it’s Meditation 101.
For many, meditation’s serenity is out of reach because their minds are, well, a mess. Chilling may be attractive, but clearing the mind while perched on a floor pillow will drive Type As to scream.
Madeline Ebelini was an attorney for 20 years and her body reflected all that implies: insomnia, worry and pain. Sleeping became a …
Meryl Davids Landau, US News: One of the hottest forms of stress reduction today is actually one of the oldest: meditation. But the kind making the rounds of hospitals, community centers, and even schools in increasing numbers doesn’t involve chanting “Om” while sitting on a cushion with closed eyes; instead, participants are trained to pay attention to their thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations, and to view them neutrally, “without assigning an emotional value that they are strongly positive or negative,” says University of Wisconsin–Madison neuroscientist Richard Davidson, coauthor of The Emotional Life of Your Brain.
The idea is to allow parts of the …
