July 2011 – Page 8 – Mindfulbalance

Mindfulness meditation improves sense of well being in teenagers

July 10, 2011July 11, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

An interesting study has been carried out on the effect of meditation on teenage boys in two schools in the U.K. Researchers from the University of Cambridge analyzed 155 boys from two schools, Tonbridge and Hampton, before and after a 4-week course in mindfulness, comparing them to a control group on measures of mindfulness, resilience and psychological well-being. The training consisted of four 40 minute classes, once a week, which presented the principles and practice of mindfulness. The classes covered the concepts such as awareness and acceptance, and taught practical skills such as how to practice bodily awareness by noticing where they were in contact with their chairs or the floor, paying attention to their breathing, and noticing the sensations involved in walking. Furthermore, the students were asked to practice outside the classroom and were encouraged to listen to an audio recording for eight minutes a day.

After the trial period, the 14 and 15 year-old boys were found to have increased well-being, defined as the combination of feeling good – having more positive emotions such as happiness, contentment, interest and affection – and functioning well. Most students reported enjoying and benefiting from the mindfulness training, and 74% said they would like to continue with it in the future.

Lead researcher Dr Felicia Hubbert summed up the findings as follows: More and more we are realising the importance of supporting the overall mental health of children. Our study demonstrates that this type of training improves wellbeing in adolescents and that the more they practise, the greater the benefits. Importantly, many of the students genuinely enjoyed the exercises and said they intended to continue them – a good sign that many children would be receptive to this type of intervention. Another significant aspect of this study is that adolescents who suffered from higher levels of anxiety were the ones who benefitted most.

Felicia Huppert, Daniel Johnson: “A controlled trial of mindfulness training in schools; the importance of practice for an impact on well-being.” The Journal of Positive Psychology. Volume 5 Issue 4, 2010

Why meditation may help with deep emotions

July 9, 2011July 11, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Research, mainly in the area of neuroscience, is increasingly showing that meditation changes how the brain functions. What I find interesting is how this harmonizes with the work of psychologists who look at the importance of early relationships or those who write about the unconscious. One of the most stimulating writers in this latter area is the modern psychoanalytical author, Christopher Bollas. Jon Kabat Zinn likes to say that meditation allows us to step out of “doing-mode” into “being-mode”. This strengthens our capacity to rest with experience rather than always conceptualizing it. As Ajahn Sumedho said in a recent post, we simply recognize, without going into the need to analyse. Bollas’ quote here may suggest a link. Maybe getting in touch with silence may allow us reconnect with our earliest experiences which were processed without the use of language and thought. We may even say that sitting in silence and holding whatever arises may possibly, slowly, heal these early experiences, if they were somehow lacking. His words also allow us see how our emotions contain a deep truth which may be outside of conscious thought, truths which may be “known” without being “thought”.

Some moments feel familiar, sacred, reverential, but are fundamentally outside cognitive experience. They are registered through an experience in being, rather than mind, because they express that part of us where the experience of rapport with the other was the essence of life before words existed….the aesthetic moment constitutes part of the unthought known. The aesthetic moment is an existential recollection of the time when communication took place primarily through this illusion of deep rapport of subject and object. Being with, as a form of dialogue, enabled the baby’s adequate processing of his existence prior to his ability to process it through thought. The mother’s idiom of care and the infant’s experience of this handling is one of the first if not the earliest human aesthetic.

Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object

Early morning freshness: Keeping the question open

July 9, 2011July 9, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Don’t carry away a conclusion unless it has been arrived at through your direct experience.

Rather, if there hasn’t been direct experience, carry away the question.

Toni Parker, The Silent Question

Seeing the way takes time

July 8, 2011July 10, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
Yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability and that may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually. Let them grow.
Let them shape themselves without undue haste.

Do not try to force them on as though you could be today what time – that is to say, grace – and circumstances, acting on your own good will – will make you tomorrow.

Teilhard de Chardin

The knowledge we get through experience

July 7, 2011June 28, 2011 Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Only knowledge gained through experience, the fruit of living and suffering, fills the heart with the wisdom of love, instead of crushing it with the disappointment of boredom and final oblivion. It is not the results of our own speculation, but the golden harvest of what we have lived through and suffered through, that has the power to enrich the heart and nourish the spirit. And all the knowledge we have acquired through study can do no more than give us some little help in meeting the problems of life with an alert and ready mind.

Karl Rahner