Tag: Brain

The body and the mind

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Increasingly research is showing how the mind plays a significant part in how our body feels. This is of interest to us who are working with stress. It also helps us understand how mediatation, simply sitting and observing the mind, can be an effective way of working with difficult emotions and events.

For example, research has shown that the body responds to abstract thoughts as if they were real. Work done at the University of Aberdeen found that when participants were asked to recall the past or imagine the future, their bodies acted out the metaphors contained in the words. So when asked to remember, they leaned slightly backward; when imagining the future, their bodies moved forwards. Though these shifts amounted to just a few millimeters, the results were consistent enough for researchers to conclude that they could ‘take an abstract concept such as time and show that it was manifested in body movements.’

Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam observes: “How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body. We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what’s going on.” This is consistent with the way stress manifests itself in the body as headaches or heart conditions. It can also be seen when we have had a difficult encounter and we go around with a knot in the stomach. It supports the approach of Mindfulness meditation in its focus on the mind as a part of a whole body response to life’s stresses.

See more at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/science/02angier.html/

Mindfulness and attachment

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

There are interesting possible links between the practice of meditation and the healing of attachment patterns which are at the basis of all our relationships. Our early relationships with our primary caregivers laid down a pattern or paradigm which can be activated in later relationships. This paradigm can be very deeply ingrained in our unconscious and in the neural patterns of the brain. Luckily, like all neural patterns they can be changed, even if this takes a lot of time. One possible effect of meditation is that it allows the healing of excessive needs in relation to others by developing a greater contentment and balance with ourselves. This seems to be supported by the following quotation from Daniel Siegel on the brain and how it functions. Although it comes from a neurological point of view it seems to me to agree with the more Buddhist view of the mind’s natural wakefulness which I referred to in the previous post.

Each of us needs periods in which our minds can focus inwardly. Solitude is an essential experience for the mind to organize its own processes and create an internal state of resonance. In such a state, the self is able to alter its constraints by directly reducing the input from interactions with others. As the mind goes through alternating phases of needing connection and needing solitude, the states of mind are cyclically influenced by combinations of external and internal processes. We can propose that such a shifting of focus allows the mind to achieve a balanced self-organizational flow in the states of mind across time. Respecting the need for solitude allows the mind to “heal” itself – which in essence can be seen as releasing the natural self-organizational tendencies of the mind to create a balanced flow of states. Solitude permits the self to reflect on engrained patterns and intentionally alter reflexive responses to external events that have been maintaining the dyadic dysfunction.

Daniel J. Siegal, The Developing Mind p., 235