A useful technique involves working with awareness of body touch-points. These are the parts of the body that come into contact with other objects in the course of each day, such as the bottoms of our feet as we move about, or the felt sense of sitting in a chair, or of our hands touching something. We bring our attention to a touch-point as often as we can remember. This is useful in breaking our habitual mental and emotional patterns.
Narayan Liebenson Grady
What is known as “realizing the mystery” is nothing but breaking through to grasp an ordinary persons life.
Deshan
For most people, just the thought of being ordinary is like a cross to a vampire; it’s the thing we fear most. We want to be unique and special, not ordinary, and we turn to books on meditation, perhaps, to help turn us into the kind of special person we want to be. None of us want to accept the mind that we have got. We come to practice because there are aspects of the mind that we don’t know how to come to terms with.
This dread of being ordinary has many roots deep in our psychological makeup. We dread being lost in the crowd, feeling that we have never gotten the attention or acknowledgement that we deserve. So much of our life is spent running away from the ordinary, and towards what we think of as some kind of a spiritual alternative.
Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness
The world today is increasingly distracting, with faster media and social networking sites increasing the speed at which we can access information and the amount of time we feel we need to stay connected. A recent study suggests that one key value of meditation may be that it helps the brain deal with this often overstimulating world.
The study, published online on April 21 in the Brain Research Bulletin, was conducted by researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It found that modulation of the alpha rhythm in response to attention-directing cues was faster and significantly more enhanced among participants who completed an eight-week MBSR mindfulness meditation programme than in a control group. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), an imaging technique that detects the location of brain activity with extreme precision, the researchers measured participants’ alpha rhythms before, during and after the eight-week period. They found that meditators were better able to focus their attention and thus choose relevant new information easier and faster.
Lead researcher Catherine Kerr, PhD, of the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH and the Osher Research Center at Harvard Medical School, explained the findings in this way: Our discovery that mindfulness meditators more quickly adjusted the brain wave that screens out distraction could explain their superior ability to rapidly remember and incorporate new facts.
Christopher Moore, an MIT neuroscientist, goes further : These activity patterns are thought to minimize distractions, to diminish the likelihood stimuli will grab your attention. Our data indicate that meditation training makes you better at focusing, in part by allowing you to better regulate how things that arise will impact you.
The implications of these findings go far beyond just meditation and could lead to developments in helping people who suffer from dysregulated brain function in ADHD (Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) and other conditions.
The secret of health for both mind and body is
not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles,
but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.
Buddha
A central truth of practice is that in order to come to the present, we must go through the past. This does not mean we have to relive or analyse our childhood, but it does mean that when our attention steadies itself in the here and now, we will be met with the residue of our past conditioning. Awakening means exposing and investigating areas of this past conditioning where the sense-of-self remains identified within a pattern, thought or emotion.
Rodney Smith, Stepping out of Self Deception.
The paradox is indeed that new life is born out of the pains of the old.
Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out.
I came across this study, carried out by Dan Gilbert and Matthew Killingsworth, just yesterday, even though it was published last November. It confirms that most of us are ‘mentally checked out’ for a good portion of the day, operating on a type of autopilot which does not lead us to feeling very content. For 46.9% of the time during their waking hours people are engaged in ‘mind wandering’, not really focusing on the outside world or the task at hand, but rather looking into their own thoughts. And what this study of 2,250 people shows is that this activity – despite its obvious attraction – doesn’t make us feel happy.
The study was designed to find out what kind of activities people did throughout a day, and which made them happiest. So people were asked to indicated what they were engaged in at different random moments chosen during the day. Mind wandering was just one of 22 possible activities people could list, but turned out one of the most common. And here is the interesting part – the participants reported being unhappy during the periods of mind wandering. Thus how people deal with mind wandering is a better predictor of happiness than many other indicators which we normally use, such as relationships, careers or the actual activities people are engaged in. The study is another support for the effectiveness of mindfulness meditation, with its emphasis on just staying in the present moment and recognizing our stories as stories, as an aid toward greater happiness.
Mindfulbalance 