Tag: Meditation

Six Simple Strategies for a Stress-Free Summer, 1.

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Maintain a Quiet Time Routine

Finding quiet time isn’t a luxury; it’s essential for protecting your health.  So, take time for yourself each day. The key is –  when will you practice meditation and where? It’s always easy to postpone our practice when we don’t have a designated time  for it.  A routine will strengthen your perseverence. Decide how long you will meditate. The best way to develop your meditation practice is to be consistent. Short sessions regularly are better than longer sporadic sessions . Start to enjoy the idea of regularity and routine.

Exercise combats low mood

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Mindfulness Stress Reduction encourages a mind-body approach to health. It is part of a growing field of integrative medical care that combines the best scientific medicine with evidence-based  therapies from complementary traditions. Recent research – which we have written about on this blog – has found that it has beneficial effects on stress as well  as changing the function and maybe even the structure of the brain,.

It would seem that physical exercise and aerobic workouts have a similar effect. Indeed, molecular scientists and neurologists have suggested that physical exercise may alter brain chemistry by working on the key neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine. In fact, exercise seems to work in much the same way that antidepressant drugs do. One researcher working in this area is Professor Philip Holmes at the University of Georgia, who has focused on the neurobiological effects of exercise. He has found that, over the course of several weeks, exercise affects certain genes that increase the brain’s level of galanin, a neurotransmitter that appears to tone down the body’s stress response by regulating another brain chemical, norepinephrine. His current work focuses on the link between stress and different addictions, and how exercise can reduce stress which leads to addictive behaviours: “Stress turns on norepinephrine,” says Holmes, “which turns on dopamine, which induces craving. Galanin decreases norepinephrine, so someone with high levels of galanin should experience reduced cravings.”

Researchers at Duke University support these findings. In a randomized controlled trial they found that depressed adults who participated in an aerobic-exercise plan improved as much as those treated with sertraline, the drug which,  marketed as Zoloft,  is one of the most prescribed anti-depressants.

You can find more on this subject in TIME Magazine: : http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1998021,00.html#ixzz0rgWOWgm0

Patience

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

In a sense,  sitting practice is waste of time because it is a dedicated period of non-doing. On an outward level it appears to achieve nothing. To make things even worse, nothing really seems to change from day to day: you sit, you get distracted, you return to the breath, you get distracted…. It may seem pointless. It feels hard to presevere because the results are not immediately tangible while the actual practice can be difficult.

However, the “point” to meditation,  is precisely by doing “nothing” and slowing down, gaps are created between activities and we develop our capacity to be aware of what is going on. And it seems that when one is aware, things have a greater tendency to fall as they should, in harmony with our deepest self.

There is increasing scientific backing showing that this “pointless” activity is, in fact, achieving something simply while we are sitting. It has been found that people who meditate activate the part of their brain that is associated with less anxiety and a better outlook on life. By not activating the anxious parts of the brain  for certain periods of each day, our bodies are less likely to be tense, and our minds less likely to trigger well-conditioned patterns when faced with difficulties.

Tara Bennett-Goleman  suggests that meditation works because it changes the relationship between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. The amygdala is the part of the brain that decides, among other things, if we should get angry or anxious. The pre-frontal cortex is the part that makes us stop and think about things. However, the amygdala can be over-cautious and makes mistakes, such as seeing problems or exaggerating anxiety where there is none. It can make us anxious even when there is no real danger present.  Because there is a time gap between the time an event occurs and the reaction of the amygdala, the slowing down we practice in meditation may allow the pre-frontal contex intervene before an automatic reaction takes over. We can redirect it into more constructive or positive feelings. In other words, meditation develops emotional brain fitness and therefore this pointless activity may not be pointless after all.

In the case of meditaton, your goal is to transform yourself over the course of months and years. The progress you make is usually hardly noticeable from day to day
like the hands of a clock you hardly see moving.

Haste and meditation do not go together ; Any profound transformation is bound to take time.

Matthieu Ricard,  The Art of Meditation

Developing your Meditation Practice, Stage 1 continued

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

The first of these posts talked about placement – we consciously place our awareness on the breath, intentionally moving away from whatever activity we were doing before.  At the same time, just as we sit down to practice, we simultaneously form our intention. One Zen teacher once gave a conference speech in which he summed up the whole of meditation in two words – “intention” and “attention”. S o the first stage in meditation involves forming an intention, right at the start,  the moment one sits. Our intention should be something like, I will use this period to consciously observe the mind and get to know it better. In a sense, we set a gentle model for our activity over the next twenty or thirty minutes.

Why is this so important? Because if we rush into sitting without consciously being aware of changing our activity and forming our intention we can find the mind wandering very quickly. After a minute or two we find ourselves in the same daydreaming we were involved in for much of the day or continuing the activity we have just finished. We may very quickly fall into the activity of checking how we are doing in this meditation and comparing it to yesterday’s or to a model of meditation which we have in our heads.

So the first stage in meditation is focused on how we sit. It seems obvious but is of vital importance. If we start well there is a greater chance that our whole sitting will go well. In the next post we will look at stage two, how to work with thoughts.

Effect of Mindfulness on the Brain

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

Richard Davidson, Ph.D, one of the world’s foremost brain scientists and named in TIME Magazine’s as one of the world’s top 100 most influential people, has done considerable research on the effect of mindfulness practices on the brain. As I mentioned in a previous post, he is now the Director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is researching how the brain can be trained and shaped to be more positive and resilient. In his work he has specialized in research on brain function related to emotion, both in normal individuals and those with, or at risk of, depression and anxiety.

In his research on brain function in anxiety he noted:  The functional M.R.I. images reveal that when people are emotionally distressed — anxious, angry, depressed — the most active sites in the brain are circuitry converging on the amygdala, part of the brain’s emotional centers, and the right prefrontal cortex, a brain region important for the hypervigilance typical of people under stress.

By contrast, when people are in positive moods — upbeat, enthusiastic and energized — those sites are quiet, with the heightened activity in the left prefrontal cortex.

By taking readings on hundreds of people, Davidson established a bell curve distribution, with most people in the middle, having a mix of good and bad moods. Those relatively few people who are farthest to the right are most likely to have a clinical depression or anxiety disorder over the course of their lives. For those lucky few farthest to the left, troubling moods are rare and recovery from them is rapid….

Davidson found  – in research on meditators versus non-meditators –  significant increases in left-sided anterior activation in the meditators compared with the non-meditators, the pattern previously associated with positive affect. He found that regular mindfulness practice over a period of just 8 weeks significantly increased immune system functioning and additionally increased left-brain activity (furthermore, increases in the left-brain functioning directly mediated the increases in immune system functioning).

The overall results from Davidson’s mindfulness research provides evidence for the use of meditative practices to reduce negative mood states – and furthermore shows that positive mood states are more likely to become a part of a person’s natural state if they meditate regularly.

Developing your Meditation Practice, Stage 1

Karl DuffyLeave a comment

There are a number of simple stages in the establishing of a consistent, daily, meditation practice.  The preparatory stages can be found in the link in the header entitled “Starting a Meditation Practice”  and they concern time, place and posture. This series of posts will move us on from those important preparatory elements.

Once we have established our posture and relaxed the body, we begin by placing our mind on the breath. In other words, we consciously and deliberately take our mind from wherever it has been up to that moment and focus its attention simply and gently on the awareness of the breath. We are conscious that we are letting go. We knowingly mark a change from what we were doing to this activity, to the next ten or twenty minutes of awareness of the breath. So three elements: settle the posture, deliberately change the focus, recognize thoughts and let them go. We gather the mind which has been scattered on a number of activities up to that point and begin to focus it softly on the simple act of breathing.

This is the the first part of the first stage, turning our attention to  the breath, marking a change from what activity we were engaged in up to this point.