Tag: mind

Meditation reduces the perception of pain.

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A recent study, conducted by researchers at the University of Oxford,  has found that our physical experience of pain is influenced by the mood we are in at that moment. In other words,  our brain influences how we perceive and deal with the pain we are going through, as a low or anxious mood  disrupts a portion of our neurocircuitry related to regulating emotion, causing an enhanced perception of pain. The low mood may go as far as to drive the pain and make it feel worse. Mind and body are intimately linked when it comes to health and wellness.

Mindfulness meditation has been shown to affect the way we attend to what is happening in our lives at any moment,  and can impact upon mood in a positive manner. Therefore it is probably not surprising to read that a 2010 University of Manchester study, to be published in the Journal Pain,  noted that experienced meditators found pain  less unpleasant than did non-meditators. It seems that regular meditation can train the brain to anticipate pain less and reduce its emotional impact.

Dr Christopher Brown, who led the research,  stated “Meditation is becoming increasingly popular as a way to treat chronic illness such as the pain caused by arthritis. Recently, a mental health charity called for meditation to be routinely available on the NHS (the National Health Service)  to treat depression, which occurs in up to 50% of people with chronic pain.”

The finding is a potential boon to the estimated 40% of people who are unable to adequately manage their chronic pain. Dr Brown suggests that the reason meditation works  is due to the fact that it is a training in remaining focused on the present moment and not anticipating future problems: “The results of the study confirm how we suspected meditation might affect the brain. Meditation trains the brain to be more present-focused and therefore to spend less time anticipating future negative events. This may be why meditation is effective at reducing the recurrence of depression, which makes chronic pain considerably worse.”

You can read more on the University’s website: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=5801

Sunday Quote

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No matter what the situation is,
we are responsible for our own mind states

Joseph Goldstein

Balance in Mind and Body

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The first three pillars of the MBSR Programme are  awareness of the body, awareness of emotions and awareness of thoughts. All of these need to work together in harmony for us to have a healthy and positive life.

The first pillar is awareness of the body,  both in the way stress manifests itself in the body and how a healthy lifestyle requires a healthy body. One way this is cultivated in the MBSR programme is through Mindful Yoga exercises.

The importance of physical fitness for the mind has been supported in a recent study by Laura Baker and her colleagues at the University of Washington, published in the Archives of Neurology. It found that older adults who engaged in regular exercise showed improved concentration and multi-tasking skills.  Another study, this time conducted by Charles Hillman PhD, published in  journal of the American College of Sports Medicine,  showed that a 30 minute aerobic workout significantly improved the accuracy of memory on administered tests. Finally, a recent Duke University study found that middle-aged participants who worked out for 30 minutes, three to four times a week, showed a 30% improvement in mental function after 4 months. As Dr Hillman states: “Data shows that getting regular exercise over time can increase both gray and white matter in the brain and make a huge difference in how well you process and track information, stay on task and allocate your mental resources”

Laura D. Baker, PhD, et al., Effects of Aerobic Exercise on Mild Cognitive Impairment : A Controlled Trial, Arch Neurol. 2010;67(1):71-79.

When we are not aware

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When we practice,
we get aware and acquainted with ourselves
how our lives work, what we are doing with them.

Anything of which we are unaware will have it’s fruits in our life, one way or another.

Charlotte Joko Beck

The body and the mind

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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

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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