Tag: Stress Reduction

Simple daily practices: Pause

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Our habits are strong, so a certain discipline is required to step outside our cocoon and receive the magic of our surroundings. The pause practice—the practice of taking three conscious breaths at any moment when we notice that we are stuck — is a simple but powerful practice that each of us can do at any given moment.

Pause practice can transform each day of your life. It creates an open doorway to the sacredness of the place in which you find yourself. The vastness, stillness, and magic of the place will dawn upon you, if you let your mind relax and drop for just a few breaths the storyline you are working so hard to maintain. If you pause just long enough, you can reconnect with exactly where you are, with the immediacy of your experience.

Pema Chodron, Waking up to your World

Letting go of objectives

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Now if the practice [of meditation] is so good for us, why is it so difficult to maintain a steady practice? It may be that the notion that practice is “good for us” is the very impediment – we all know we can resist what is good for us at the table, at the gym, and on the internet. This mechanical notion of practice – “if I practice then I will be (fill in the blank)” – leads to discouragement because it is not true that practice inevitably leads to happiness, or anything we can imagine. Our lives, like the ocean, constantly change,and we will naturally face great storms and dreary lulls. How then do we put our mind in a space where practice is always there, whether tumultuous or in the doldrums? It requires a completely radical view of practice: practice is not something we do, it is something we are. Seeing our practice as our life, we just let go and do it.

Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, Like a Dragon in Water

When you see fear today

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When you are frightened by something, you have to relate with fear, explore why you are frightened, and develop some sense of conviction. You can actually look at fear. Then fear ceases to be the dominant situation that is going to defeat you. Fear can be conquered. You can be free from fear if you realize that fear is not the ogre. You can step on fear, and therefore, you can attain what is known as fearlessness. But that requires that, when you see fear, you smile.

Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Simple daily practices: Bring awareness to your anxiety

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To begin with, I’ve found it helps me to appreciate how scared that little lizard inside each one us is. Lizards – and early mammals, emerging about 200 million years ago – that were not continually uneasy and vigilant would fail the first test of life in the wild: eat lunch – don’t be lunch – today.  So be aware of the ongoing background trickle of anxiety in your mind, the subtle guarding and bracing with people and events as you move through your day. Then, again and again, try to relax some, remind yourself that you are actually alright right now, and send soothing and calming down into the most ancient layers of your mind.

 Also soothe your own body. Most of the signals coming into the brain originate inside the body, not from out there in the world. Therefore, as your body settles down, that sends feedback up into your brain that all is well – or at least not too bad. Take a deep breath and feel each part of it, noticing that you are basically OK, and letting go of tension and anxiety as you exhale; repeat as you like. Shift your posture – even right now as you read this – to a more comfortable position. As you do activities such as eating, walking, using the bathroom, or going to bed, keep bringing awareness to the fact that you are safe, that necessary things are getting done just fine, that you are alive and well. Register the experience in your body of a softening, calming, and opening; savor it; stay with it for 10-20-30 seconds in a row so that it can transfer to implicit memory.

Rick Hanson, Pet the Lizard

Making time for our better health 6: Not making excuses

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When we get rushed, the mind will formulate all kinds of reasons why we cannot do the things which are good for us – take time out, meditate, exercise, visit friends. This is because it realizes we are under pressure, and mistakenly opts for two contrasting strategies to deal with this. Firstly, it convinces us that we need to conserve energy, that we do not have time to take things easy or socialize. Secondly, it focuses all its energy on the problem, normally by deciding that we should  think about it a lot. Both strategies will actually exacerbate the problem in the long run, but the mind prioritizes how we use our  time by being tricked by the very pressure it is trying to relieve.

Therefore until our practice becomes firmly established we have to remind ourselves to choose to meditate when we get stressed. This is why a fixed routine and a conscious intention are useful.  As one meditation teacher said, meditation actually begins the night before when we form the intention in our mind to set aside the time the next morning. A fixed time each day frees us from associating the practice with what sort of day yesterday was and what may  happen today, and allows us take a proactive stance towards our overall wellbeing in the face of constantly changing mind states. It help us embody the constancy we would like to feel in the face of our changing moods.

Mindful eating and weight loss

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A pilot study has looked at the effect of Mindful Eating on weight loss. The report of  the study was published in Complementary Therapies in Medicine in 2010  and involved ten people classified as “obese” (average age was 44) who followed a Mindful Eating program for six weeks, consisting of mindfulness meditation, group eating exercises, and group discussions.  Pairing daily meditation with eating was encouaged to enable people to identify and examine eating triggers, hunger and fullness  cues, the quality of craved foods, and emotions associated with eating. They were encouraged to engage in as much mindful eating as possible and to increase their physical activity by about 5 to 10% each week. The participants were assessed during the trial and again after three months for changes in eating behaviour, psychological functioning, and weight and inflammation markers.

It was found that all of the participants lost a significant amount of weight, almost nine pounds over 12 weeks, on average. A measure of inflammation in the body (C-reactive protein,), decreased significantly, as well. Measures of mindfulness—the ability to observe, be aware of, accept, and describe their eating patterns—saw moderate to large increases throughout the study and follow-up periods. The participants’ self control improved dramatically, and binge eating was significantly reduced. In addition, significant improvements were seen in depressive and physical symptoms (such as indigestion and headache), as well as negative affect (mood) and perceived stress. The cautious conclusions drawn by the researcher were that mindful eating programmes could result in significant changes in weight and eating behaviour.

“In contrast to a focus on cutting calories, mindfulness helps people reduce weight and improve health by restoring the individual’s ability to detect and respond to natural cues,” stated Jeanne Dalen, lead author of the study who works at the Center for Family and Adolescent Research in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Jeanne Dalen, Bruce W Smith, Brian M Shelley, Anita Lee Sloan, Lisa Leahigh, Debbie Begay, “Pilot study: Mindful Eating and Living : weight, eating behavior, and psychological outcomes associated with a mindfulness-based intervention for people with obesity”, Complementary Therapies In Medicine (2010), Volume: 18, Issue: 6.