#418 Cognitive & Emotional Changes from Meditation Practices

     "The contemplative traditions from which commonly taught meditation practices have arisen are clear in identifying affective qualities as central targets of the contemplative practices. Kindness, compassion, and equanimity are all regarded as qualities that can be cultivated and enhanced through mental training. Indeed, the cognitive changes that are also hypothesized to occur with mental training, such as improvements in certain components of attention, are viewed in these traditions as building blocks and tools to facilitate the most important types of transformation, which are in the emotional realm."

       Davidson RJ. Empirical Explorations of Mindfulness: Conceptual and Methodological Conundrums. Emotion 2010; 10(1) 8–11.

Val Bueno   www.dpreview.com

#396 Intentionally Improving our own Mental & Emotional Health

     "... just as we as a society are learning to take more responsibility for our physical health by engaging in regular physical exercise, we can also take more responsibility for our minds & brains by engaging in certain mental exercises (mindfulness meditation) that can induce plastic changes in the brain and that may have enduring beneficial consequences for social and emotional behavior. 

     ... qualities such as well-being ought to be viewed, at least in part, as a product of trainable skills ... interventions explicitly designed to promote well-being may have beneficial behavioral and biological effects."

       Davidson RJ, McEwen BS. Social influences on neuroplasticity: stress and interventions to promote well-being. Nature Neuroscience 2012; 15(5): 689-95.

     For a nice summary of the neuroscientific support for the effectiveness & benefits of Mindfulness training see: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2013/09/emotions-attention-introspection-are.html

instagram.com/toddler777#

"Well-being is actually a skill," said Dr. Richard J. Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the study's senior author. "It's something that can be enhanced with training. If we can take more responsibility for our well-being, we can help to minimize burnout or decrease its severity." - See more at: http://wisdomresearch.org/blogs/news/archive/2013/09/05/mindfulness-meditation-fights-burnout-new-study-of-teachers-suggests-video.aspx#sthash.DXmVJtve.dpuf

#387 Meditation Facilitating Normal Developmental Shift to Healthier Emotion Regulation

     "The challenge is to find ways of regulating our emotions so that we retain their helpful features while limiting their destructive aspects.
     ... two commonly used emotion regulation strategies:
     Cognitive REAPPRAISAL - changing the way one thinks about a potentially emotion-eliciting situation in order to modify its emotional impact; 

     Expressive SUPPRESSION - changing the way one responds behaviorally to an emotion-eliciting event. 

     ... experimental findings show that 

1) reappraisal has a healthier profile of ... consequences (patterns of affect, social functioning, & well-being) than suppression

2) (there's) a normative shift toward an increasingly healthy emotion regulation profile during adulthood (increases in the use of reappraisal & decreases in the use of suppression)."

 

       John OP, Gross JJ. Healthy and unhealthy emotion regulation: personality processes, individual differences, and life span development. J Pers 2004; 72(6): 1301-33.

     Meditation is based on seeing clearly (awareness). The acceptance aspect of meditation involves letting go of prevalent avoidant tendencies such as suppression by accepting reality as it is, rather than demanding that it conform to our preferences.

 

 

#330 Mindfulness Practices - Simple but Not Easy

     "taking time out to sit in silence and bring attention to something like the breath, there is an opportunity for a degree of relaxation, or ‘slowing down’. Secondly there is a perhaps more counter-intuitive opportunity to simply notice - as non-judgementally and non-analytically as possible - the experiential flow of thoughts, feelings and sensations. In other words, there is an attempt to cultivate awareness of one’s moment-by-moment experience ... a ‘post-modern’ meta skill.
     Straight away in this two-fold description, one may appreciate why it could be said that mindfulness is ‘simple, but not easy’. The process of sitting and bringing some light attention to the process of breathing (or in other mindfulness practices it may be for example the process of walking, or eating), is not technically complicated and may feel a welcome relaxation. Alternatively, being invited simply to notice one’s experience, can feel tremendously challenging. One can come up closer to previously less noticed streams of negative, painful, or fearful thought, or at the very least one can feel unsettled by noticing for perhaps the first time, how ‘all over the place’ our experience can be, veering in the space of a few moments, from wild fantasy, to profound sleepiness, for example. It is not something we may ever have done before, in such a direct way, and it can feel anything but relaxing at times. Thus, mindfulness could be said to be a more radical practice, of learning to be with both positive and painful experiential states, in the present, without loading this with strong expectations, of an outcome."

       Moss D, Waugh M, Barnes R. A tool for life? Mindfulness as self-help or safe uncertainty. Int J Qual Stud Health Well-being 2008; 3(3): 132-142.

 

Studio 21 Art Gallery, Halifax, NS   http://www.studio21.ca/

#222 Physically processing emotions - Mindfulness meditation's systematic desensitization

     Staying with (acceptance of) the unpleasant physical sensations of emotions such as fear, AND witnessing it objectively (a process Western psychology calls cognitive defusion) is how we "physically process" or work our way through difficult emotions in mindfulness practice.
     Amazingly, we learn this powerful, far-ranging skill during mindfulness meditation by simply sitting still - when our nose tickles, when our feet want to move, and even when we want to get up and end the sitting prematurely. We're fully aware of the physical feeling, without words or stories, we examine it with curiosity, accept it fully, and stay with it, observing how it arises, remains for a while, changes, and disappears from whence it arose, without us ever having to react. (Psychiatrists & psychologists use similar concepts - systematic desensitization / graduated exposure therapy - to treat phobias & other anxiety disorders.)
     We learn in a very direct experiential manner how we can intentionally “outgrow” the clutches of fear, anxiety, chronic pain, etc. All that we fear, worry about, or are otherwise imprisoned by, can thus "lose their solidity." We are no longer fused with these transient energies (phantoms) passing through the mind.
     We remember "the story", but it's no longer "my drama," for the emotional charge progressively dissipates. We free ourselves. Our mind-heart becomes relaxed, free, open. We come home to the stillness and silence of our center.

     See: http://www.johnlovas.com/2012/12/physical-processing-neuroscience.html

Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) - "Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo"