#707 Choosing To Change

www.elephantjournal.com

#650 Effective Management for Existential Distress ??

     A life of generosity, ethical living & ideally, a longstanding deep meditation practice, seems to be one of the ideal ways to access & embody profoundly meaningful, transformative insight & evolve or mature spiritually. Such maturity generally includes facing death with calm composure (equanimity).

     However, for many in our secular society, who spend their lives focused mostly on material concerns, the possibility remains open for having profound transformative spiritual experiences, even at the end of life, via medically-supervised psychedelic drugs, in palliative care settings.

     "under the influence of the (psilocybin), 'individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states . . . and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.'
     ... cancer patients receiving just a single dose of psilocybin experienced immediate and dramatic reductions in anxiety and depression, improvements that were sustained for at least six months.
     Researchers are using or planning to use psilocybin not only to treat anxiety, addiction (to smoking and alcohol), and depression but also to study the neurobiology of mystical experience, which the drug, at high doses, can reliably occasion.
     “People don’t realize how few tools we have in psychiatry to address existential distress. Xanax isn’t the answer. So how can we not explore this, if it can recalibrate how we die?”
     “When administered under supportive conditions,” the paper concluded, “psilocybin occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously occurring mystical experiences.” Participants ranked these experiences as among the most meaningful in their lives, comparable to the birth of a child or the death of a parent. Two-thirds of the participants rated the psilocybin session among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives; a third ranked it at the top. Fourteen months later, these ratings had slipped only slightly.
     Furthermore, the “completeness” of the mystical experience closely tracked the improvements reported in personal well-being, life satisfaction, and “positive behavior change” measured two months and then fourteen months after the session.
     A follow-up study ... found that the psilocybin experience also had a positive and lasting effect on the personality of most participants. This is a striking result, since the conventional wisdom in psychology holds that personality is usually fixed by age thirty and thereafter is unlikely to substantially change. But more than a year after their psilocybin sessions volunteers who had had the most complete mystical experiences showed significant increases in their “openness,” one of the five domains that psychologists look at in assessing personality traits. (The others are conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.) Openness, which encompasses aesthetic appreciation, imagination, and tolerance of others’ viewpoints, is a good predictor of creativity.
     “I don’t want to use the word ‘mind-blowing,’ ” Griffiths told me, “but, as a scientific phenomenon, if you can create conditions in which seventy per cent of people will say they have had one of the five most meaningful experiences of their lives? To a scientist, that’s just incredible.”
     ... William James ... suggested that we judge the mystical experience not by its veracity, which is unknowable, but by its fruits: does it turn someone’s life in a positive direction?"
       Michael Pollan "The Trip Treatment." Annals of Medicine, The New Yorker Magazine, Feb 9, 2015
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment 

     Listen to Mary Hines' March 12, 2015 interview: "Psychologist Anthony Bossis: Can psychedelic drugs help ease the fear of death?"  http://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry

Lilly J Warren   www.dpreview.com

 

#580 "All Manner of Things SHALL be Well" ??

Old echoes may ache,
Doubts inherited can pummel,
Reflexive unskilled tendencies can simmer,
AND YET - "all manner of things ARE well" - NOW

For deep within & all about ...
Profound wisdom,
The vigilance of the most loving grandparent,

Immediately, effortlessly ever-present ...
Spacious clear AWARENESS -
Silent, still, timeless, loving, peaceful, joyful,
Embracing EVERYTHING.

     See also: http://www.johnlovas.com/2014/11/waking-up.html

Valerios Theofanidis, National Geographic   http://photography.nationalgeographic.com

#570 What Remains When Self-talk is Released?

     In Mindfulness practice, as we gradually, gently learn to let go of identifying with incessant self-talk (“thought proliferation”), and become more engaged with the physical experience of the present moment ("just this"), we experience interesting shifts. 

     This (or any other) statement / concept, in itself as a thought, is merely equivalent to self-talk - "blah, blah, blah ...". 
     BUT how are you experiencing this? How does it impact your one, fleeting, precious life?

#466 Timelessness?

     Linear time may seem quite rational. Timelessness may be something you experience as equally if not more reasonable, in time. Yes, both time and timelessness.

Steve McCurry   http://stevemccurry.com/

#456 Awakening to Things as They Are

     We progressively awaken to the moment-to-moment reactions we have to life by noticing how each reaction is preceded by a felt physical sensation. Two amazingly frequent sensations:
     1) closing off, tightening / hardening of the body - particularly the heart-mind - towards stimuli that we negatively judge. This is aversion or hatred - a rigid, adversarial reaction.
     2) aching hunger - particularly in the gut - towards stimuli we judge to be enticing, desirable. This is craving or clinging - a wanting, wishing, pining away for, desperately desiring to keep reaction.
     In aversion / hatred we're running from / fighting off stuff, in craving / clinging we're running after / desperately hanging-on to stuff, based on the fundamental misunderstanding: that things as they are, are unacceptable. 
     And how actually are things as they are? Fluidly changing, ephemeral - far more like inner transient energies than solid external chunks of matter, that can either be accumulated in our bedrooms, or hauled far away to be buried.
     These are not dogma, simply observations at a given stage of mindfulness meditation practice. From a Western psychological perspective, it represents a normal, healthy shift from rigidity towards psychological flexibility & accepting reality.

St. Andrews by John England   http://www.fogforestgallery.ca/bios/bio_england.html

#423 What is This?

     There are at least 3 levels of reality: 1) the stories we tell ourselves about reality, from our default narrative focus of attention; 2) reality as we actually experience it directly, from our experiential focus of attention (mindfulness); and occasionally, 3) profound peace, silence, stillness that feels like home.
     Much of mindfulness practice is about noticing, accepting, then letting go of a wide variety of noises (self-talk, mental proliferation etc - mainly #1) that's interposed - like friction - between our awareness and #2 & 3.  
     Much of mindfulness practice is identifying & letting go of noise / friction, a process of simplification, of getting down to basics, the core of what we are, then living this mystery as cleanly & simply as possible. What is this?

Charles Baxter   www.dpreview.com

#368 Practicing Meditation Changes How We Relate to Experience

     "the best quality study so far has found a significant positive association between the amount of formal meditation practised during the MBSR course and improvements in symptoms & wellbeing. In addition, based on the theory of Segal et al, higher frequency & duration of mindfulness practice (after the course also) should be associated with more positive outcomes since the ability to switch to a being mode is strengthened by practice.

     ... we would argue that mindfulness practice differs from other health behaviours in that it involves cultivating a different mode of functioning. Thus, it entails not only performing a discrete behaviour but also changing the way in which we relate to our experience. *** One can adopt specific behaviours while remaining within a “doing” mode, whereas to become more mindful entails developing an entirely different “being” mode, which one can enter at any time. Thus, arguably, mindfulness practice is less a health behaviour and more an approach to life."

       Langdon S, Jones FW, Hutton J, Holttum S. A grounded-theory study of mindfulness practice following mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Mindfulness 2011; 2(4): 270-281.

*** See also "Qualities or Attitudes of Mindfulness": http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2012/04/114-qualities-or-attitudes-of.html

Gandalfthewhite   www.dpreview.com

 

#92 Psychological flexibility

     Psychological flexibility is defined as “contacting the present moment as a conscious human being, and, based on what that situation affords, acting in accordance with one’s chosen values. … (It) guides people in persisting with or changing their actions, in accordance with the values-based contingencies that they contact, when they are willing to experience the present moment.”
     Bond FW, Hayes SC, Barnes-Holmes D. Psychological Flexibility, ACT, and Organizational Behavior. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management 2006; 26(1-2): 25-54.

     “Psychological flexibility spans a wide range of human abilities to: recognize & adapt to various situational demands; shift mindsets or behavioral repertoires when these strategies compromise personal or social functioning; maintain balance among important life domains; and be aware, open, and committed to behaviors that are congruent with deeply held values.”
     Kashdan TB, Rottenberg J. Psychological Flexibility as a Fundamental Aspect of Health. Clin Psychol Rev 2010; 30(7): 865-878.

     “The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.”                      William Sloane Coffin

Photo: Steve Macek   www.dpreview.com