“When we cultivate our capacity for balance and attunement, we can experience joyful inner liberation, no matter what the outer circumstances.”Jack Kornfield
"Love is omni-inclusive, Progressively exquisite, Understanding and tender And compassionately attuned To other [and] self." R. Buckminster Fuller[I replaced "than" with "and"]
attunement: • bringinginto a harmonious or responsiverelationship; • causing (a person, company, etc.) to have a better understanding of what is needed or wanted by a particular person or group; • becoming aware or responsive; • a feeling of being "at one" with others.
Is it possible that we can sense two basic modes of being in this world? In one, we take a very broad mature perspective on things, not just horizontally - as things are right now for us & everyone & everything else in the world, but also vertically - taking the past & future into account. In the other, we have a very young, narrow, self-centered perspective - fearful, exclusively-about-poor-me. The first perspective, does include ourselves - but in a balanced, rational relationship to the whole! The second, is completely egocentric. Totally ignoring our human & non-human ecology - the home which gives life to & sustains our very being - is unsustainable & makes no sense, like thrashing one's home during a "party".
Can we learn to FEEL which of these two states of being we're inhabiting? Can we keep choosing to embody the one that FEELS healthier?
We can all agree that every one of us is very interested & highly motivated to have & enjoy maximal personal health & quality of life. What constitutes professional behavior & good citizenship, and how best to promote these is more controversial & challenging. Yet I've come to understand that an individual's attention to self-care & wellness, their professionalism, good citizenshipoverlap greatly. From the other direction, I suggest that it's not possible (except perhaps for sociopaths) to enjoy optimal health while behaving unethically. If someone commits a horrific crime, chances are s/he will be found criminally insane (innocent by virtue of insanity). But I suggest that anything short of consistent prosocial, civilized, allocentric / ecocentric behavior is unhealthy - creates needless additional suffering - for the individual "actor" and society. Individuals (except sociopaths) are an integral part of society and nature - whatever benefits or harms one, has the identical effect on the other. So progressive maximal personal evolution of consciousness, fully integrated into one’s life, is the path to maximal health & well-being for oneself (wellness), one's profession (professionalism) and society at large (good citizenship). Teaching self-care - at the deepest level eg via mindfulness (MBSR) - is I suggest, a highly effective way of teaching professionalism and good citizenship in our multicultural, multi-faith, multi-ethnic society. Our world is literally dying for these qualities.
Interim report of the Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Group (MAPPG)
Executive Summary:
The Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Group has carried out an eight-month inquiry into the potential for mindfulness training in key areas of public life - health, education, workplaces and the criminal justice system. We find that mindfulness is a transformative practice, leading to a deeper understanding of how to respond to situations wisely. We believe that government should widen access to mindfulness training in key public services, where it has the potential to be an effective low-cost intervention with a wide range of benefits. We urge all political parties to consider our recommendations for inclusion in their manifestos for the 2015 General Election, as part of the pressing task of tackling the country's mental health crisis.
Key Recommendations:
Health
We recommend that access to Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is substantially widened for adults with a history of depression, because it significantly reduces risk of depressive relapse and can reduce healthcare use.
Workplace
We recommend that public sector employers such as the NHS and civil service pioneer good practice and set up mindfulness pilot projects, which can be evaluated as part of their responsibility to combat stress.
Education
We recommend making mindfulness in schools a priority for development and research. Mindfulness programmes are popular with children and teachers, and research has shown promising potential, with an impact on a wide range of measures including wellbeing, executive function (attention, focus), emotional self-regulation and improved relationships.
Criminal Justice System
We recommend those in the criminal justice sector develop and evaluate pilot projects to identify appropriate forms of mindfulness teaching and establish their acceptability and effectiveness.
We currently live in an age of distraction, yet we come from a long line of humans who successfully survived by being acutely attuned to environmental cues of danger, as well as opportunity to flourish. Many of us realize that today, there's just too much information coming at us 24/7 from all directions, so we need to improveour currently diminished abilities to prioritize, focus attention & stabilize awareness. Mindfulness meditation is a healthy, intelligent way of achieving this. We simply sit still, attend directly to the physical feel of the breath in our belly, letting go of words eg stories, plans, worries, etc. This is how we start sitting practice, whether a novice or if we've been practicing for many years.
While we have youth, good health & abundant energy, it's so easy to take these for granted, and focus our worries on relatively trivial matters. As the many & varied challenges of aging start creeping in, we marvel at young peoples' good fortune - which for us is now "slip-sliding away". When life-threatening illness arrives, we're suddenly thrown for a loop. This is how most of us sleepwalk through life - on autopilot. But we're ALL, ALWAYS changing, and everything around us is also CONSTANTLY changing. Stability, of any kind, at any age, is an illusion. Reality has nothing to do with solid permanence - everything isliminal! Successful adaptation involves perceiving things clearly, accepting life as it is, improving external circumstances as much as practical, AND adjusting ourselves optimally to situations that cannot be improved (serenity prayer). This is thriving in the real world - the world of liminality.
"The concept of liminality stems from the work ... on ritual and rites of passage. Van Gennep suggested ‘the life of an individual in any society is a series of passages from one age to another and from one occupation to another’. Typical rites include life events such as: pregnancy, birth, marriage and death. Rites of passage can be divided into three stages: preliminal rites (rites of separation), liminal rites (rites of transition) and postliminal rites (rites of reincorporation). A rite of passage begins by ‘severing connection’ with a previous social state or position, followed by an ambiguous time where individuals find themselves ‘in-between’ social positions, and ends with ‘re-entry’ or ‘rebirth’ into a new social position.
Rites of passage are not restricted to movement between ‘ascribed’ statuses such as those associated with birth, marriage and death. They also apply to entry into a ‘new achieved status’, for example, membership of a certain group. Turner was particularly interested in the ‘sociocultural’ properties of the liminal (transition) period, asserting that liminality is an ‘interstructural’ situation where culturally recognized positions, such as being married, single, an infant, etc. no longer apply. Liminal people are structurally ‘invisible’ - they are ‘no longer classified and not yet classified’, and therefore are ‘betwixt and between’ structural classification. As such, they are often described as being on the threshold, or margins. Living in the liminal (or transition) period can therefore lead to feelings of ‘ambiguity and paradox’. Yet, Turner also suggested that transition can be transformative. In fact, Turner described liminality as a ‘stage of reflection’ where ‘the reformulation of old elements in new patterns’ occurs, with liminal people re-entering society at a higher social status."
Blows E et al. Liminality as a framework for understanding the experience of cancer survivorship: A literature review. J Adv Nurs 2012; 68(10): 2155-64.
"Meaning in life is regarded as a critical facet of well-being, referring to people’s judgments that their lives are coherent, make sense, & are endowed with a sense of overarching purpose. Most research on meaning in life (& the closely-related construct, purpose in life) has drawn from adult samples. Across hundreds of studies, higher levels of meaning in life consistently are related to greater well-being & better health, as well as lesser psychological distress & reduced impact from physical illness, including death. Although research on meaning in life within adolescents is more scarce, a similar pattern of results emerges, leading some to suggest that meaning in life is foundational to positive youth development." Henry KL et al. The potential role of meaning in life in the relationship between bullying victimization and suicidal ideation. Journal of Youth and Adolescence 2013 DOI 10.1007/s10964-013-9960-2.
The depth of each person's interest, investigation & direct experience of life's meaning, self-concept, & worldview can vary greatly from blissful ignorance to transcendent joy, with a broad band of "ordinary unhappiness" in between.
"People might search for meaning if they feel like their lives are meaningless or if they were motivated to continually deepen their ideas about what their lives mean. The definition of search for meaning accounts for both kinds of motivations. Essentially, the presence of meaning is about the destination and search for meaning is about the journey." Steger MF, Kashdan TB. The unbearable lightness of meaning: Well-being and unstable meaning in life. The Journal of Positive Psychology 2013; 8(2): 103-115.
Mindfulness practice is a wise, life-long, progressive path from ignorance & unhappiness, towards joy.
What makes this a mindfulness exercise, not simply a physical one? Is there such a thing as only a physical exercise, without effecting the mind and emotions? First of all, this popular, very effective core-strengthening exercise can be done with straight arms (strengthens the upper body more) resting on the palms of the hands OR (as illustrated) on the forearms (strengthens the abdomen more). Shoes are optional. The body is held straight (as illustrated). What's not obvious, is that all the leg muscles are active, the belly is allowed to move up towards the spine, the shoulder area is intentionally connected by muscles to the chest, sides of the body & back, the neck & jaws are allowed to relax. Start with a modest time that you can do fairly easily - perhaps 30 seconds. Repeat this daily for a week, taking Sunday off, then up it to 60 seconds per day, daily, etc. Use a timer to let you know when the session is over. Gradually keep increasing the time (by 30 seconds each week, up to 5 minutes or so) so as to maintain a steady mind-body training effect. The mindfulness part: • Welcome all perceptual inputsfrom your body into awareness. Allow these to FILL awareness COMPLETELY. • Notice & gently let go ofwords, forceful effort, & any concept of time. Awareness does NOT have any ROOM for these (see above).
You are practicing noticing and letting go of extraneous friction, noise (unnecessary suffering); WHILE stabilizing simple direct contact with what is real. This is profoundly healthy, beneficial, & takes a few minutes per day. This may be the easiest, most efficient Mindfulness practice - try it - notice all that may happen over the course of a few weeks. Remember, stay open - everything changes - see: http://www.johnlovas.com/2012/01/intention-shifts.html
"Mindfulness meditation, emanating from Zen Buddhism, has emerged as a nonreligious, popular, & accessible practice in teaching universal human qualities of focus, attention, and awareness in clinical and nonclinical populations. The concept and practice of mindfulness has gained popularity in the medical profession over the past three decades and has resulted in improved health, well-being, & quality of life. Mindfulness is a learned discipline that is not limited to any particular setting and its power is in the practice and many applications. The purpose of a daily mindfulness-based meditation, which may include a sitting meditation or yoga, is to simply practice witnessing and acknowledging whatever arises in the present moment without judging it. One’s attention is directed to anything real and tangible, such as the breath or a thought, feeling or sound without any attempt to change it. In this fashion one liberates the mind from unconsciousness and allows himself, in that moment, to live with the full extent of possibilities and greater opportunities for learning, growth, and change.
Many professions, including occupational therapy, support and accept the growing body of empirical research on the use of mindfulness primarily as a way to improve the health and well-being of clients. Mindfulness-based stress reduction is one of the most well-researched stress management programs. Kabat-Zinn, the pioneer in creating the program in 1979, has been instrumental in promoting the growth and acceptance of mindfulness to more than 5,000 medical patients and has demonstrated its efficacy. In 2007 alone, 70 scientific published articles supported the increasing interest in mindfulness." Gura ST. Mindfulness in occupational therapy education. Occup Ther Health Care 2010; 24(3): 266-73.
"... 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.
"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
"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.
From my understanding, mindfulness is as central to overall health as an optimal operating system is central to the optimal functioning of a computer. The statements below re health promotion are therefore relevant to mindfulness practice: we are our own life coach and we must believe in ourselves.
"Health habits are not changed by an act of will. It requires motivational and self-regulatory
skills. Self-management operates through a set of psychological subfunctions. People have to
learn to monitor their health behavior and the circumstances under which it occurs, and how to
use proximal goals to motivate themselves and guide their behavior. They also need to learn
how to create incentives for themselves, and to enlist social supports to sustain their efforts. People are producers of their life circumstances not just products of them. By developing self-regulatory functions people can motivate and guide their efforts in personal and social change."
Bandura A. Swimming against the mainstream: the early years from chilly tributary to transformative mainstream. Behav Res Ther 2004; 42(6): 613-30.
