From my UK friend and fellow mindfulness author, Ed Halliwell, a helpful article on how mindfulness can be a hard thing to do…

For  the last couple of weeks, I’ve been catching up on streaming videos from Creating A Mindful Society, the Mindful.org-sponsored event which took place in New York last month. Two segments stood out for me. The first was Richie Davidson’s brilliant keynote on the neuroscience of meditation—a clear and cogent outline of what happens in our brains as we train in presence and kindness. The second was a discussion of why, twenty years after publication of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s seminal book, Full Catastrophe Living, and with so much evidence pointing towards the benefits, mindfulness practice hasn’t yet become a part of most people’s lives.

There were several interesting takes on this, including Kabat-Zinn’s own call for patience—he talked in terms of a thousand-year unfolding—and Davidson’s reminder that in spite of all the remarkable data, we are far from convincing the scientific mainstream that meditation is a valuable thing to do. [click to continue…]

It’s easy for us to get caught up in our own lives and forget about the people around us.  This article by Janet Lansbury reminds us to acknowledge our children’s unique points of view.

Enjoy,
~Marsha

Write this word on your hand. It’s a magical way to connect with a child of any age, can ease tears and tantrums and even prevent them. It’s a simple but surprisingly challenging thing to do, particularly tough to remember in the heat the moment…

Acknowledge.

Before you tell your child that it’s time to leave the park, or remind him that the really cool truck he’s examining has to stay at the store, acknowledge his point of view. Acknowledge your child’s feelings and wishes, even if they seem ridiculous, irrational, self-centered or wrong. This is not the same as agreeing, and is definitely not indulgent or allowing an undesirable behavior.

Acknowledgement isn’t condoning our child’s actions; it’s validating the feelings behind them. It’s a simple, profound way to reflect our child’s experience and inner self. It demonstrates our understanding and acceptance. It sends a powerful, affirming message… Every thought, desire, feeling — every expression of your mind, body and heart — is perfectly acceptable, appropriate and lovable.

Acknowledging is simple, but it isn’t easy. It’s counter-intuitive for most of us, even when we’ve done it thousands of times. Won’t acknowledging our child’s wishes make matters worse? Won’t saying “I know how much you want an ice cream cone like the one your friend has and it does look yummy, but we won’t be having dessert until later” make our toddler hold on to the idea longer, cry harder? Wouldn’t it be better to dismiss or downplay the child’s feelings, distract, redirect or say:”Oh, sweetie, not now”? [click to continue…]

Thought-provoking summary of a study on improving female sexual difficulties using mindfulness.

Abstract

Objectives Treatments of female sexual dysfunction have been largely unsuccessful because they do not address the psychological factors that underlie female sexuality. Negative self-evaluative processes interfere with the ability to attend and register physiological changes (interoceptive awareness). This study explores the effect of mindfulness meditation training on interoceptive awareness and the three categories of known barriers to healthy sexual functioning: attention, self-judgment, and clinical symptoms.

Methods Forty-four college students (30 women) participated in either a 12-week course containing a “meditation laboratory” or an active control course with similar content or laboratory format. Interoceptive awareness was measured by reaction time in rating physiological response to sexual stimuli. Psychological barriers were assessed with self-reported measures of mindfulness and psychological well-being. [click to continue…]

Embodied cognition states that even though the brain controls the body, the body has a major influence on the mind and our experiences influence our cognition.  This view on brain cognition is explored below.

Enjoy

Embodied cognition, the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind, is one of the more counter-intuitive ideas in cognitive science. In sharp contrast is dualism, a theory of mind famously put forth by Rene Descartes in the 17^th century when he claimed that “there is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible… the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body.” In the proceeding centuries, the notion of the disembodied mind flourished. From it, western thought developed two basic ideas: reason is disembodied because the mind is disembodied and reason is transcendent and universal. However, as George Lakoff and Rafeal Núñez explain:

Cognitive science calls this entire philosophical worldview into serious question on empirical grounds… [the mind] arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experiences. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment… Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanism of neural binding.

What exactly does this mean? It means that our cognition isn’t confined to our cortices. That is, our cognition is influenced, perhaps determined by, our experiences in the physical world. This is why we say that something is “over our heads” to express the idea that we do not understand; we are drawing upon the physical inability to not see something over our heads and the mental feeling of uncertainty. Or why we understand warmth with affection; as infants and children the subjective judgment of affection almost always corresponded with the sensation of warmth, thus giving way to metaphors such as “I’m warming up to her.” [click to continue…]

This study on pain tolerance and meditation makes yet another argument for mindfulness meditation.

Meditation has long been touted as a holistic approach to pain relief. And studies show that long-time meditators can tolerate quite a bit of pain.

Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have found that you don’t have to be a lifelong Buddhist monk to pull it off. Novices were able to tame pain after just a few training sessions.

Sounds a bit mystical, I know, but researchers, using a special type of brain imaging, have also been able to see changes in the brain activity of newbies. Their conclusion? “A little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation,” Fadel Zeidan, a neuroscientist and the study’s lead author, tells Shots. That finding’s a first, Zeidan says. [click to continue…]