RENOUNCE ONE THING

For one day (or one day a week), refrain from something you habitually do to run away, to escape. Pick something concrete, such as overeating or excessive sleeping or overworking or spending too much time texting or checking e-mails. Make a commitment to yourself to gently and compassionately work with refraining from this habit for this one day. Really commit to it. Do this with the intention that it will put you in touch with the underlying anxiety or uncertainty that you've been avoiding. Do it and see what you discover.

Pema Chodron

What habit can you work with?

Friend your amygdala

From U.S. News and World Report, Sept. 18, 2012

One of the hottest forms of stress reduction today is actually one of the oldest: meditation. But the kind making the rounds of hospitals, community centers, and even schools in increasing numbers doesn't involve chanting "Om" while sitting on a cushion with closed eyes; instead, participants are trained to pay attention to their thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations, and to view them neutrally, "without assigning an emotional value that they are strongly positive or negative," says University of Wisconsin–Madison neuroscientist Richard Davidson, coauthor of The Emotional Life of Your Brain.

The idea is to allow parts of the prefrontal cortex to lessen activity in the amygdala, which is responsible for evaluating threats. This helps reduce the likelihood you will overreact and enhances your ability to see potential solutions to problems, Davidson says.

Mandy Patinkin: JewBu. Who knew?

Exhibit1, a TVGuide.com Q&A from 2005: Have things ever been better for you?

Patinkin: The greatest gift in my life was getting cancer because it taught me how much I love my life, my family, my friends and my work, and it taught me that I must find a way to find some peace and calm every day. I never could sit still long enough to meditate, but since my experience with cancer, I do it every day. I'm a little baby Zen Buddhist.

Exhibit 2, New York magazine, Sept. 9, 2012, asked if Saul, the character he plays on Showtime's "Homeland" a good guy or a bad one?

Patinkin: “I don’t want to know. I don’t know what’s going to happen five seconds from now, so why should Saul? As an actor, I play the scene the same way whether he’s bad or good. My inner motivation is to make the world a better place; the bad guy and the good guy think the same thing.”

How to Start a Home Meditation Practice -- and Why You Should

Meditation is good for you. New studies confirm objectively what ancient spiritual traditions have said -- it can reduce stress, increase happiness, and foster a compassionate attitude. The techniques aren't complicated, but many people struggle with starting -- and continuing -- a meditation practice.

I'm teaching a four-week class at Samadhi Yoga Studio in Manchester, which will include meditation instruction and techniques, discussion of the benefits of an ongoing practice, how to get started, and how to keep going, and problems you may encounter. Encouragement and support available! And once you've done it for four weeks ...

I am  a teacher with the Interdependence Project in New York, a secular Buddhist organization that promotes mindful living, and I've trained in meditation instruction with Sarah Powers of the Insight Yoga Institute. I lead a weekly meditation class at Samadhi on Wednesdays at 7 p.m., and teach at the Unitarian-Universalist Society: East Buddhist Group at 7 p.m. on the first Tuesday of the month.

For details or to register -- you can do all four weeks or drop in -- go to samadhiyogastudio.com and click on the workshops tab

The natural beauty of inner landscape

Meditation is another dimension of natural beauty. People talk about appreciating natural beauty — climbing mountains, seeing giraffes and tigers in Africa, and all sorts of things. But nobody seems to appreciate this kind of natural beauty of ourselves. This is actually far more beautiful than flora and fauna, far more fantastic, far more painful and colorful and delightful.

-- Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Friend your body

Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we already are. - Pema Chodron

"When you talk about yourself, or talk to yourself...try to picture you talking to your own daughter or your younger sister. Because you would tell your younger sister or your daughter that she was beautiful, and you wouldn't be lying - because she is. And so are you." - Amy Poehler

Sitting alone

Loneliness hurts -- not just psychologically.  Elders who report feeling lonely have an increased risk of heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, and depression.

Researchers at UCLA say that an eight-week mindfulness meditation program reduced not only feelings of loneliness in older adults but also significantly reduced expression of inflammatory genes.

Science Daily reports that in the current online edition of the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, senior study author Steve Cole, a UCLA professor of medicine and psychiatry and a member of the Norman Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at UCLA, and colleagues report that the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program reduced the feelings of loneliness among study participants. (MBSR is a secular meditation program developed by Buddhist Jon Kabat-Zinn.**)

For more on how the study was done, read the Science Daily article here. For an article with fewer technical details, read this CNN piece.

This is one of those things that just make sense to me. Loneliness is stressful. Stress puts your body on alert. Alertness means tense muscles, internal chemistry going into overdrive. It's bound to have physical consequences.

It also makes sense to me that mindfulness meditation eases feelings of loneliness, even if you're sitting alone in your room doing it. Being alone is not a problem in the moment. It's all the thoughts that go along with it ... Why am I alone? Nobody loves me. They're not answering my calls because they know it's me. I have always been alone. I will always be alone. (John Welwood describes this as "the mood of unlove -- a deep-seated suspicion most of us harbor within ourselves that we cannot be loved, that we are not truly lovable for who we are.")

If you stay in the moment and don't board that train of thought, you avoid the stress. What's more, you can notice what's right about the moment -- the light, the sounds, the temperature, the sheer joy of being able to breathe.

Calm your mind and calm your body.

The benefits may not be tied only to mindfulness. The Science Daily article also notes that Dr. Helen Lavretsky, a UCLA professor of psychiatry and a Cousins Center member, published a study showing that a form of yogic meditation involving chanting also reduced inflammatory gene expression, as well as stress levels, among individuals who care for patients with Alzheimer's disease.