Walk like a scientist -- with mindfulness

In this blog post from NPR, Adam Frank recommends using scientific methods to get in touch with the present moment.

Like meditators, scientists practice noticing, Frank says. "This is where it begins, with simple act of catching seeing the smallest detail as an opening to a wider world of wonder and awe," he says. Noticing can overcome our habit of walking around lost in thought, not seeing where we are "by binding us to experience in ways that are thrilling, even in their ordinariness."

And, he says, you don't need expensive microscopes or a particle accelerator in your basement to practice noticing. (You knew that, didn't you, since you're reading a meditation blog.) Frank recommends you take a walk in the woods and gives helpful directions:

How many trees are there on the sides of a steep hill compared with its crest? How many leaves are there on the stalks of the blue flowers compared to the yellow ones? How many different kinds of birdsong do you hear when you stop and listen, (by the way, this requires really stopping and really listening, which is awesome). Counting things forces you to pay attention to subtleties in the landscape, the plants, the critters.
Other things scientists love: shapes, colors, patterns. Do the rocks at the stream's edge look different from the ones near the trail? Do the big cattails have the same color as the small ones? Get your naturalist on and bring a notebook. Pretend you are or John Muir. Jot down your findings, make little drawings and always, always ask your yourself those basic questions: why, how, when?
You don't need the answers. As the poet Rilke once said, "Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language." Questions raise our pulse and sharpen our delight.

Doctors prescribe meditation

The Wall Street Journal reports that doctors increasingly are prescribing meditation for a variety of conditions.

At Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, doctor’s orders can include an unlikely prescription: meditation.
“I recommend five minutes, twice a day, and then gradually increase,” said Aditi Nerurkar, a primary-care doctor and assistant medical director of the Cheng & Tsui Center for Integrative Care, which offers alternative medical treatment at the Harvard Medical School-affiliated hospital. “It’s basically the same way I prescribe medicine. I don’t start you on a high dose right away.” She recommends that patients eventually work up to about 20 minutes of meditating, twice a day, for conditions including insomnia and irritable bowel syndrome.
Integrative medicine programs including meditation are increasingly showing up at hospitals and clinics across the country. Recent research has found that meditation can lower blood pressure and help patients with chronic illness cope with pain and depression. In a study published last year, meditation sharply reduced the risk of heart attack or stroke among a group of African-Americans with heart disease.

Meditation is seen as complementary to traditional medicine, not a substitute for it, the article says. 

Feel what you feel. Know what you know

When something happens, like the explosions at the Boston Marathon today, it's hard to know how to react. And while this my sound counter-intuitive or self-centered, I think the best way to work with it is to be with your own reaction. (This assumes you're not in the immediate vicinity and there's no action you can take to help.)

When you allow space for your own reaction, it naturally leads to compassion. Being present with what's happening for you with kindness expands your heart, which makes room for others. 

Feel what you feel, without naming it or judging it or explaining it or justifying it. Feel it. And know what you know.

"Anxiety, heartbreak, and tenderness mark the in-between state. It's the kind of place we usually want to avoid. The challenge is to stay in the middle rather than buy into struggle and complaint. The challenge is to let it soften us rather than make us more rigid and afraid. Becoming intimate with the queasy feeling of being in the middle of nowhere makes our hearts more tender. When we are brave enough to stay in the middle, compassion arises spontaneously. By not knowing, not hoping to know, and not acting like we know what's happening, we begin to access our inner strength.

Yet it seems reasonable to want some kind of relief. If we can make the situation right or wrong, if we can pin it down that way, then we are on familiar ground....But staying with volatile energy gradually becomes more comfortable than acting it out or repressing it. This open-ended tender place is called bodhicitta. Staying with it is what heals. It allows us to let go of our self-importance. It's how the warrior learns to love."

~Pema Chödrön

Meditators are nicer

People meditate for lots of reasons -- to reach enlightenment, to lower their blood pressure, reduce anxiety, relieve stress. Most don't sit in order to be nicer to others, but a new study shows that meditation can have that effect.

A team of researchers at Northeastern University recruited 36 people who said they were interested in meditation. Half, the control group, were told they were on a wait list. The other half were given eight weeks of meditation instruction, with half of that group also involved in discussions of Buddhist teachings on compassion and sufferings.

To test the effects, subjects were told to come to an office; the waiting room had three chairs, two occupied by actors involved in the experiment. The subject naturally took the third chair, and another actor -- on crutches and with a look of pain -- came in.

The study found that about 15 per­cent of the non-meditators – the wait-­listed group – got up and offered their seat to the suf­ferer com­pared to about 50 per­cent of those in both med­i­ta­tion groups – those who engaged in dis­cus­sions about com­pas­sion and those who only par­tic­i­pated in med­i­ta­tion training. The results sug­gest that it was the med­i­ta­tion itself — not the discussions — that accounted for the increase.

The research team is now looking at why meditators were more likely to give up their seats.It could be related to a height­ened aware­ness of one’s sur­round­ings or an increased sense of empathy, they speculate.

“This is the first evi­dence that the prac­tice of meditation—even for brief periods of time—increases peo­ples’ respon­sive­ness and moti­va­tion to relieve the suf­fering of others,” psychology professor David DeSteno said.

Mindfulness explained

This post gives gives a lot of information on how mindfulness works in our minds. If you like to know how things work, read it. If you just like to know what works, I like this summary:

So practicing mindfulness is important, as you're more likely to then remember to do it.
The key to practicing mindfulness is just to practice focusing your attention onto a direct sense, and to do so often. It helps to use a rich stream of data. You can hold your attention to the feeling of your foot on the floor easier than the feeling of your little toe on the floor: there's more data to tap into. You can practice mindfulness while you are eating, walking, talking, doing just about anything, with the exception of drinking a beer in the sun, which works for only a limited time before your attention leaves to go and party (the neuroscience of all that will have to wait for another book.)
Building mindfulness doesn't mean you have to sit still and watch your breath. You can find a way that suits your lifestyle. My wife and I built a 10 second ritual into the evening meal with my kids, which involves just stopping and noticing three small breaths together before we eat. The added bonus is it makes a great dinner taste even better.
What ever practice you do develop, practice it. The more mindful you become, the better decisions you will make, and the more you will achieve your own goals, rather than other people's goals for you.

David Rock

More mindfulness = less stress

Focusing on the present rather than letting the mind drift may help to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, new research from the the University of California, Davis, suggests.

"This is the first study to show a direct relation between resting cortisol and scores on any type of mindfulness scale," said Tonya Jacobs, a postdoctoral researcher at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain and first author of a paper describing the work, published this week in the journal Health Psychology.

High levels of cortisol, a hormone produced by the adrenal gland, are associated with physical or
emotional stress. Prolonged release of the hormone contributes to wide-ranging, adverse effects on a number of physiological systems.

Mindfulness includes the ability to focus mental resources on immediate experience, which can be improved by meditation training.

According to Jacobs, training the mind to focus on immediate experience may reduce the propensity to ruminate about the past or worry about the future, thought processes that have been linked to cortisol release.
"The idea that we can train our minds in a way that fosters healthy mental habits and that these habits may be reflected in mind-body relations is not new; it's been around for thousands of years across various cultures and ideologies," Jacobs said. "However, this idea is just beginning to be integrated into Western medicine as objective evidence accumulates. Hopefully, studies like this one will contribute to that effort."

Meditation is better for you than smoking

Well, duh. Am I right? At this point, everyone knows that smoking is not healthy for you. It's worse for you and those in proximity than most things.
And yet, people do it.
Forbes, not exactly a spiritual journal, notes that some bad habits (smoking) feed on themselves, creating a cycle, while others break that cycle. In "Eat, Smoke, Meditate: Why your brain cares how you cope" Forbes assesses ways of chilling out.

Most people would agree that a lot of our unhappiness comes from the mind’s annoying chatter, which includes obsessions, worries, drifts from this stress to that stress, and our compulsive and exhausting need to anticipate the future. Not surprisingly, the goal of most adults is to get the mind to shut up, calm down, and chill out. For this reason, we turn to our diverse array of feel-good tools (cigarettes, deep breathing, and what have you). Some are healthier and more effective than others, and researchers are finally understanding why certain methods break the cycle and others exacerbate it.

The article notes the benefits of meditation, including creation of a new default mode for the brain, where it can rest.

Smoking actually creates a negative feedback loop, where you are linking stress and craving with the oh-so-good act of smoking. So whenever you experience a negative emotion, craving returns and intensifies over time, so that you are actually even less happy than before. A cigarette may quiet the mind temporarily – during the act of smoking – but in between cigarettes is where things get bad, because craving creeps in. Though we’re using craving as the example, unhappiness, self-referential thoughts, or everyday worries can all be substituted in.

Substituting a carrot stick or other behavior for your actual craving (or other form of unhappiness) is a typical method of treatment, but it doesn’t often work, because the feedback loop is still there. Addressing the process itself with other methods (like meditation), which allow you to ride out the craving/unhappiness by attending to it and accepting it, and then letting it go, has been more successful, because it actually breaks the cycle rather than masks it.