Meditation is Great!

[LittleMissMuffet]

Is anyone else getting calmer from doing meditation?
It's only been around a month of me meditating and using Mindfulness, and I'm noticing that I'm less tense and reactive.
I practise meditating nearly everyday (trying to do it everyday) and when I get tense in a situation I use Mindfulness.

Here is a short description of Mindfulness: when thoughts or feelings rise-up, notice them with the attitude of an impartial observer. Without judging them or trying to do anything whatsoever about them or in reaction to them, simply notice that they are there and in an unattached way.

...I've been doing this and am still practising the skill of being the "Impartial observer". And, jst like the books are saying -the thoughts and emotions (in this case, specifically the anxious ones) get 'bored' because they have no audience. Kind of like they lose their power and reality because I let them come and go but don't react to them.

....Well, it has been hard for me to get my self to really do meditation -and to really believe that it could help. I'm always too bust trying to understand and analyse everything. I needed other people to give me a bit of a kick, in order for me to stop needing to know everything and just accept what so far is an answer, as well as my accepting that I tend to get tangled-up and can't see as clearly as I would like.

I've been reading about meditation -and they tell us that the attitude you take in is very important. That this attitude can make the difference between meditation working for you fairly early, or taking decades to work. It is basically that a person needs not to have expectations -otherwise the pressure is on, and relaxing and finding those new insights and inner peace remains elusive.

So a bit of a leap of faith is necessary -and in my case a bit of a push from others.

Well, the simplest explanation for how meditation works, that I've found so far, is.... if you can remain calm and develop your ability to be calm at will, any problem no matter how big that surrounds you won't overwhelm you. Like, you can have anxiety without being anxious about it. You can have you fear without being afraid of it. ...heaps of people say that it is our judgements of our emotions that cause us to continue being stuck having those very same emotions that we do not want to have. But remove the judgement, let those emotions you worry about come and go without getting afraid or reacting to them -without getting involved- and you'll tame your emotions and move quickly through whatever pain or ordeal that is your cross to bear.
...I'm greatful that others -specifically Buddha and the Buddhists- have figured out a way to do this. (and it is fairly simple too, but I'm glad that someone has figured it out.)

Even after I've gotten back on my feet and past intense anxiety issues I still want to practise meditation: I figure that it can make a very weak person into a very strong one -by which I mean that a problem can be turned inside-out and we can end-up becoming stronger than most people just because of effort and from having found a great way to deal with problems.

Well, that's all

 

[Spearmint]

...

 

[van_sp]

Cool, I have never heard of this till now. I have been involved with meditation for some time but never thought about using it for this application. The way you described it totally makes sense.
I will read up on this some more. Thanks for the tip.

 

[JamesMorgan]

Muffy

Hi there! Its James.

According to Buddhism, meditation is a method for acquainting our mind with virtue. The more familiar our mind is with virtue, the calmer and more peaceful it becomes. When our mind is peaceful we are free from worries and mental discomfort, and we experience true happiness. This is what is meant by virtue.

When the turbulence of distracting thoughts subsides and our mind becomes still, a deep happiness and contentment naturally arises from within. This feeling of contentment and well-being helps us to cope with the busyness and difficulties of daily life.

So much of the stress and tension we normally experience comes from our mind, and many of the problems we experience, including ill health, are caused or aggravated by this stress. Just by doing a simple breathing meditation for ten or fifteen minutes each day, we will be able to reduce this stress.

If we train our mind to become peaceful we will be happy all the time, even in the most adverse conditions. But if our mind is not peaceful, even if we have the most pleasant external conditions we will not be happy. Therefore it is important to train our mind through meditation.

The purpose of meditation is to cultivate those states of mind that are conducive to peace and well-being, and to eradicate those that aren't.

Mindfulness is actually remembering the object of our meditation, which means bringing our mind back to a state of peace. The type of mindfulness you describe is a preliminary to actually quieten the mind to that state and from that state you can relearn how to react to your world. You are becoming a 'silent watcher'.

I have been practicing formal meditation for several years, anxiety, worries, depression and so on are massively weakened by engaging in meditation. Anyone can do it, in fact we meditate all day long, the problem is our mind doesnt focus on peaceful objects, it focuses single pointedly on negative objects such as anger, jealousy, and so on. So meditation is used to simply change the object of our mind so that we experience peace more and more often.

James

 

[appletree]

thank you James, I have been looking into Buddhism/meditation myself recently.
i have very bad hyperhidrosis and i think it's genetic, needless to say this causes me a lot of anxiety but if i try to detatch myself from the physical symptoms and focus on feeling calm it doesn't reduce my sweating but it does make me feel much less anxious.
meditation is fantastic in helping people cope.

 

[LittleMissMuffet]

I found this great article in the New York Times. IT is really encouraging because it says that through meditation it is possible to train the mind so that negative emotions are easier to control and, along with this, the brain actually physically changes; and that, we are likewise not limited by the genes we inherent.

I can't seem to find success putting-up links, so I've just cut and paste the article here....

Following article is from The New York Times…
February 4, 2003
Finding Happiness: Cajole Your Brain
to Lean to the Left
By DANIEL GOLEMAN

ALL TOO MANY years ago, while I was still a psychology graduate
student, I ran an experiment to assess how well meditation might work
as an antidote to stress. My professors were skeptical, my measures
were weak, and my subjects were mainly college sophomores. Not
surprisingly, my results were inconclusive.
But today I feel vindicated.

To be sure, over the years there have been scores of studies that have
looked at meditation, some suggesting its powers to alleviate the
adverse effects of stress. But only last month did what I see as a
definitive study confirm my once-shaky hypothesis, by revealing the
brain mechanism that may account for meditation's singular ability to
soothe.

The data has emerged as one of many experimental fruits of an
unlikely research collaboration: the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan religious
and political leader in exile, and some of top psychologists and
neuroscientists from the United States. The scientists met with the
Dalai Lama for five days in Dharamsala, India, in March 2000, to
discuss how people might better control their destructive emotions.
One of my personal heroes in this rapprochement between modern
science and ancient wisdom is Dr. Richard Davidson, director of the
Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin.
Dr. Davidson, in recent research using functional M.R.I. and advanced
EEG analysis, has identified an index for the brain's set point for
moods.

The functional M.R.I. images reveal that when people are emotionally
distressed — anxious, angry, depressed — the most active sites in the
brain are circuitry converging on the amygdala, part of the brain's
emotional centers, and the right prefrontal cortex, a brain region
important for the hypervigilance typical of people under stress.
By contrast, when people are in positive moods — upbeat, enthusiastic
and energized — those sites are quiet, with the heightened activity in
the left prefrontal cortex.

Indeed, Dr. Davidson has discovered what he believes is a quick way
to index a person's typical mood range, by reading the baseline levels
of activity in these right and left prefrontal areas. That ratio predicts
daily moods with surprising accuracy. The more the ratio tilts to the
right, the more unhappy or distressed a person tends to be, while the
more activity to the left, the more happy and enthusiastic.
By taking readings on hundreds of people, Dr. Davidson has
established a bell curve distribution, with most people in the middle,
having a mix of good and bad moods. Those relatively few people who
are farthest to the right are most likely to have a clinical depression or
anxiety disorder over the course of their lives. For those lucky few
farthest to the left, troubling moods are rare and recovery from them
is rapid.

This may explain other kinds of data suggesting a biologically
determined set point for our emotional range. One finding, for
instance, shows that both for people lucky enough to win a lottery and
those unlucky souls who become paraplegic from an accident, by a
year or so after the events their daily moods are about the same as
before the momentous occurrences, indicating that the emotional set
point changes little, if at all.

By chance, Dr. Davidson had the opportunity to test the left-right ratio
on a senior Tibetan lama, who turned out to have the most extreme
value to the left of the 175 people measured to that point.
Dr. Davidson reported that remarkable finding during the meeting
between the Dalai Lama and the scientists in India. But the finding,
while intriguing, raised more questions than it answered.

Was it just a quirk, or a trait common among those who become
monks? Or was there something about the training of lamas — the
Tibetan Buddhist equivalent of a priest or spiritual teacher — that
might nudge a set point into the range for perpetual happiness? And if
so, the Dalai Lama wondered, can it be taken out of the religious
context to be shared for the benefit of all?

A tentative answer to that last question has come from a study that
Dr. Davidson did in collaboration with Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of
the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of
Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.

That clinic teaches mindfulness to patients with chronic diseases of all
kinds, to help them better handle their symptoms. In an article
accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journal Psychosomatic
Medicine, Drs. Davidson and Kabat-Zinn report the effects of training
in mindfulness meditation, a method extracted from its Buddhist
origins and now widely taught to patients in hospitals and clinics
throughout the United States and many other countries.

Dr. Kabat-Zinn taught mindfulness to workers in a high-pressure
biotech business for roughly three hours a week over two months. A
comparison group of volunteers from the company received the
training later, though they, like the participants, were tested before
and after training by Dr. Davidson and his colleagues.

The results bode well for beginners, who will never put in the training
time routine for lamas. Before the mindfulness training, the workers
were on average tipped toward the right in the ratio for the emotional
set point. At the same time, they complained of feeling highly stressed.
After the training, however, on average their emotions ratio shifted
leftward, toward the positive zone. Simultaneously, their moods
improved; they reported feeling engaged again in their work, more
energized and less anxious.

In short, the results suggest that the emotion set point can shift, given
the proper training. In mindfulness, people learn to monitor their
moods and thoughts and drop those that might spin them toward
distress. Dr. Davidson hypothesizes that it may strengthen an array of
neurons in the left prefrontal cortex that inhibits the messages from
the amygdala that drive disturbing emotions.

Another benefit for the workers, Dr. Davidson reported, was that
mindfulness seemed to improve the robustness of their immune
systems, as gauged by the amount of flu antibodies in their blood after
receiving a flu shot.

According to Dr. Davidson, other studies suggest that if people in two
experimental groups are exposed to the flu virus, those who have
learned the mindfulness technique will experience less severe
symptoms. The greater the leftward shift in the emotional set point,
the larger the increase in the immune measure.

The mindfulness training focuses on learning to monitor the continuing
sensations and thoughts more closely, both in sitting meditation and in
activities like yoga exercises.

Now, with the Dalai Lama's blessing, a trickle of highly trained lamas
have come to be studied. All of them have spent at least three years in
solitary meditative retreat. That amount of practice puts them in a
range found among masters of other domains, like Olympic divers and
concert violinists.

What difference such intense mind training may make for human
abilities has been suggested by preliminary findings from other
laboratories. Some of the more tantalizing data come from the work of
another scientist, Dr. Paul Ekman, director of the Human Interaction
Laboratory at the University of California at San Francisco, which
studies the facial expression of emotions. Dr. Ekman also participated
in the five days of dialogue with the Dalai Lama.

Dr. Ekman has developed a measure of how well a person can read
another's moods as telegraphed in rapid, slight changes in facial
muscles.

As Dr. Ekman describes in “Emotions Revealed,” to be published by
Times Books in April, these microexpressions — ultrarapid facial
actions, some lasting as little as one-twentieth of a second — lay bare
our most naked feelings. We are not aware we are making them; they
cross our faces spontaneously and involuntarily, and so reveal for
those who can read them our emotion of the moment, utterly
uncensored.

Perhaps luckily, there is a catch: almost no one can read these
moments. Though Dr. Ekman's book explains how people can learn to
detect these expressions in just hours with proper training, his testing
shows that most people — including judges, the police and
psychotherapists — are ordinarily no better at reading
microexpressions than someone making random guesses.

Yet when Dr. Ekman brought into the laboratory two Tibetan
practitioners, one scored perfectly on reading three of six emotions
tested for, and the other scored perfectly on four. And an American
teacher of Buddhist meditation got a perfect score on all six,
considered quite rare. Normally, a random guess will produce one
correct answer in six.

Such findings, along with urgings from the Dalai Lama, inspired Dr.
Ekman to design a program called “Cultivating Emotional Balance,”
which combines methods extracted from Buddhism, like mindfulness,
with synergistic training from modern psychology, like reading
microexpressions, and seeks to help people better manage their
emotions and relationships.

A pilot of the project began last month with elementary school
teachers in the San Francisco Bay area, under the direction of Dr.
Margaret Kemeny, a professor of behavioral medicine at the University
of California at San Francisco. She hopes to replicate Dr. Davidson's
immune system findings on mindfulness, as well as adding other
measures of emotional and social skill, in a controlled trial with 120
nurses and teachers.

Finally, the scientific momentum of these initial forays has intrigued
other investigators. Under the auspices of the Mind and Life Institute,
which organizes the series of continuing meetings between the Dalai
Lama and scientists, there will be a round at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology on Sept. 13 and 14. This time the Dalai Lama
will meet with an expanded group of researchers to discuss further
research possibilities.

Though open to the public, half the seats will be reserved for graduate
students and academic researchers. (More information is at
www.InvestigatingTheMind.org.)
As for me, I am taking all this to heart. An on-again, off-again
meditator since my college days, I have become decidedly on again.
Next month, my wife and I are heading to a warm spot for two or
three weeks of meditation retreat. I may never catch up with that
sublime lama, but I will enjoy trying.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company