by Michael W. Taft We all know by now that mindfulness meditation can create positive changes in your life. It works, but you pretty much have to practice it every ...
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Losing Control
By Jessica Graham In mindfulness meditation we observe and explore our experience ...
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Meditation Builds a Better Brain
Awesome New York Times article on the measurable changes in the brain that come from long-term meditation. — Michael The role that meditation plays in brain development has been the subject of several theories and a number of studies. One of them, conducted at the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at the University of California, Los [...]
Effects of mindfulness training in asthma ‘comparable to inhalers’
By David Swan for pulsetoday Mindfulness training produces clinically significant improvements in quality of life and stress that are equivalent to those seen with inhalers in patients with asthma, a US trial has found. Researchers studied 83 patients who had a physician-documented case of asthma and randomized participants to receive either mindfulness-based stress reduction, or [...]
Zen for High Schoolers: ‘Notice the Anxiety. Notice the Fear.’
By Aidan Gardiner for The New York Times La-keeyatta Steward, 17, sat on a small black pillow one recent Tuesday afternoon, her legs tucked under her. Her meditation instructor told her to imagine her body pulled upward by a string, so she lowered her shoulders and straightened her back. Then two of her classmates burst [...]
Why We Need to Teach Mindfulness in a Digital Age
by Aran Levasseur, for pbs.org Think of sitting quietly in a spartan room. There are no TVs, computers, smartphones, books, magazines or music. If you’re like most people, this probably sounds like a recipe for boredom. In our culture, we avoid moments of “not-doing” because we don’t associate boredom with having any value. And our [...]
Alone Bad, Friend Good.
I used to have a very hard time relating to people. As a bald-headed punk, my personality was so intense that my friends jokingly nicknamed me “Toxic Mike.” I felt that I was different from everyone, and that the world was sort of out to get me. That was almost thirty years ago now, and [...]
Mindful Teachers
Back in October we posted an article about meditation helping students. While introducing mindfulness to students is incredibly important, shouldn’t teachers be learning to meditate too? I was very happy to come across this Science Daily article about just that. In a study of 82 teachers “The findings suggest that increased awareness of mental processes [...]
Mindfulness and the Military: Does Self-Acceptance Help Veterans?
By Daniel Tomasulo, Ph.D. A recently published article in the Journal of Clinical Psychology by Kearney, McDermott, Malte, Martinez, and Simpson (2012) may have broad implications for veterans suffering with symptoms of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). These researchers demonstrated that engagement in mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) showed significant improvements after six months in reducing soldiers’ [...]
Meditation Pumps Up the Brain, Improves Ability to Adapt
By Denise Reynolds RD Meditation is a mind-body practice in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in which a person learns to focus attention and become mindful of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. It can also bring about a state of greater calmness and physical relaxation. But did you also know that it can actually thicken the brain [...]
Don’t Take It Personally
My friend Rick Hanson is a psychotherapist, meditation teacher, and author of the books, Buddha’s Brain and Just One Thing. In this post, he discusses the absurdity of taking life’s events personally, and gives some pointers on how to manifest this teaching in your life. — Michael by Rick Hanson Here’s an updated parable from the [...]
Practicing Non-Buddhist
By Jessica Graham The seven-day retreat had just ended and I was sitting with my boyfriend and a small group of fellow meditators. We were eating lunch and speaking our first words since coming out of silence. In an attempt to start a little friendly conversation, one woman asked if we would all go around [...]
