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 day to really reap the benefits. Establishing and maintaining that kind of steady, daily practice presents a challenge, even for people with a strong motivation to sit.

Understanding some basic psychological principles, however, can help you to create and maintain the regular practice you desire. A few simple brain hacks can nudge your meditation tendency over the line to a sustainable, life-long practice. Here are five scientifically-proven methods that do just that:

1. Make a Contract with Yourself
There’s this funny thing about the brain. It wants to appear consistent to itself, and really dislikes things that make you look contradictory or hypocritical. This naturally applies socially, but it turns out that you want to appear consistent even to yourself. This is a psychological principle called “consistency bias,” and here’s how to make it work in your favor.

Write up a contract with yourself, explicitly committing to meditate every day, and then sign it. Once you put something in writing and sign it, your brain has a strong desire to appear consistent. You will actually begin to change your beliefs and actions to come into line with this written commitment. So even when you don’t feel like meditating—there’s a concert, or television show, or sleeping late, or whatever you would rather do—somewhere in the back of your mind you will remember that contract, and that can push you over the edge toward sitting down and meditating first.

 2. Make a Calendar
You can make your written commitment even stronger if you create a calendar each week, containing specific meditation goals for each day. Post this calendar prominently, in a place where you see it all the time, and put a large X through each day after you sit. Combining this tip with the contract makes both work more effectively.

There are also all kinds of great applications that don’t only serve as a meditation calendar, but that actually remind you to do it. On Windows, Outlook or Lightning can be used to create a meditation calendar, and are integrated with email clients you may already have. If you want a stand-alone Windows program that is also free, Rainlender comes highly recommended. (I haven’t used any of these programs myself). On my Mac, I really like the Todo program from Appigio. Cross-platform, by far the best web-based application is Google Calendar. All of these can send you reminders to motivate you to sit down and meditate.

3. Social Pressure
You’ve made a contract and signed it, and you’ve got a meditation calendar up and running.  With these two tools helping you to stay motivated and engaged in your meditation practice, the next step is to publicly state your dedication to meditate. Never underestimate the power of social or peer pressure. It magnifies the effect of consistency bias because especially want to appear consistent to others. When we say something in public, we will make big efforts to do what we say we will.

There are many ways to do this. Post on Facebook and Twitter. Tell your friends and family. Make a commitment in front of your twelve-step group. If you happen to appear on national television, take that opportunity to declare your commitment.

4. Sit with a Group
If you want to get the full benefit of social pressure, join a meditation group. On top of the gain you get from consistency bias, you will also benefit from a major increase in your desire to meditate, due to the normative effects of peer pressure. I always say that 50 percent of who you are is other people, meaning that the beliefs, attitudes, and biases of the people around you gradually become your own. By intentionally surrounding yourself with people who meditate, who believe that meditation is a good thing to do, who talk about the details of practice, and so forth, you are slowly and subtly reprogramming yourself to be a long term meditator.

And, of course, there’s also the benefit of the group’s meditation schedule, which also helps to keep you on track.

5. Make It Hard to Fail
So often the reasons that make it hard to meditate are quite mundane: your cat won’t leave you alone, your neighbor plays loud music, the phone keeps ringing. In day to day meditating, these little things can grow big enough to frustrate even the most dedicated person. It’s important to minimize all such annoyances by intelligently engineering your practice times and places. Sit at the quietest times of day, unplug the phone and the computer, let your partner know that you don’t want to be disturbed, put the cat outside. By reducing the number of reasons to stop sitting, you’ll be increasing your likelihood of success with meditation and joy with life.

And that’s what it’s all about.

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 Angeles, found that long-term meditators like Ms. Splain had greater gyrification — a term that describes the folding of the cerebral cortex, the outermost part of the brain.

Published in the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience journal in February, the study is the latest effort from the U.C.L.A. lab to determine the extent to which meditation may affect neuroplasticity — the ability of the brain to make physiological changes. Previous studies found that the brains of long-term meditators had increased amounts of so-called gray and white matter (the former is believed to be involved in processing information; the latter is thought of as the “wiring” of the brain’s communication system.)

It follows other studies examining possible links between meditation and physical benefits. In 2009, for example, a study presented at an American Heart Association meeting suggested that the mental relaxation produced by meditation has physiological benefits for people with established coronary artery disease.

The U.C.L.A. study, like previous ones, is inconclusive but intriguing. “You could argue that more folds mean more neurons,” said Dr. Eileen Luders, the recent study’s lead author, who practices meditation herself. “These are the processing units of the brain, and so having more might mean that you have greater cognitive capacities.”

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I first encountered the work of Mike Zittel through his cartoons in an early instruction manual by Shinzen Young. Later I met him and his beautiful wife Marta at a Shinzen retreat, sitting with them many times over the years. When I discovered that Mike had created these fabulous illustrated mindfulness meditation pages, I begged him to let me publish them on the site. And with that, I’m super happy to present them to you. Just click on the first image to get a slideshow viewer of the big, gorgeous pages. Enjoy this first installment. More to come! — Michael

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 a control of a healthy living course.

Mindfulness-based stress reduction featured eight weekly sessions lasting two-and-a-half hours each, with one six hour session in the sixth week.

At 12 months, those in the intervention group had a clinically significant improvement in asthma-related quality of life compared with the controls, with an increase in scores of 0.72 and 0.06 respectively. Perceived stress scores had also decreased by 4.3 in the intervention group, compared with an increase of 0.2 in the controls.

Study lead Dr Lori Pbert, professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, said: ‘From clinical perspective, these findings are comparable to quality of life improvements in trials of widely prescribed asthma medications, including inhaled corticosteroids and an anti-IgE antibody.’

Read original article here

By Jessica Graham

“Like someone is trying to slice my sternum open from the inside of my body.”

“Like prickly pins in my stomach.”

“It feels like a hollowness of air in your heart and chest, in a place that should be filled with fluid.”

“Very, very heavy, exhausting.”

“Feels like labor contractions in the heart—torn apart while in a vice grip at the same time.”

“Nervous feeling—like tingles shooting throughout body.”

“Like being stabbed in the place between your heart and stomach.”

 These are some of the responses I got when I asked a group of friends to tell me what it feels like to have a broken heart. As you have probably experienced yourself, you know it can be quite painful. Doctors have named it “Broken Heart Syndrome.” Before that diagnosis existed, people were going to the emergency room with broken hearts and being treated for a heart attack. The symptoms can be very similar, and agonizing.

I’ve had more than a few people ask me how meditation can help with the pains of a relationship ending. In my own experience, I’ve seen that it can help a lot. The main trick is learning to separate the emotional sensations in the body from the thoughts in the mind. Once you can do that, you are able to deconstruct the sensations and the thoughts into smaller more manageable pieces. That’s easier said than done, but with practice, you will find that it becomes automatic.

The first time I had a broken heart was shocking and unbearable. I was seventeen and had been dating this guy I thought was really cool. He read obscure literature, listened to obscure music, and shot heroin. I would ride the El train into the city to see him in the various one-bedroom apartments he shared with whomever would have him.

I was underage, so he would buy me beer. We would sit on the floor, smoke cigarettes, and seek mutual oblivion. We had been attempting a relationship for about a year when I, as he put it, “dropped the L-bomb.” He informed me that while he enjoyed my company, love was the last thing on his mind. Looking back, it was the last thing on my mind too. I had no clue how to love myself, let alone anybody else. But at that time all I knew was that I was being rejected and it hurt like hell. All the parts of me that believed I was unlovable and inadequate came to life in a big way. I cried all night at his place, cried all the way home on the El, and walked into the apartment I shared with my dad, puffy, red, and still crying. My dad thought someone had died, and I felt sure it was going to be me.

For days I could barely move. The tears were a torrential downpour. I couldn’t believe how much it physically hurt. My chest felt hollow and filled with cement at the same time. The ache was so intense that I thought maybe a broken heart could actually kill me. My brain wouldn’t shut up. Reminding me of how devastated I was, how “heart-broken” I was. Whenever I would start to feel better there would be a surge of mental talk retriggering the intense physical sensations. I took everything my mind said personally; I believed all of it.

I needed to make it stop. I started calling friends, asking what to do. Everyone told me hat I had a broken heart, and that the only thing to do was to wait it out. What no one told me was that suffering through a broken heart is totally optional. In addition, having a broken heart can be turbocharge your spiritual and emotional evolution.

After that first one,  my breakups became more and more dramatic. Each time a relationship ended, no mater how dysfunctional, I would lose it. “It” being any semblance of clarity and equanimity. I would stop eating, stop sleeping, roll up in a ball on the floor for hours, make really creepy shrines in honor of my lost love, go on two-month-long pill popping, black out binges, create musical soundtracks to keep me as miserable as possible, drink until I could no longer actually get drunk, have really embarrassing rebound relationships, and tell the story of my broken heart over and over and over again to anyone who would listen. These symptoms could go on for months. I started very seriously considering suicide. I was suffering more than I could bear. If the procedure in Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind had been real, I would have signed on the dotted line.

It was around this time that I started to dip my toes into the meditation pool. Someone gave me the Pema Chödrön book, When Things Fall Apart. I began sitting for five minutes at a time, here and there. I noticed that there was a voice inside my head that wasn’t very nice. I didn’t yet understand that my body was full of sensations, many of them emotional. I felt the emotional pain in my chest and throat, but it was completely tangled up with my thoughts. After a while, those five minute sits every once in a while became 30 to 60 minutes every day, and that’s when my relationship with my mind and body changed dramatically.

About four years later I had a chance to try out my new skills on a broken heart. What a difference a daily practice makes. Was I sad that my relationship hadn’t worked out? Yes. Was there a lot of chatter in my mind about it? Yes. Did I experience unpleasant emotional sensations in my body? Yes. Did I suffer? No. Well, maybe a tiny bit, but we are talking about five minutes here and there. It was a huge difference. There was no pill popping or shrine building this time.

The night the breakup occurred I cried for a bit and meditated on the emotions in my chest and belly. Then I tried to get some sleep, but my mind was racing. It kept telling me all the things I could have done differently; all the things I should have said or not said. Over and over it replayed the final interactions with my now-absent lover. I would fall asleep and the mental talk would literally wake me up.

I did what I had been trained to do: mindfully attend to the mental talk with as much concentration, clarity, and equanimity as possible. I was amazed at how my brain created and recreated the problem and then tried to solve it. I was not asking my brain to do this (in fact, at moments when I lost my equanimity, I really wanted it to stop), but it kept going like a powerful computer, crunching the facts.

I also worked with the flow of the mental talk. It rose and fell in waves. It was was very much like being rocked by the ocean. It started to becoming soothing instead of uncomfortable. It was waking me up, but it was also putting me back to sleep.

By five a.m., when the talk woke me up for the fourth time, I laughed. It was hilarious and almost endearing or cute. Later I talked with some close friends about the situation, but my mind was relatively quiet. I had let it do its computing, without judging it or resisting it. I knew that eventually I would get some sleep, and that the chatter would stop when it was ready to. By allowing it, but not taking it personally or wallowing in it, I had a complete experience of it. It passed though me and was gone.

As for the physical sensations, I enjoyed working with them. Emotions in my body tell me that I’m alive. I am learning to let go of attachments to “pleasant” or “unpleasant,” and instead to explore sensation as sensation. Waves, vibration, heat, cold, contraction, expansion. When you mindfully contact the experience of a “hollow ache” or ‘physical exhaustion,” without the mental label of “broken heart,” it’s just sensation. The waves of mental talk and waves of emotions merged and I took the ride.

I got a lot out of that last broken heart. The emotional pain gave me direct access to some aspects of my consciousness that had been long buried. By fully allowing all my feeling and thoughts about the breakup to occur, I was able to heal much older wounds. I saw myself change very quickly during that time. I became more open, more available to others, less defensive, more alive. Really leaning into your meditation practice during tough times brings great rewards.

I think for a lot of us a broken heart is very romantic. We see it in movies, hear it on songs, revel in the drama of it. It can be addictive. We have an idea of what it is like when our heart is broken and we hold tight to that idea. Our neural pathways are programmed. This is what the end of a relationship should feel like. This is how I should behave. We don’t realize that there many ways of experiencing a breakup, not all of which include big blow outs and months of suffering.

For me it was a matter of life and death to find a new way of being broken hearted. Even if it’s not that dire for you, why not try a new experience? For that matter have a new experience of stubbing your toe or eating foods you don’t like. There is something to be learned in every experience if we bring mindfulness to it.

My relationship with the idea of a broken heart has changed.  I’ve watched the concept of a broken heart construct and deconstruct in my mind. I have felt the emotions move through my body and vanish. If I get stuck in mental talk or put a value on the sensations in my body—bam!—I have a broken heart. If I simply and openly observe what it happening, it’s just what’s happening, one moment to the next.

One big insight that I gained from my last broken heart is this: a broken heart is an open heart. This sounds a little cheesy, I know, but it was true for me. When I fully experienced the many facets of my heartbreak, I found expansive open space. Instead of becoming jaded and afraid to love again, I realized that within all that space was room for more love than I ever imagined.

I’m not excited about the prospect of going though another breakup. I hope I don’t have to, but I know for sure that my heart will be broken again. People I love will die. Natural disasters will occur. Wars will rage. I have a choice about how much I want to suffer and about how much I want to perpetuate suffering. I have all the tools I need to break open my heart and to face life openly and with love.

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 in.

“There was a brawl,” called Ian Alsopp, 18, shaking his head. “It went down. It went down.”

Riding the subway after school, he said, he saw about 20 teenagers beat up another boy.

The news startled Ms. Steward and the other high school students at the Brooklyn Zen Center, where they attend weekly meditation sessions meant to help them handle the challenges of growing up in the city.

“This is where you actually use this,” the instructor, Greg Snyder, told Mr. Alsopp. “Notice the thought. That’s fine. Notice the anxiety. Notice the fear. Use the meditation to focus your mind. Are you with me?”

“I’m with you,” Mr. Alsopp said before settling onto his pillow, still fidgeting.

Mr. Snyder is a Zen Buddhist priest who leads the center, a converted loft with pristine white walls and exposed beams set in a small industrial building near the Gowanus Canal. The center’s Awake Youth Project includes weekly workshops in five public high schools and teenager-led sessions at the center.

Now, Mr. Snyder is taking on the tougher task of teaching meditation to Level 1 offenders— students who are frequently put in detention or suspended because they start fights or cause trouble — at Bushwick High School. Administrators at the school approved the program April 5 and plan to start it in coming weeks.

Students in trouble are given the choice of traditional punishments or participating in the meditation program, where Mr. Snyder will teach them how to meditate, understand volatile emotions and curb impulsive behavior. He intends to take the program to other schools as well.

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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 aversion to boredom and not-doing have been amplified in our hyper-connected age.

It’s been said that the currency of the Net is attention. As connectivity penetrates the furthest reaches of our lives, all of us, but schools in particular, need to treat attention as a skill to be cultivated.

A torrent of stimulation is just a click or touchscreen away, ensuring that even the slightest trace of boredom can be mitigated through constant screen connectivity. As beneficial as this perpetual connectivity can be, neuroscience has been uncovering some detrimental side effects.

Recent brain imaging studies reveal that sections of our brains are highly active during down time. This has led scientists to imply that moments of not-doing are critical for connecting and synthesizing new information, ideas and experiences. Dr. Michael Rich, a professor at Harvard Medical School put it this way in a 2010 New York Times article: “Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body.”

According to a report from the University of California, San Diego, in 28 years — from 1980 to 2008 — our consumption of information increased 350 percent, while our downtime continues to shrink.

In the midst of this multimedia blitzkrieg, the importance of mindfulness and focused attention is rising. If we can’t cultivate mindfulness and focused attention while sitting quietly in a room, then how can we expect to bring these qualities of mind into turbulent circumstances — both on and offline?

Fractured Attention, Fractured Mind

The average American consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words every single day, according to the 2008 report from UC San Diego. To put these numbers in perspective, one gigabyte is a symphony in high-fidelity sound or a broadcast quality movie.

Our colossal consuming habits are not only crowding out essential neurological downtime, but they’re creating a chemical addiction that has interest in little else. When we consume media — from watching TV to surfing the Net, and from playing video games to using social media — we’re triggering the brain chemical dopamine. Dopamine creates a “high,” and we are wired to do what it takes to maintain this elevated state. When the dopamine levels decrease, we begin to look for diversions that will restore the high.

In the absence of stimulation, and the corresponding dopamine high, we’re likely to feel bored. As a result, many of us become stimulation junkies and incessant multitaskers. In the New York Times article, “Attached to Technology and Paying the Price,” Matt Richtel wrote, “While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress … And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.”

The Antidote: Mindfulness

Living in a connected age is double-edged. While policy and regulation have their place within this matrix, it seems that human agency should be the keystone. Therefore, for the body politic to walk the edge between being empowered by our connectivity or hindered by it requires a steady dose of mind training.

Research at Duke University underscores why. Researchers found that more than 40 percent of our actions are based on habits, not conscious decisions. Unconscious habits and assumptions aren’t destiny, but if we don’t bring them into focus then the force of these habits will continue to chart our course.

The practice of mindfulness is a time-tested antidote to operating in autopilot.

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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 since then the practice of meditation has really turned around my relationships with others. I connect with people and feel a lot of joy in their presence. Meditation can help you make friends, and love people more deeply. People often find this a bit hard to believe: how can sitting alone and silent in a room help you with friendships? It seems like it would be detrimental, but actually the opposite is the case. This is where some of the latest scientific research into the effects of mindfulness can give us a solid empirical basis for something that meditators have noticed anecdotally for centuries.

When you practice mindfulness meditation on your internal environment, such as meditating on body sensations, you are learning to focus awareness on yourself. The more you do this, the more refined, deep, and broad your ability to monitor your internal environment becomes. And this has a really interesting effect: according to researcher Sara Lazar, PhD, it actually grows your prefrontal cortex—the area of your brain that is responsible for (among other things) the capacity to feel empathy for others. Just like lifting weights bulks up your muscles, meditation bulks up your prefrontal cortex, which means you become better at tuning into other people, and knowing (or at least making much better guesses about) what they’re feeling and thinking.

And that is how you make, cultivate, and keep friendships and relationships. Being able to tune into your partner or your friend is what it’s all about. When you tune into yourself during meditation, you’re learning to tune into a person (you) and that skill translates into being able to tune into any person. Meditation helps you become your own best friend, and teaches you how to become a good friend to others.

So tune into yourself in meditation, get yourself a healthy mind, and then go out and create some healthy relationships with the people around you. Life won’t be perfect, of course, but you will notice that you are the cause of less friction and fighting, and more love and laughter than before. Less toxic, and more helpful. This is how sitting alone in a room quietly observing your own body sensations can actually make the world a better place.

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 can influence emotional behavior”.

-Jessica

Meditation Improves Emotional Behaviors in Teachers

Schoolteachers who underwent a short but intensive program of meditation were less depressed, anxious or stressed — and more compassionate and aware of others’ feelings, according to a UCSF-led study that blended ancient meditation practices with the most current scientific methods for regulating emotions.

A core feature of many religions, meditation is practiced by tens of millions around the world as part of their spiritual beliefs as well as to alleviate psychological problems, improve self-awareness and to clear the mind. Previous research has linked meditation to positive changes in blood pressure, metabolism and pain, but less is known about the specific emotional changes that result from the practice.

The new study was designed to create new techniques to reduce destructive emotions while improving social and emotional behavior.

The study will be published in the April issue of the journal Emotion.

“The findings suggest that increased awareness of mental processes can influence emotional behavior,” said lead author Margaret Kemeny, PhD, director of the Health Psychology Program in UCSF’s Department of Psychiatry. “The study is particularly important because opportunities for reflection and contemplation seem to be fading in our fast-paced, technology-driven culture.”

Altogether, 82 female schoolteachers between the ages of 25 and 60 participated in the project. Teachers were chosen because their work is stressful and because the meditation skills they learned could be immediately useful to their daily lives, possibly trickling down to benefit their students.

Study Arose After Meeting Dalai Lama

The study arose from a meeting in 2000 between Buddhist scholars, behavioral scientists and emotion experts at the home of the Dalai Lama. There, the Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman, PhD, a UCSF emeritus professor and world expert in emotions, pondered the topic of emotions, leading the Dalai Lama to pose a question: In the modern world, would a secular version of Buddhist contemplation reduce harmful emotions?

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If you are interested in mindfulness teachers, on the other hand, check this out.

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’ symptoms of PTSD, depression, behavioral activation (the ability to engage in activities to achieve a goal in spite of aversive symptoms), and self-acceptance.

Forty-seven percent of the veterans in the study showed clinically significant improvements in their PTSD symptoms. This highlights the fact that sustainable symptom reduction may be possible by employing a mindfulness technique. MBSR and other mindfulness-based meditation practices may provide broad-based ancillary interventions in the treatment of PTSD that can complement the current psychotherapeutic and pharmacological practices.

PTSD is a particularly nasty collection of symptoms.  Some of the more difficult indications include hyperarousal, rumination about the event, depression and anxiety. In addition to the study noted above, other researchers (Vujanovic, Niles, Pietrefesa, Schmertz, & Potter, 2011) have also found a link between mindfulness meditation and reduced PTSD symptoms in veterans.  In both studies it appears that accepting one’s emotional pain appears to actually help alleviate that pain.

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