Capturing Moments of Mindfulness
I was giving a talk on mindfulness recently and someone in the audience noted they had tried to meditate for 10 minutes and when they finished, their email inbox had filled up with work messages they had to attend to. They implied this made it seem that the time they had spent meditating had a higher cost than benefit. This situation applies to many of us when we try to find the time to practice mindfulness. How do we find the time to practice when we have busy schedules and seemingly more to do than there is time to do it all? Even though our lives are very busy and it seems that there is no time for meditation, often there is if we really have the intention to practice. When practicing, any time spent intentionally paying attention to our present moment experience is beneficial, and more time is better. Just like with exercising, if we want to make it a regular part of our lives we have to make the commitment to do it, set aside the time, and then do it regularly. Often this works best if we have a schedule and a time carved out every day, perhaps half an hour every morning after we get up. This is my favorite time to meditate. If half an hour is too long, we might try 15 minutes. If it’s only 15 minutes, we might even get up 15 minutes earlier to do it. Ideally, we will set an intention for how much we will meditate, decide when we will do it, and then practice every day.
Innovative Mindfulness Training Research At the University of Virginia, we are testing three versions of a highly interactive open-awareness (versus breath-focused) game to help people train their brains to recognize…
Both a Mediterranean Diet and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Reduced the Percentage of Newborns Born Small for Gestational Age Following High-Risk Pregnancies Being born small for gestational age is a leading…
We all accumulate baggage throughout our lives, much of it stuff we might be happier if we did not continue to carry with us. There are regrets, losses, perceived slights that we hold on to, to name just a few. We often wish things were different regarding these experiences, that we had acted differently or made different choices, that a relationship hadn’t ended, or that someone had acted differently toward us. Yet in this moment, things are just as they are, and wishing they were different will not make them so. “Wanting things to be different than they are” is a basic definition of suffering often used in mindfulness practice. Mindfulness has been defined as “Intentional present moment nonjudgmental awareness with kindness”. So is it possible to just be with our experience as it is, without judgment, noticing any desire for things to be different that arises? There are often little things that we wish were different- the temperature to be cooler, the environment to be quieter, the chair to be more comfortable. And as we pay attention, we may notice that more significant wishes for things to be different also arise. When this happens, we can pay attention, noticing what we feel in the body, what thoughts come up, what emotions are present. We might notice gnawing in the pit of the stomach as thoughts of something mean we said to a friend arise, and become aware that we have been holding on to feeling guilty. Noticing this, we can ask ourselves, is there something I might do that would help the situation, perhaps apologize?
Payment Options for Mindfulness Center Courses Most Mindfulness Center courses are offered with sliding scale tuition, allowing participants to choose the amount they will pay from among three tiers. For…
Mindfulness Added to Usual Treatment Is More Effective than Usual Treatment Alone among Patients with Chronic Migraine or Medication Overuse Headache Investigators in Italy studied the effect of a six-session…