A great way to get in touch with the present

Eating a Raisin with All Your Senses

Try this simple exercise for moment-by-moment observation: Mindful eating. By slowing down and paying close attention to different aspects of the sensory experience.

By immersing in the here-and-now, we notice things that we have not noticed before and that go unnoticed when we act without mindfulness. First take the raisin and hold it between your thumb and finger. Close your eyes Roll it between your fingers…feel its texture…lightly squeeze it how does it feel at your finger tips?

Open your eyes, gaze at it...does it look like it felt? Examine the shades and dark hollows, its features, its surfaces. Now smell the raisin a few times while inhaling. Notice any sensations in your mouth or throat. Gently place the raisin between your frontal teeth and hold it there, touch it with your tongue and notice any sensations arising in your mouth, throat or stomach. Without chewing on it yet, notice how, moment by moment, changes occur inside your mouth and in the raisin, too.

Place it on your tongue and roll it around sensing, moment after moment. Now before chewing it, notice what conditions the intention to chew causes. As you chew, what do you hear? Now before swallowing the raisin, notice any physical conditions the intention to swallow causes.

Notice how the whole body feels after swallowing, after you’ve completed this whole exercise.

Integrating mindfulness with biofeedback — a new way to enhance results in individual therapy — Part 1 — Introduction

By Yuval Oded, inspired by Zindel Segal

As mindfulness and other Eastern spiritual practices are introduced into psychotherapy, both therapists and clients seek for ways to deepen the practice. In the next few weeks I will describe how I integrate Alive biofeedback with mindfulness practices.

“Mindfulness” refers to keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality. John Kabat-Zinn, one of pioneers in integrating mindfulness into therapy, says, “when we use the term mindfulness we refer to ‘an openhearted, moment to moment, nonjudgmental awareness’.”

In therapy we often aim at helping our clients to promote acceptance of internal experience. In a wide range of clinical problems, what is common is the avoidance or over-attention to internal experiences such as thoughts, images, emotions and sensations. For example, many clients are not aware of the moment-to-moment fluctuations in mood they are experiencing. A patient may describe his panic attack as lasting 4 days while scientific findings show that the human body is not capable of sustaining such high levels of arousal for long. Anxiety sensitivity, or fear of fear, often causes this sustained attention to anxiety-related symptoms.

Zapping migraine pain

According to Dr. Joshua Wootton, a psychologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (a Harvard teaching hospital), a 22-year-old psychology student named Jennifer tried a variety of medications and trigger-point nerve block injections to treat the migraines she had suffered since she was 10, though none of these approaches really worked. Then she found out about biofeedback and meditation.

Read her inspiring story, in which she finds biofeedback training and meditation "completely zap the pain."

Wootten explains his process of using biofeedback to treat migraine pain:

“People can actually see on a computer screen what is happening in real time,” he says. “By increasing their awareness of how their bodies respond, patients can more easily devise strategies for improved response. For headache pain, we focus on musculoskeletal tension and autonomic nervous system dysfunction. Patients can see that by just being in pain they are raising their adrenaline levels and putting further strain on the system, exacerbating their pain and making it less treatable. I teach them an easy form [of relaxation] and ask them to practice it twice a day for 15 minutes each time.”