Inviting silence to quiet stress

Especially during the crazy holiday months, it's important to remember how we can cultivate and use inner quiet to combat the frenetic pace of the season and all its attendant tasks. In a recent piece, Arnie Kozack explains:

Four AM is an auspicious time of day in many contemplative traditions. The world used to be quiet at 4 AM, long before 24-hour stores and the ongoing hum of our electrical and now electronic world. Still, Four AM is relatively quiet as are the other early morning hours. The children are not yet awake, traffic has not started piling up, the press of the work day not yet begun.

Of course, we can be in the relaxing silence of the early morning hours and not have inner silence, and this is why we practice mindfulness — to cultivate that inner quiet. And if you’ve tried mindfulness practice you’ve discovered that this quiet is not always so. We move in an out of quiet and this IS the practice. The goal should not be to make the mind quiet for this only sets us up with expectations. Rather, the practice is retrieve the mind back from noise and allow it to be quiet for a moment or however long it is before it is drawn back out of silence. Again, the practice is to keep coming back.

When we can create this space of returning to silence within ourselves we can take this space anywhere. Now when we are in the noisy world of cars, people shouting into cell phones, construction, and just the hum of daily life we can enjoy an inner quiet.

Mindfulness helps many people live better

Mindfulness is an off-screen practice that is incredibly central to the Alive & Beyond 8-week program. Within Alive, in Workshops, you'll find Mindfulness instruction.

In fact, mindfulness has been shown to have very positive effects in many arenas of health. Here's a round-up of recent news items reflecting some of the many ways mindfulness improves people's lives and outcomes, often taking the place of medications that can bring unwanted side-effects.

From Bloomberg Businessweek, a story about mindfulness easing depression and anxiety in people suffering from MS:

The problem with medications is that patients are told, "'Here are some drugs that make you sad, tired and depressed, but nothing will effectively take away your disease.' They're left with no effective treatments."

Enter mindfulness meditation. "You learn to objectify what you're feeling, be it pain or anxiety or depression, and see it as a separate entity that's not part of yourself. It helps you let it go. You're getting to the heart of the symptom rather than just covering it as you do with medications."

From the Times of India:

'Mindfulness' meditation, the process of becoming more aware of one's surroundings, improves mental health and well being in teenage boys, says a new study.

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 — 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.