Participating in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress. In a study that will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Harvard-affiliated researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) reported the results of their study, the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain’s gray matter.

“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” says study senior author Sara Lazar of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program and a Harvard Medical School instructor in psychology. “This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.”

See the full article for much more.

She has written about her successes with the practice. An excerpt:

I teach in a public school. You might wonder if the practice has caused controversy. Certainly, my first two years were fraught with worry that a student might misinterpret the practice to his parents, and I doggedly corrected students who called it “karma” or “some weird Buddhist crap.” A number of parents over the years have thanked me for teaching their kids “an important life skill,” and a few offered, preemptively, to defend me should a problem arise.

The school and community have so supported the practice that I was recently awarded a grant through the local Education Foundation to run a meditation group at the high school.

Students have told me repeatedly that they come to depend on Stillness. On days I am particularly rushed, I might launch into some directions, but they always pull me back: “You forgot ‘peace time!” or “What about Stillness, Mrs. B?” or, my favorite, “Can we do 20 minutes today? I really need it.”

In recent years, I’ve broadened our practice, allowing every six weeks or so an extended period of 20 minutes, sometimes silent, sometimes with a guided full-body scan. And as a reward at the end of the year, I’ve invited my sister-in-law, a yoga teacher, to lead each class in some soothing poses.

Students have told me that they use stillness on the bus before football games, in the middle of the lunchroom when someone “said something stupid that made me want to punch him out,” and at night when they can’t sleep. They regularly download the songs I play or make me cds of music they think will work well. They return after graduation to say they’ve taken yoga or mediation classes at college. The biggest compliment I’ve ever received was when a tough guy – you know the type, too cool for school and always ready to challenge authority – re-emerged after a 20-minute session mumbling dreamily, “Mrs. B., you have the best voice.”

His friends razzed him mercifully, but he was stalwart in defending Stillness: “Dude, shut up! I am so chillaxed after that. We should have a whole class of just her talking about that ‘blue healing breath’ or whatever that thing is.”

See her full article for much more.

What determines whether a soul has basic trust? Basic trust is the effect on the soul of a particular aspect or quality of Being that we call Living Daylight. We call it this because if one’s perception is subtle enough to visually see and kinesthetically feel the substance of one’s consciousness, it actually looks like daylight, and is felt as an alive consciousness. It is experienced as something boundless, in the sense that it is not bounded by one’s body but rather is experienced as something that everything is made of. It is a universal sense of presence in that it pervades everything and is everywhere. The first level of experiencing it is to perceive that it is everywhere; the second level is to see that everything comes out of it; and the deepest level is to know that everything is made of it. At this deepest level, everything in the universe is seen to be originating in, bathed in, and constituted by Living Daylight.

This is definitely in the territory of the mystical, but I like Almaas’s ability to explain mystic experiences through less-mystical origins (e.g., pointing out that we’re essentially looking at the nature of our own consciousness, here).

I’m getting a ton out of slowly making my way through his new book The Unfolding Now. I hope to publish a fuller review of this book at some point, because it’s been quite profound so far.

I would assume that, like me, you have consulted many doctors and they aren’t able to do much to help. In this case, one of the most powerful therapies is what we might call “radical acceptance.”

The basic premise is that we often don’t realize how much of our suffering is of our own creation, created by how we react to the pain in our body. Sometimes the core of pain itself can be like a grain of sand in an oyster; but through our irritated reaction, it grows and grows and grows, like a painfully hard pearl, into something large and hard that impinges on our ability to live.

I use the word “radical” acceptance because normally we think of acceptance as a sort of trivial cognitive process: I know I’m in pain. OK, I accept that — but it’s not going anywhere.

On a more influential level, though, real acceptance is not just cognitive but also emotional, and has roots deep in the body and the unconscious mind. And so the process for those of us who experience constant pain is to learn to look deeper than our thoughts, deeper than our surface emotions, and observe our own reactions to the pain in a very intimate way. Instinctively, it is often the last thing we would think to do, since we just want the pain to get out of our way; but if we become skilled at looking deeper and with greater compassion, it can help a great deal.

One of the first steps, especially for those of us who tend to get caught up in our thoughts, is to learn to be more deeply present with “the now” — and not just when we sit down to meditate or do yoga, but as a way of life. In this area, I know of no better teacher than Eckhart Tolle. His book The Power of Now is perhaps the best instruction manual for learning to get more deeply into the present moment and stay there.

I particularly recommend listening to the audiobook version of The Power of Now, so you can hear his voice and join him at a psychological level as he models the quality of consciousness of which he speaks.

When it comes to more intensive meditation and personal inquiry, another teacher I’ve learned from immensely is Adyashanti. His True Meditation audiobook is particularly incisive, even though the recording quality isn’t great. For anyone with some prior exposure to Buddhism, I would also highly recommend his Spontaneous Awakening recordings.

Adyashanti’s basic teaching is very simple. He teaches that if we want to reach our true potential, we must learn to stop trying to manipulate our mind into artificial states, wishing for our experience to be different, always longing, striving, aching for reality to be other than it is — wanting to get somewhere faster, to gain more insight, to overcome our struggles, to change the way we feel, to improve the way we think, etc. This striving creates a conflict in our minds, so that we do everything from a place of effort and tension, rather than ease.

And so his basic spiritual teaching, regardless of your level of meditation experience, is to simply let go of control and allow everything to be as it is.

In my own meditation practice, I often sit on a small bench, put my torso in a nice relaxed upright posture, get in touch with the feeling of my in-breath and out-breath, and then start paying attention to the tension in my body. As I see my emotional tension, I notice where it is at in my body, observe it as intimately as I can, and then let go of it.

Then I repeat that same process with any urgent thoughts that come to mind, any aching tensions in my body, any well-intentioned efforts to improve my state of mind, etc. The answer to each of these things, almost like a mantra or a psychological balm I administer to them in equal measure, is: Let go of control and allow everything to be as it is.

And I keep repeating the process. The first time notice some mental tension and let go, I might get 10% of the way there. But as I keep repeating it, with each tension in my mind and body, I get deeper into a state that actually looks like radical harmony with the way things are.

Amazingly, the more I let go of control, the more my mind and body are able to join this harmony, accomplishing things I could never have accomplished through deliberate effort: My mind is more clear, I have more energy available, I’m able to think more creatively, I feel more relaxed, and my aches and pains gradually shrink back to much more manageable proportions.

Lately I use this instruction-mantra not just when I’m on my meditation cushion, but when I’m typing e-mails, when I’m in conversations, when I’m doing the dishes, when I’m shopping, when I’m working, when I’m driving: Let go of control and allow everything to be as it is. It’s amazing how much it helps.

If you get to experimenting with these ideas, I’d really enjoy hearing how it goes. I know many friends who have been helped by them in one way or another. I wish you luck in your journey. Feel free to write if you have questions or want to know more about something.

I’d love to learn more about how he does it.

ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) – The sun beams down on a warm Dutch spring morning, and the Iceman’s students look wary as they watch him dump bag after bag of ice into the tub of water where they will soon be taking a dip.

The plan is to try to overcome the normal human reaction to immersion in freezing slush: gasping for air, shivering uncontrollably, and getting back out again as soon as possible.

Instead, under the direction of “Iceman” Wim Hof, the group of athletes is going to stay in the water for minutes practicing his meditation techniques, seeking possible performance or health benefits.

Hof, 52, earned his nickname from feats such as remaining in a tank of ice in Hong Kong for almost 2 hours; swimming half the length of a football field under a sheet of ice in the Arctic; and making the Guinness record books for running a half-marathon barefoot in Finnish snow in deep subzero conditions.

Keep reading.

People who meditate grow bigger brains than those who don’t.

Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of our brains. Brain scans they conducted reveal that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input.

In one area of gray matter, the thickening turns out to be more pronounced in older than in younger people. That’s intriguing because those sections of the human cortex, or thinking cap, normally get thinner as we age.

“Our data suggest that meditation practice can promote cortical plasticity in adults in areas important for cognitive and emotional processing and well-being,” says Sara Lazar, leader of the study and a psychologist at Harvard Medical School. “These findings are consistent with other studies that demonstrated increased thickness of music areas in the brains of musicians, and visual and motor areas in the brains of jugglers. In other words, the structure of an adult brain can change in response to repeated practice.”

Keep reading »

Thanks for the link, Marsh.

UPDATE: Looks like this study has made the front page of Mudita Journal before. And from the same tipster. Perhaps if I meditated more, I would have noticed sooner.

The purpose of Mudita Forum is to provide a stimulating, thoughtful environment for discussing Eastern consciousness-raising practices — such as meditation, mindfulness, and the cultivation of presence — while using Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism as a basic philosophical frame-of-reference.

The old group got lost when I was changing servers a couple years ago, but recently I’ve been contacted by new people wishing to join.

My hope for the new group is that it will be much like the old one: low-volume, high-quality, and stimulating on many levels.

I sent invites to many of you from the old group, but I’m sure I missed some of you. Also, Google apparently holds such invitation messages until they can review and approve them manually, so who knows when you’ll get my invitation.

Membership in the new group is by approval only, but feel free to request joining if you’re interested in the subject matter.

Feel free to browse some of my own public posts to the forum for an example of the kinds of things we discuss.

The most valuable skill I’ve acquired through meditation is the ability to experience the sense in which I am not the same as my emotions. We have a tendency to unconsciously identify with thoughts and emotions, but it is also possible to dis-identiify from them, much as you might look around the theater and dis-identify from a scary movie. It is liberating.

I suspect this is is why Marsha Linehan et al have found mindfulness to be so effective in the treatment of BPD [borderline personality disorder]. Many of us have a tendency to identify too strongly with thoughts and feelings, or perhaps with the wrong thoughts and feelings, and it causes us to go out of balance. But if we can learn to step back and see ourselves through a slightly different lens, we see the illusions involved and don’t get so easily ensnared.

The process by which we identify with emotions, and can also learn to dis-identify from them, is probably the single most interesting thing to me in all of psychology. I’m convinced it accounts for a huge percentage of not only strong unpleasant emotions like rage and guilt and fear, but also for more long-term stable experiences like our self-esteem and the average success levels of our relationships.

The strength with which schizophrenics and other psychotics identify with their thoughts and emotions could potentially be a defining characteristic of psychosis. They appear to identify so strongly with every thought that pops into their noodle that they lose the ability to step back and reconnect with reality. I’ve heard that some schizophrenics (such as Mr. Beautiful Mind) do develop this very skill, to step back, and it helps them cope and maintain some sense of reality.

So what is the alternative? If we’re not our emotions or our thoughts or our actions or our experiences, what are we?

Buddhists — who have the most experience with this stuff, and taught Linehan the basics of what has become the most promising treatment available for borderline personalities — would say the trick is to identify your self with the witness or perhaps the flow of experience, rather than with the contents of any particular experience. You are process, not content.

So — you are not your anger; you are your capacity to observe your anger as it grows, tempts, and dissipates. You are not the new car you bought, or the thrill you get when you drive it; you are the observing presence that sees you are a little out of balance as you do it.

This is not a trick of semantics. It is a qualitatively different experience, and getting more familiar with it has saved me from doing all kinds of stupid things that cost me dearly in my youth.

I totally want to write a book about this.

Criticisms of mindfulness are particularly interesting to me, partly because I experience mindfulness, at root, to be a simple increase in awareness — and not even at the “synthetic” level of thought, but rather at the even more basic level of perception.

Since the practice of mindfulness is virtually synonymous with an increase in perception, or elementary awareness, I often find myself wondering, “How on earth can raising awareness be bad?”

So that is, perhaps, a philosophical bias I bring to the table, from the outset — I don’t understand how awareness can be bad. Ever. Not in principle, as a way of living.

Occasionally I get the impression that mindfulness is being criticized because the critic has something akin to a religious phobia, and their criticisms of mindfulness are just a by-product of that, since mindfulness therapies are derived, historically, from Buddhism.

I get that vibe, for example, in this quote from critic Scott Lilienfield in the article:

“What concerns me is the hype, the talk about changing the world, this allure of the guru that the field of psychotherapy has a tendency to cultivate.”

I personally attended a training in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (the gold standard in mindfulness as a clinical intervention) and I don’t recall anything about gurus or changing the world. If anything, the approach being taught seemed systematically stripped of it cultural underpinnings in Buddhism and the various Zen traditions from which it originated.

So I wonder where this concern of his is coming from; does it relate to the empirical treatments being offered, or is it something he picked up elsewhere?

Also, sometimes people criticize mindfulness meditation because they do not recognize the difference between mindfulness meditation (which involves increasing one’s awareness of reality) and transcendental meditation (which involves entering a trance and, essentially, temporarily decreasing one’s contact with reality).

The latter was quite popular, and controversial, in the 1970s, but is fundamentally dissimilar from mindfulness meditation.

On the other hand, there are certain criticisms of mindfulness that appear to have undeniable empirical merit — assuming the results upon which they’re based can be taken at face value:

A case in point is mindfulness-based therapy to prevent a relapse into depression. The treatment significantly reduced the risk of relapse in people who have had three or more episodes of depression. But it may have had the opposite effect on people who had one or two previous episodes, two studies suggest.

Why would mindfulness help people with three or more episodes, but hurt people with two or fewer?

Understanding the dynamics involved, it seems to me, could do much to increase our grasp of the human mind, as well as mindfulness therapies.

Could it be that, for patients with two or fewer episodes, the mind’s natural defense mechanisms are more safe or useful, at least in the short term, than an increase in awareness?

I would enjoy hearing theories from anyone with some grasp of the dynamics involved, and preferably some first-hand personal experience with mindfulness practice.

Why would mindfulness — even when removed entirely from any religious trappings — help certain patients, while hurting others?

Jon Bernie is one of Adya’s friends and colleagues. I met him briefly and attended one of his satsangs (sitting & teaching events) last time I was in San Francisco.

Below is a brief teaching he sent out to his an announcement list. (Thanks to Marsh for the forward.)

I think it’s a well-expressed encapsulation of this perspective. You might find it worth contemplating if you’re open to this sort of thing.

For those of you new to this perspective, there’s plenty of “poetry” here: It’s not so much to think about; the trick is to feel its actual meaning in your lived experience. Your mileage may vary.

“Karmic arisings,” by the way, can be loosely translated as “the difficult things that come up in your experience.”

To awaken is to dissolve in one place and simultaneously appear everywhere. Awakening can also be called being presence, being energy. Karmic arisings, whatever their nature, are fuel for dissolving. So rather than resisting, or fighting, or arguing with what is — instead of all that, simply accept what is. Receive what is, allow what is. Become what is.

Now there’s no separation between perceiver and perception — there’s simply being perception. There’s just listening, just observing, just feeling. There’s just thinking. And you allow this gestation to happen, you allow this growth, as painful — or ecstatic! — as it might be.

The good news is you don’t have to understand how it works for it to work. Being here is enough. All you have to do is learn to allow yourself to cook. To be dissolved into light. To appear everywhere simultaneously. That is freedom.