Three reasons why mindfulness meditation helps relationships

1. Mindfulness meditation turns down the volume on stress. One of the most widely known benefits of meditation is reduced stress. "Stress" in this case doesn't mean that meditating will reduce the number of urgent e-mails in your inbox, but rather the reaction that your brain and your body have to what's going on inside you and around you. What I see in myself, and in the people with whom I work, is that the response to stressors is less intense, takes less time to recover from, and doesn't tend to linger on the sidelines. "Well, sure," you might say, "anybody can be relaxed right after meditating." What seems to happen, though, is that the effect of meditation on decreasing the stress response extends well beyond the meditation session itself, for more and more of the day as people develop a consistent practice.
2. Mind the Gap. Research on the effects of mindfulness meditation on the brain is increasingly showing that there is a beefing up (in activation and even in size) of the middle prefrontal cortex (mPFC). The mPFC is an area which neuroscientists believe plays an important role in integrating our higher, "intellectual" brain areas (for example, your frontal cortex) with those down below in our more raw, "emotional" areas (like your amygdala).
3. "Getting" your partner better. As you practice mindfulness meditation, you're practicing, over and over again, the act of noticing when your mind has wandered off. (By the way, if you think your brain is too busy for you to meditate -- think again (pun intended) -- and take a look at this video explaining how a busy brain can actually make for more effective mindfulness practice). Read More...

Meditation : An Enrichment To Your Soul

While a meditative state is the natural outcome of yoga and the spiritual benefit of meditation is supreme bliss or enlightenment, these words are unlikely to be understood by many.

However, progress towards meditation and meditative techniques have several benefits at the gross body or material level:

• Improvement of body luster and general health-When your mind focuses on a particular part of the body, the blood flow to that part increases and cells receive more oxygen and other nutrients in abundance. Today, many of the film stars and fashion models include meditation in their daily regimen.
• Improvement in concentration - Many of the athletes and sports professionals regularly employ meditation methods. Studies have found a direct correlation between concentration exercises (meditation) and the performance level of sports professionals. Meditation strengthens the mind, it comes under control and is able to provide effective guidance to the physical body to effectively execute all its projects. Psychological Exercises are a powerful way of improving concentration and improving mental strength. Read More...

Mindfulness Meditation: Thoughts on paying attention

The research that got Ari thinking about mindfulness meditation as a route to dealing with procrastination. This research may help you see procrastination a little differently.

Here's the argument in a nutshell based on the psychological research (notably by Roy Baumeister and his colleagues):

1. Procrastination is a form of self-regulatory failure (this is a prevalent view of researchers, and it fits with all explanations of procrastination, although the cause of the regulatory failure itself is debated, e.g., whether it's something like discounting future rewards, fear of failure, a personality trait or living in bad faith).
2. Self-regulation is the process whereby systems maintain stability of functioning and adaptability to change. It's based on feedback loops.
3. Self-regulation failure is largely a problem of under-regulation. We fail to regulate and maintain the feedback loop.
4. Most models of the cognitive control of behavior through feedback begin with noticing a change that needs to be regulated in the system. These models begin with attention to the system.
5. Therefore, loss of attentional control is a common harbinger of self-regulatory failure.

So, with attention as his focus Ari's next question was "How can we facilitate the management of attention?" To answer this question, he turned to a different research literature, one related to meditation.

Using the work of Shapiro and colleagues (among others), Ari moved towards mindfulness as a means of managing attention, as the cultivation of nonjudgmental attention is posited to lead to "connection" which in turn leads to self-regulation. He also found research that demonstrated that people who score higher on measures of mindfulness (e.g., I am open to the experience of the present moment, I sense my body, whether eating, cooking, cleaning or talking, When I notice an absence of mind, I gently return to the experience of the here and now) reported significantly greater self-regulated behavior.

He did find that scores on the mindfulness measures correlated negatively with all of his measures of procrastination. The more mindful we are, the less we report procrastinating.

He did not, however, demonstrate that the mindfulness meditation made a difference. Although there are many other studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of mindfulness meditation on health, well-being and countless other outcomes, the effect on this particular form of self-regulatory failure, procrastination, awaits future research. Read More...