Articles on Mindfulness Meditation

How does Mindfulness in Cognitive Behavorial Therapy Help you

" I've been I practicing mind-fullness all my life...I can multi-task, multi-think, and multi-stress with the best of them. What I'm not good at is mindfulness."

A few years ago, while studying some brain anatomy material for an upcoming exam, I had an epiphany. It occurred to me that my brain was actually engaged in the act of studying itself! As I read for example, about how the brain translates visual text into abstract thought, my brain was actually doing what it was reading about doing. This happened several times during those few months. For instance, when I am trying to master new knowledge, I have a study routine that works very well for me. After reviewing the relevant textbook, I write questions and answers on notecards to test myself. I also record myself asking those questions and giving the answers along with affirming remarks like "good job!"

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Date Posted: November 5, 2012

Categories: Mindfulness Meditation

Benefits of Meditation and How to easily start Meditating

What is meditation? Does practicing meditation daily really bring some benefits? How does one meditate?

My own experience with meditation began in the 70’s with the practice of transcendental meditation (TM), followed by Benson’s non-religious version of TM aimed at stress reduction (Benson, H., 1975), a tiny bit of Taoist meditation, and finally mindfulness meditation as advocated by Jon Kabat-Zinn (Kabat-Zinn, J., 1990). Mindfulness meditation is used increasingly by psychologists not so much for relaxation but for coping with difficult thoughts and feelings. In this post I will focus on Benson’s technique for meditating because it is a very simple introduction to meditation.

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Date Posted: October 3, 2011

Categories: Mindfulness Meditation, Relaxation techniques, Stress Management

Mindfulness with Jon Kabat-Zinn Video

In 2007, Jon Kabat-Zinn gave a talk on Mindfulness meditation at Google. The video may be a few years old but it offers an excellent insight into the topics of mindfulness for beginners. The present article provides a brief summary of his presentation along with the actual video which you can watch on your own.

Jon started with an analogy of the usefulness of meditation for Olympic rowers. To maximize their potentials, rowers  have to work in harmony with the boat, the water and  each other, in other words, each rower's body and mind must becomes one with the environment they are in at that moment along with the other rowers.

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Date Posted: July 4, 2011

Categories: Mindfulness Meditation

Highlights from the Happiness and Its Causes conference - 15th June: Meditation

Today I attended the pre-conference workshop in Brisbane, Australia as part of the Happiness and Its Causes conference conducted by B. Alan Wallace, who is an expert in meditation having studied and practiced meditation for 40 years.  He is able to meditate for periods of amazing lengths of time e.g. 8 to 10 hours continuously instead of the usual 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening.  But this is nothing compared to the depth and quality of his meditation compared to that of most of us who meditate.

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Date Posted: June 16, 2011

Categories: Mindfulness Meditation, Relaxation techniques