In reference to Growing a steering wheel for one's brain, and "Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction" - Jon Kabat-Zinn:
A recent article in the NY Times delves into the history of mindfulness meditation in therapy; check out Lotus therapy by Benedict Carey.
Thank you to Deric at Mindblog.
I just (a few days ago) obtained a copy of Kabat-Zinn's book, Full Catastrophe Living, and am reading random pages from it at bedtime. I usually do this with books ... expose my sleepy brain to them, see if something in there can grab my tired attention hard enough to make me want to read them cover to cover when I'm awake and can fairly engage. It's my own Sleepy Brain Interest Detection Screening Mechanism.
I'm grateful, actually, that at this stage of life I appear to be relatively catastrophe-free - there has been a very nice patch of smooth sailing for several years.
PS: I'm back in this post on May 29, to link to a just-released podcast from Ginger Campbell, in her books and ideas series, an interview with Delaney Dean on Mindfulness Meditation. Here are Campbell's show notes. Here is a link to the actual podcast. I am eager to listen to it.
Showing posts with label Jon Kabat-Zinn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jon Kabat-Zinn. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Growing a steering wheel for one's brain
Lately I've been crossing paths often with the idea of meditation.
My personal take on meditation is that on the one hand, I've always been somewhat reluctant to commit to anything that has any whiff of religiosity about it, while on the other, everything I ever have read about meditation suggested that at its fundamental level it is inherently secular, and biologically, neurologically friendly, which I find attractive.
I was not indoctrinated into any religion as a child, never attended church, usually headed off the other way from any setting where altars were part of the decor. I did succumb, however, to the Maharishi craze when it passed through where I was living in 1972. I took formal instruction and "sat" for awhile (a month or two at most). The meditation consisted of resting while sitting up and silently repeating a "word" given to me by the instructor in a formal private ceremony (which I stomached bravely), a word that meant nothing whatsoever in English, just a sound.
I can still remember the word ("ah-eem"), but don't recall noticing any change in myself at all. I dropped the whole process after awhile. I was/am easily bored I suppose, which is likely the whole "problem" I've had with meditation. Since then I have steered pretty clear of any committed sitting meditation on any sort of recurring quasi-permanent basis that involves being around other people.
Shortly after I became a meditation failure I learned about yoga from Ruth Richards, another physiotherapist in the hospital where I worked at the time. She was considerably older at 55 (I was a tender 22), was Danish, had been through WWII in Britain, was married to, then had become widowed by a UK man involved in the military. She seemed exotic, slightly tragic, wise, worldly, elegant and beautiful. She was a yoga practitioner and taught me the basics - how to breathe, what to feel for.
I began practicing yoga, on my own, from a book; every day for two years I spent at least an hour in my own body, focusing on every small sensation, breathing into, being with, and inhabiting every cubic centimeter of my entire body, feeling, registering, appreciating mounting improvements in my relationship with my body, my movement, my physicality.
I do not recall why I stopped. Bored again probably. But the feeling of knowing/ knowing how to feel and sense, physically, kinesthetically, has stayed ever since, right to this day.
It has helped me focus in on things that actually do matter to me, like getting the right "feel" in my work of manual treatment of pain. I can sit for several minutes without moving, breathing carefully, fully relaxed, even while exerting considerable physical force through my arms if need be, feeling with my hands, feeling for changes in someone's body tissues that tell me favorable change is happening in their nervous systems. I've done this all day long, for years. I've learned to get "me" out of the way, and let my own nervous system and that of my patient "communicate" in whatever way is required, to help that change along. Kinesthesis, whether it's auto- or applied, is so wordless it lends itself well to this deeper kind of attending. I practice this daily or nearly daily as part of my manual therapy practice, and try to teach it to the people I treat, so they can treat themselves.
After having become a manual therapist and learning to feel and control my own nervous system well enough to be able to use it to help other people with theirs, I came full circle back to learn there was meditation for dealing with pain, called Mindfulness Meditation. I wrote about this before, here.
Just a few days ago a new person joined BrainScience Podcast Forum, Delaney Dean, who is a meditation enthusiast and teacher, among other pursuits. She provided a MindHacks link (this one - thank you Vaughan), which contains a link to a great article on meditation, which was really supposed to be the point of this blog post...
Here is a link to the abstract of Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation by Lutz et al., and a link to the paper itself, a 7 page pdf.
I love the first sentence:
Indeed it can. Indeed it can. So much so that even "I", this rudderless construct of a self that has managed to cobble itself together over time and change, could be persuaded by my nonconscious processes to take it up, maybe for real this time... but I won't hold my breath. Which is part of the point of learning to meditate, or so I've heard..
My personal take on meditation is that on the one hand, I've always been somewhat reluctant to commit to anything that has any whiff of religiosity about it, while on the other, everything I ever have read about meditation suggested that at its fundamental level it is inherently secular, and biologically, neurologically friendly, which I find attractive.
I was not indoctrinated into any religion as a child, never attended church, usually headed off the other way from any setting where altars were part of the decor. I did succumb, however, to the Maharishi craze when it passed through where I was living in 1972. I took formal instruction and "sat" for awhile (a month or two at most). The meditation consisted of resting while sitting up and silently repeating a "word" given to me by the instructor in a formal private ceremony (which I stomached bravely), a word that meant nothing whatsoever in English, just a sound.
I can still remember the word ("ah-eem"), but don't recall noticing any change in myself at all. I dropped the whole process after awhile. I was/am easily bored I suppose, which is likely the whole "problem" I've had with meditation. Since then I have steered pretty clear of any committed sitting meditation on any sort of recurring quasi-permanent basis that involves being around other people.
Shortly after I became a meditation failure I learned about yoga from Ruth Richards, another physiotherapist in the hospital where I worked at the time. She was considerably older at 55 (I was a tender 22), was Danish, had been through WWII in Britain, was married to, then had become widowed by a UK man involved in the military. She seemed exotic, slightly tragic, wise, worldly, elegant and beautiful. She was a yoga practitioner and taught me the basics - how to breathe, what to feel for.
I began practicing yoga, on my own, from a book; every day for two years I spent at least an hour in my own body, focusing on every small sensation, breathing into, being with, and inhabiting every cubic centimeter of my entire body, feeling, registering, appreciating mounting improvements in my relationship with my body, my movement, my physicality.
I do not recall why I stopped. Bored again probably. But the feeling of knowing/ knowing how to feel and sense, physically, kinesthetically, has stayed ever since, right to this day.
It has helped me focus in on things that actually do matter to me, like getting the right "feel" in my work of manual treatment of pain. I can sit for several minutes without moving, breathing carefully, fully relaxed, even while exerting considerable physical force through my arms if need be, feeling with my hands, feeling for changes in someone's body tissues that tell me favorable change is happening in their nervous systems. I've done this all day long, for years. I've learned to get "me" out of the way, and let my own nervous system and that of my patient "communicate" in whatever way is required, to help that change along. Kinesthesis, whether it's auto- or applied, is so wordless it lends itself well to this deeper kind of attending. I practice this daily or nearly daily as part of my manual therapy practice, and try to teach it to the people I treat, so they can treat themselves.
After having become a manual therapist and learning to feel and control my own nervous system well enough to be able to use it to help other people with theirs, I came full circle back to learn there was meditation for dealing with pain, called Mindfulness Meditation. I wrote about this before, here.
Just a few days ago a new person joined BrainScience Podcast Forum, Delaney Dean, who is a meditation enthusiast and teacher, among other pursuits. She provided a MindHacks link (this one - thank you Vaughan), which contains a link to a great article on meditation, which was really supposed to be the point of this blog post...
Here is a link to the abstract of Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation by Lutz et al., and a link to the paper itself, a 7 page pdf.
I love the first sentence:
"Meditation can be conceptualized as a family of complex emotional and attentional regulatory training regimes developed for various ends, including the cultivation of well-being and emotional balance."
Indeed it can. Indeed it can. So much so that even "I", this rudderless construct of a self that has managed to cobble itself together over time and change, could be persuaded by my nonconscious processes to take it up, maybe for real this time... but I won't hold my breath. Which is part of the point of learning to meditate, or so I've heard..
Saturday, April 05, 2008
"Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction" - Jon Kabat-Zinn
I finally checked out Jon Kabat-Zinn more closely, after having heard about him and his work several years ago. He has written several books, some or all of which entered the world of persistent pain via pain clinics, probably because of the obvious overlap of stress reduction. I heard him interviewed on a radio program a few years back, and very much liked his blend of common sense coupled with description of the kinds of ordinary stressors meditation can help with. His book, Full Catastrophe Living (one of many) has been around since 1990, and I'm embarrassed to admit I've never read it.
Here are some links:
1. Mindfulness Meditation, 72-minute you-tube presentation to google employees (recommended)
2. "Coming to Our Senses" a short (9.15 minute) you-tube video
3. Coming to Our Senses, a 57 minute google video (long intro by someone at UCSD Medical Center)
4. A simple bio. Excerpt:
5. Wikipedia entry on JKZ.
6. An interview, "Mindful Medicine". Excerpt I:
After seeing him, especially in the 72 minute video linked higher up, I might actually acquire and read that book. What he says is simple and it makes total sense.
Here are some links:
1. Mindfulness Meditation, 72-minute you-tube presentation to google employees (recommended)
2. "Coming to Our Senses" a short (9.15 minute) you-tube video
3. Coming to Our Senses, a 57 minute google video (long intro by someone at UCSD Medical Center)
4. A simple bio. Excerpt:
Dr. Kabat-Zinn received his Ph.D. in molecular biology from MIT in 1971 with the Nobel Laureate in Medicine, Salvador Luria. Dr. Kabat-Zinn’s research between 1979 and 2002 focused on mind/body interactions for healing, on various clinical applications of mindfulness meditation training for people with chronic pain and/or stress-related disorders, on the effects of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) on the brain and how it processes emotions, particularly under stress, and on the immune system; on the use and effects of MBSR with women with breast cancer and men with prostate cancer; on patients undergoing bone marrow transplant; with prison inmates and staff; in multicultural settings; and on stress in various corporate settings and work environments.
5. Wikipedia entry on JKZ.
6. An interview, "Mindful Medicine". Excerpt I:
Jon Kabat-Zinn was one of the earliest students of Zen Master Seung Sahn and was a founding member of Cambridge Zen Center. Over the years he has studied with a number of Buddhist teachers and incorporated their teachings, especially the practice of mindfulness, into his practice of medicine. His book Full Catastrophe Living (New York: Delacorte Press, 1990) was on the New York Times bestseller list.Excerpt II:
"The two fundamental things that most people get out of the program, independent of symptom reduction, are these. First, the breath is an ally and can be used to calm down and see more clearly. The other, related discovery, is that you are not the content of your thoughts. You don't have to believe them or react to them. That's incredibly liberating."- JKZ
After seeing him, especially in the 72 minute video linked higher up, I might actually acquire and read that book. What he says is simple and it makes total sense.
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