There are an abundance of meditation and mindfulness talks on the TED website, some of which I felt were helpful in my aim to better understand mindfulness so that I can create content that's accurate and covers everything a newcomer might want to know. This post has been in progress for a while so some of the information has fed itself in into my designs in places.
Bodhi Kioldije: Meditation: Change Your Mind, Change Your Life
Kiodije is a monk who, naturally, knows best about the benefits of meditation. Here he is specifically talking about Zen meditation, which is not quite the same thing as mindfulness, but there are some effects of the practice which cross over. At the start of his talk Kiodije compares the levels of happiness of lottery winners to a group of people suffering HIV, which was compared several years ago in a scientific study. Those who were HIV positive were happier than the lottery winners. This is because, as Kiodije puts it, "the mind determines our experience of life". This leads into the main focus of his talk, which is that: "Where we pay attention will also determine our experience. Most people don't use this tremendous tool, this flashlight, of how to direct attention."
"It's about detaching from our thoughts. Our thought are just one aspect of our mind…We need to balance that discriminating function of the mind with this other realm of consciousness that opens up when we learn to detach form our thoughts...Meditation helps you with your whole emotional life by enabling you to detach from your thoughts." This statement outlines the core element of meditation and is something I will draw on when I get to designing the pages of the app which describe what happens to our thoughts when we practice mindfulness, as this is something I've not really looked at in practical work yet.
His explanations of the practice through a metaphor can be helpful to a newcomer who might not be clear on why they should start meditating. "You shake a snowglobe - this is the condition of the mind before meditation. And in Zen, we are juts setting that snow globe down, allowing thoughts to settle."
"Consider this as the waves on the surface of the ocean, a lot of turmoil, a lot of buzzing of the mind. …Many people don't known how much their mind is buzzing all the time, it's like being on the surface of the ocean and just buzzing all the time, and not experience what it is to just get underneath the waves, into the depths of the ocean...When we get under those waves, we experience the unity of things, ands this has tremendous implications."
Shannon Paige: Mindfulness and Healing
Shannon Page spoke of her journey through depression, which was helped by a comination of yoga and mindfulness meditation. A lot of her talk was about her personal stuff but I managed to clean a few essential bits from it :"Yoga works by accessing the mind-body breath connection." and also, "If we learn to take deeper breaths, we can actually pattern or even re-pattern and heal and move toward wholeness and fullness and wellness." Yoga and mindfulness can go hand in hand, and I have discussed with Simone the possibility of bringing some aspects of depicting a yoga practice in the app, through an illustrative diagram or similar.
Diana Winston: The Practice of Mindfulness
"If you were to look at your mind and kind of examine it, what would you notice? Your mind is probably in the past or probably in the future. …So our minds are kind of careening back and forth between these two places. And in between these two places is where stress lies. Stress impacts out body, impacts our mind, but it's the mind that takes us out of the present and makes us more stressed out."Diana Watson's talk was an excellent source for me, because her approach to speaking about mindfulness is very similar to the way in which I present it in practical work. She introduces mindfulness as an easy, accessible thing: "Mindfulness…was something that anybody could do. Regardless of your background, regardless of where you come from and what your religion is, this practice of paying attention - it's so simple. Not easy to do, but very very simple."
Watson's talk features many titbits of facts which could help convince a non-meditator to take it up. For example, she notes that psoriasis sufferers practicing mindfulness healed 3x faster than non-mindfulness practicers. To echo Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's findings, Watson tells the audience that people reported being happier if their minds were focused on the present moment rather than being distracted.
With regard to neuroscience, Watson explains that mediation changes the structure of the brain over time. Studies on long-term meditators brains showed that the meditators brains did not "thin out" or have age-related cortical recline, in the pre-frontal cortex and the insular cortex. Meditation is directly related to the number of cortical layers in the brain. After 8 weeks of 27 mins a day meditation, the same brain changes were seen in the novice meditators as those who had been practising for years. Areas showing the most growth were "The areas related to decision making and flexible thinking, and synthesising information in the body and brain, and connecting self awareness and compassion."
Watson's last point in her presentation is that with mindfulness, we can bring this attention into the present moment and find a place of peace and ease. "We learn it as a meditation practice, we learn it as coming back. And then we find later on that our mind can be present. And in this way we cultivate more and more ease and more and more wellbeing."
Zindel Siegel: The Mindful Way Through Depression
Zindel Siegel is one of the big guns in the area of mindfulness research, having worked with John Kabat-Zinn, Mark Williams and John Teasedale at Oxford Mindfulness Centre to develop the 8 week MBSR training, based on the model of John Kabat-Zinn.. His talk is about his experience making discoveries in the field and serves as another great introduction to the topic, especially as a combative approach to depression. "What we were really interested in doing was getting people to create a different relationship with their sadness. Mindfulness is really the awareness that comes to mind when we pay attention in a particular way, we are bringing our attention to the present moment and we are not judging what we notice."
"MBSR tries to work with concrete examples of how to pay attention and how to be mindful." Siegel notes the examples of holding and "investigating" a raisin, and other introductory exercises which get people used to thinking about physical sensations and focusing on them further. These exercises will actually be featured in the app I am creating as a way of creating stickiness, which I have spoken about in previous posts. Of the exercises, Siegel says: "What we are trying to get people to do is to anchor themselves in their experience so that when a negative emotion comes up in the mind it can wash over them…they can find a different place for standing and working with these feelings. And as a result, have much more of an option for sleeting a response and for influencing what happens next."
Also mentioned is the sister therapy of MBSR, MSCT (Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy), which reduces the risk of a relapse into depression by about 40%, and equal relapse prevention to continued medication. "It enhances people's ability to feel reward, to feel positive affect, in their daily lives…the capacity to reward and to feel reinforced for mindfulness allows these health benefits to continue." I plan to detail these techniques in the same section of the app that deals with the introductory exercises (under the "How To Get Started" umbrella).
So why is this? "People are better able to tune in to the state of the body…what we are finding is that as the present moment pathway gets activated people trained in mindfulness are able to increase the activation in the insula, more than people who haven't been trained. It turns out this is vitally important for working with sad mood states." Through mindfulness, the person feeling sad has access to two pathways: Executive control network vs. the present moment pathway. This pathway is desrcibed by Siegel as "...an inner resource that allows them to take care of themselves in a way that touches greater moments of wholeness…it becomes less about a treatment and more about a way of life and looking after themselves."
Susan Kaiser Greenland: Teaching the ABC's of Attention, Balance and Compassion
Susan Kaiser Greenland speaks about mindful awareness in schools. She believes that if we start teaching mindfulness to children as young as five, the next generation will grow up with tools to deal with their busy stressful lives and learn how to better handle certain health conditions too. Greenland's emphasis is on attention and what kind of attention we are paying to ourselves. "What is the quality of my attention? Is my attention sleepy, is it drowsy and dull? Or am I alert and really wide awake? Or is there a bias to my attention?"
"The two strategies with attention are really focusing and choosing. The repeated focusing of attention on one object over ad over again does change the brain...When you focus on one thing and nothing else, a corresponding part of your brain will get bigger." Greenland notes that taxi drivers have a bigger part of the brain associated with navigating geographical spaces than other people - the same applies to regular mindful meditators.
The next question she raises is how we are to balance our attention. "Balance is associated with quieting and seeing. mindfulness is really not about changing…or trying to fix emotions, or hide emotions or put them under the rug. It's about noticing them and being able to turn in and look at them, with the intention to understand and not to judge."
Similar to Siegel's analogy above, Greenland talks of the emotional part of the brain vs the problem solving part. "When the emotional part of the brain gets loud, it's really hard for the problem solving part of the brain to do its work. What mindfulness in adults does is it moves the problems from the emotional part of the brain to the problem solving part." This also works in reverse.
Greenland also has something to say about the effect of compassion levels in mindfulness practitioners, which is something I have toyed with bringing in to my information visuals. "In compassion, caring and connecting are the two parts. If you develop the ability to empathise with more people, that part of the brain in the nervous system gets stringer and you can better understand yourself. It works the other way around too, the more introspective you are…the stronger your ability to understand other people." So, mindfulness literally makes you nicer!
References
Kaiser Greenland, Susan. 2012. "Teaching the ABCs of Attention, Balance and Compassion." [online video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMvTTIr2p4
[Accessed 07 February 2015]
Kjolhede, Bodhin. 2013. "Meditation: Change Your Mind, Change Your Life." [online video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upNONoxskiw&spfreload=10
[Accessed 07 February 2015]
Paige, Shannon. 2012. "Shannon Paige - Mindfulness and Healing." [online video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcGUo6uNs34
[Accessed 07 February 2015]
Winston, Diana. 2012. "The Practice of Mindfulness." [online video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMlaSCxZPN4
[Accessed 07 February 2015]
Segal, Zindel. 2014. "The Mindful Way Through Depression." [online video] Available T: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A4w3W94ygA
[Accessed 07 February 2015]
Further watching:
Siegel, Daniel. 2012. "Mindfulness and Neural Integration: Daniel Siegel, MD" [online video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiyaSr5aeho
[Accessed 07 February 2015]
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