Meditation - short term craze or long term opportunity for the growth of Buddhism?

Suddenly everybody’s meditating  - from stressed-out film stars and business executives, to senior citizens trying to slow down the effects of ageing. We’re all suffering from information overload, and a favorite way to bring order to the chaos of our minds is to meditate.

Although most of the meditation techniques are based on Buddhist methods, they are usually presented in a secular manner.  The marketing ploy seems to be: ‘Although the Buddhists have by some accident discovered techniques for calming and healing mind and body, let’s forget about their theories and all that religious stuff, and just concentrate on the practical methods for the here and now’. 

But can such secular meditation lead on to spiritual meditation? Can meditation for mundane purposes introduce people to the Buddhadharma?  Is this an opportunity for the growth of Buddhism in the West?

 
Tangled mind 
People are often motivated into taking up meditation by the realisation that their overloaded thought-processes feel like this…
 

Information overload

What they’re hoping to do is to sort them out into something neat and tidy like this....
 

Tidy thoughts

But what they might eventually experience, as they untangle their minds, is something like this, where they become aware of a clear central core to the mind…

The Core of Awareness

 
 


















 
That central core (the 'root mind' or 'pure awareness') is non-physical and continues onwards when all the other strands, threads and processes of the mind have come to an end.   The core of the mind is like an optical fiber - clear and illuminating. It is the clear, pure awareness that is central to other thought processes.

Secular mindfulness meditations allow the meditator to catch a glimpse of this clear core by parting the tangled threads of peripheral thought processes.   However, only more advanced meditations, especially the Tantric-style ones, allow the meditator to actually manipulate this central core and its contents. For like a clear optical fiber, it carries information onwards from the end of this life to all our future lives. 


Mindfulness meditation primes the mind for spiritual experiences
From The Huffington Post 
"The practice of mindfulness dates back at least 2,500 years to early Buddhism, and since then, it's played an important role in a number of spiritual traditions.

While the stillness and connecting with one's inner self cultivated through mindfulness are certainly an important part of a spiritual practice, feelings of wonder and awe -- the amazement we get when faced with incredible vastness -- are also central to the spiritual experience. And according to new research, mindfulness may actually set the stage for awe.

Mindfulness is the key element of the spiritual experience in a number of different religions.

Awe is defined as a feeling of fascination and amazement invoked by an encounter with something larger than ourselves that is beyond our ordinary frameworks of understanding. Previous research has shown that spirituality, nature and art are the most common ways that we experience awe.

"You can't digest [the object of awe] with your cognitive structures -- it's too big for you," University of Groningen psychologist Dr. Brian Ostafin told the Huffington Post. "So there's a need for accommodation, to change your mental structures to understand what that is. This is the key element of the spiritual experience in a number of different religions..."
 

Progressing from secular meditation to the dharma
Mindfulness meditation is probably not a temporary craze, but is here to stay, since information overload is not going to decrease, and our lives or not going to get any less busy. Buddhists need to show that the dharma starts where secular meditation techniques leave off.   It will require skillful presentation to introduce spiritual ideas to an increasingly secular audience, without scaring them off with 'religion', and its associated bad vibes.


Read more at Buddhist Philosophy

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Kadampa Life

The webcrawler in your mind.

The purpose of this 'mindfulness' meditation is to obtain a glimpse of the formless nature of the mind as pure awareness, and in the process examine the compulsive web of interlinked thoughts that normally dominates our consciousness.


1. Find somewhere quiet and peaceful where you won't be disturbed. Silence your mobile, and if at home take the phone off the hook.

2. There's no need for a classical meditation posture, just sit upright in a chair. Try to keep your back reasonably straight. Avoid the two extremes of slouching  and getting excessively rigid.

3. Observe your breathing. Don't try to control it, just observe the natural rhythm of inhaling and exhaling.

4. Once you've settled into this observational state, but before you've got bored, introduce a small amount of breath control - just pause for a second between the in and the out breaths.

5. Next try a simple silent mental recitation. On the in-breath mentally recite the syllable OM (you don't say it out loud). At the pause between the in-breath and out-breath silently recite the syllable AH  (there is no need to prolong this pause any longer than it takes to mentally recite this syllable). On the out-breath mentally recite the syllable HUM.
 
6. Keep on breathing and silently reciting OM... AH... HUM...  Don't force the breath. Breathe naturally apart from the slight pause long enough to mentally recite the AH between the in and out breaths. You can then extend this pause if it helps you to feel calmer, and you can do so without discomfort. You may like to imagine that you hold the AH sound at your heart during the pause. Concentrate on the syllables and don't let your mind wander.

If the OM AH HUM method  doesn't work for you, then try just breathing naturally and maintaining your awareness of the sensation of the breath in the nostrils as you breathe in and out.

 
7. After a while, the novelty will wear off and your mind will appear to become extremely busy, with all sorts of thoughts competing for your attention.  Your mind will have much more immediate concerns than OM AH HUM or the sensation in the nostrils. -  "Well here I am meditating, not much happening yet -  the phone's off the hook - I wonder if anyone's trying to call -  that reminds me, it's a week since I last phoned my mother -   have I paid my phone bill? -   I haven't checked my  bank balance lately - I guess its bad because I haven't had a raise since my boss put me on a wage freeze -  "due to the recession" he said' - really it's because I'm 48 and not likely to find another job -  Why do I have to work for that creep? - Surely I could branch out on my own - I should have done it years ago - the whole company's gone down the toilet -  Toilet, just remembered, I noticed a crack in the seat this morning - I hope it doesn't collapse while I'm sitting on it  - more than likely since I'm putting on so much weight - comfort eating mostly - craving, isn't that what Buddhism's about - I hope this meditation helps with that  - nothing much happening yet -  did I remember to silence my mobile? - etc, etc..."

8. Welcome to your information-overloaded mind!  Why does meditation make the mind busier? And you thought it was supposed to calm you down. 

Yes ultimately meditation does quieten and clarify the mind, but in the early stages all that happens is that your mind becomes aware of the incessant junk-thoughts circulating in your brain (the first inkling that the mind is more than just the mechanism of the brain.). There's no more going on in your head than usual, it's just that you've become aware of it.
 
So is this incessant parade of trivialities all that there is to your mind?   Who's controlling it - obviously not you!

9. Continue with the OM AH HUM for a little while longer, gently returning your mind to the silent recitation every time it wanders away.

10. Now cease the recitation and examine the constant stream of linked thoughts that your brain is presenting to your mind. But try to distance yourself from these thoughts. Observe them but with a certain amount of disinterest. Pretend you're observing someone else's stream of consciousness rather than stuff which is obviously aimed at you. Don't get involved in this thought stream.  Rather than experience how one thought leads to another, examine what the links are and how each thought arises.

You'll become aware of the web of trivialities in your mind. Each thought is like a webpage with hyperlinks which lead on to another thought, and so on round and round ad infinitum. 

11. As you step back from your thoughts, you'll become aware of the webcrawler in your mind  - the process that follows all these associations and presents them to your awareness. You don't (at present) control this webcrawler. It seems to be able to click the links in your thoughts without, or even in spite of, your attempting to exercise some control.  And you'll notice that the webcrawler has certain preferred types of links, those that lead to objects of anger, fear or desire. It doesn't pay too much attention to bland associations, and there's no family filter on what it dredges up.

You have now begun to understand one of the compulsive systems of the mind. What you still need to experience is pure mind - the actual awareness which is viewing all the trivia which the webcrawler is displaying to it.
 
Convince yourself that your mind is neither the individual scenarios thrown up as the stream of consciousness progresses, nor the mechanism which drives the stream of consciousness. Your mind is pure awareness - non-structured and non-procedural. Occasionally the stream of thoughts will subside into the root mind, and a moment or two of clarity will occur before a new thread of associations emerges. When this happens, attempt to catch a glimpse of the calm, space-like and empty nature of the root mind - like a blue sky rather than one constantly obstructed by a passing procession of clouds. For a moment your mind has stepped outside the system, outside he normal loops and webs of compulsive, self-referential, uncontrolled thoughts.   (This action of 'stepping outside the system' or 'escaping from the loop' occurs repeatedly in different contexts in Buddhist philosophy and practice.)
 
12. Slowly come out of meditation. It may help to mentally recite the OM AH HUM for a brief period.

It is traditional and auspicious at the end of a meditation to silently dedicate any insight that we might have achieved to the happiness and freedom from suffering of all sentient beings.

Read more at Buddhist Philosophy

Mindfulness meditations for students, to help them be calm, focused and creative

From  THE GUARDIAN

How to teach ... mindfulness

The Guardian Teacher Network has resources to help introduce the concept of mindfulness to pupils, to help them be calm, focused and creative

By Emily Drabble

"Meditating at school, where mindfulness has become something of a buzzword. 

All teachers want their students to be calm, focused, alert, aware and creative, which is essentially what mindfulness is all about, so it's no wonder the term has become a bit of a buzzword, even in mainstream education.
The Guardian Teacher Network has resources to help introduce mindfulness to young people at school (and at home) and to help them develop some essential life skills.

The most delicious way to start has to be Mindfulness and the art of chocolate eating. Taking just three minutes, this is a practical and instantly likeable introduction to bringing mindfulness to the classroom. If you must, swap chocolate for strawberries or ripe slices of mango.

This is just one of a fantastic set of resources from Mind Space on Guardian Teacher Network – and all are without an aura, guru or chakra in sight. The non-denominational and non-religious presentation of meditation and mindfulness has been specifically developed to be useable by all types of schools, beyond the RE classroom.

Try this mindfulness relaxation exercise script, which has been designed to guide students to a heightened level of mindfulness while relaxing the body and mind in just 15 minutes. Find also the audio recording of this meditation.
If you've got less time to spare, find five minutes to a calmer classroom, which has some fantastic tips and is one of the most popular resources on the Guardian Teacher Network.

The exam season is pretty much over, but this one is a keeper: Tips for dealing with exam stress has been designed to help students reduce stress through practising mindfulness and meditation around exam time.
Teachers can find out more about Mind Space's meditation in schools project and seminars, and if you would like a speaker to come to your school to introduce mindfulness and the practice and technique of meditation to staff and students, get in touch.

RE teacher Andrew Jones, who recently blogged for the Guardian Teacher Network about his experiences with meditation at Goffs school, has created this useful slideshow on meditation for beginners – the slides list what to do and give basic directions. The lesson was created for a scheme of work on Buddhism, but it can act as a standalone lesson, too. Andrew has highly recommended the audio and CD resources created by Clear Vision, a UK Buddhist charity specialising in Buddhism and meditation in schools. Thanks to Clear Vision for sharing some of its stilling exercises for young people on the Guardian Teacher Network, meditation one and meditation two.

Meditation teacher Jon Shore has been teaching mindfulness since 1978 and has shared a soothing 15-minute audio file of soft meditation music and ocean waves – ideal for using as background music during a mindfulness meditation in class and Personal transformation using mindfulness and meditation, which includes meditations that can be used in a classroom setting.

Thanks to 100 hours for sharing this fascinating exploration of the wider context of mindfulness. Mindfulness and the vision for a 21st-century transformational curriculum introduces 100 hours' vision of how young people around the world can be supported to become wise and compassionate leaders and, ultimately, to transform society. The resource describes what mindfulness is and its benefits, and includes a two-minute guided exercise, top principles and tips. Teachers are invited to get in touch and find out more about how they can get involved.

We have some really creative resources shared by Ross Young at The Dharma primary school, the UK's only primary school to offer an education based on Buddhist values, which puts mindfulness at the centre of its practice so has lots of expertise to share. Find The Duct-Tape maze – a mindfulness activity that helps children learn how to manage distractions, to notice and persevere as well as to plan and reason. StickArt is another great calming idea. Students sit in a circle and take it in turns to place pipe-cleaners onto the floor in a particular shape without talking. A pattern or a picture is created and the focus is on developing mindful mind skills.

This pebble guided meditation is perfect for young children and in planting wishes children place wishes they would like to see grow in the world and work hard to help make their wishes grow.

The children at The Dharma school have created this poster of mindfulness skills because, in the words of a group of students: "Some of them are annoyingly long, tricky words!" The Kung Fu Panda Peach tree clip has been recommended to help children understand the concept of being present. Also find mind in a jar, a mindfulness activity in which children make and use a snow globe to show how their minds are working – and then give it a good shake!

And finally, for those who would like to podcast about their mindfulness experiences, but aren't quite sure where to start, How to podcast with your class is a really easy guide including software suggestions.

Join the Guardian Teacher Network community for free access to teaching resources and an opportunity to share your own as well as read and comment on blogs."


  
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Buddhism Subject Index

Cash-strapped healthcare system looks to Buddhism to cut costs

From The Guardian

"Back in 1965, a grad student in molecular biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology stumbled across a class of five people on Zen Buddhism. He'd never heard of Zen and knew nothing of Buddhism. Nearly half a century later, that grad student, Jon Kabat-Zinn, has arguably done more than any other individual to put Buddhism into the mainstream, not just in America, but in dozens of countries around the world. Now, Downing Street policymakers are keen to hear more.

"That first class took the top off my head. I found a sense of largeness beyond my little preoccupations of what would happen to my future, or my relationships," says Kabat-Zinn. "It opened up a new dimension of being which could offer more meaning and enable me to interface more effectively with society in a way which could be healing and transformative."

Kabat-Zinn's enthusiasm for that dramatic breakthrough is still palpable as he talks of how as a scientist he resolved to find a way to bring those benefits to millions of others. What he evolved over the next 15 years was the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme; an eight-week set of meditation and yoga practices in classes and at home, which instil the basics of paying close attention to the current moment.

"I was teaching molecular biology of muscle development in medical school at the time, and began to ask doctors: 'What percentage of your patients do you help?' They thought it was about 15% to 20%."

So Kabat-Zinn set up a clinic to help the untreatable majority. "Patients turned up with all kinds of conditions: hypertension, cancer, anxiety."

As a scientist, Kabat-Zinn knew he needed evidence; anecdotes and testimony were not going to be enough to persuade the American health establishment. "I wrote up the chronic pain results first because they were astonishing." Since then, a steady stream of academic papers, books and, more recently, randomised control trials, have helped pave the way for hundreds of MBSR programmes in hospitals and medical centres across the US.

Kabat-Zinn's work has spawned a cluster of different applications of mindfulness training, including for addiction, the elderly and parenting. In the past couple of decades, Kabat-Zinn has collaborated with psychologists in the UK who have adapted his work for Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), which has won recognition from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), as a treatment for depression.

All of which explains why our interview is happening in Westminster, where Kabat-Zinn has a string of meetings with senior politicians before he heads to Downing Street for a session with policy advisers. There are good reasons for the policymakers to be listening closely, as Kabat-Zinn and his colleagues have a compelling proposition: mindfulness has unlimited applicability to almost every healthcare issue we now face – and it's cheap..."  Read it all 



Related Posts

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Buddhist Mindfulness Meditation Alleviates Depression

Teens meditate to reduce stress

Bodhisattva vows - an antidote to depression and mental illness

Doctor Buddha

Vajrasattva Purification of Guilt and Negative Thinking 

Alcoholism, Identity and Emptiness 

‘He who tends to the sick tends to me’ – The Buddha

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Buddhism Subject Index

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Secularized Buddhist Practices adopted by Big Business

...but don't mention the B-word!

From Management Today  
By John Morrish Thursday, 31 May 2012

'Facing a tough economy and heavy workloads, strung-out managers are turning to a range of meditation techniques to help them keep their cool and become better bosses. John Morrish seeks out some headspace.

'Times are fraught, and overstretched executives are constantly on the lookout for a way to clear their minds so they can work in a calmer, more effective, and more responsive way. Cultivating a special state of consciousness called 'mindfulness' - an intense awareness of the here and now - is proving attractive to a growing number of senior managers, both in the US and here.

Mindfulness is achieved by meditation techniques, often involving sitting on a cushion, eyes closed, concentrating on the inflow and outflow of your breath. Or you might spend 10 minutes studying, sniffing, tasting and finally eating a piece of fruit. That might make it sound like a remnant of the hippy-dippy, navel-gazing 1960s and 1970s, but the evidence for mindfulness's effectiveness is good enough to have impressed hard-nosed companies such as Google (which has invited mindfulness gurus to speak at the Googleplex), General Mills, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deutsche Bank, Procter & Gamble, AstraZeneca, Apple, Credit Suisse, KPMG, Innocent, Reuters and many more.

According to Don McCormick, assistant professor of management at California State University and a dedicated meditator, it 'can help individuals to manage workplace stress, perform tasks more effectively, enhance self-awareness and self-regulation, experience work as more meaningful, improve workplace relationships, increase ethical behaviour, and make perception more accurate'. It is said to pay dividends for leaders and managers, by improving the quality of their listening and communicating.

Impressive claims, then. But what exactly is mindfulness? Michael Chaskalson, an experienced British mindfulness teacher and the author of a powerful little book called The Mindful Workplace (Wiley-Blackwell), says it is 'a way of paying attention to yourself, to others and to the world around you. And it's a quality of attention which is open, kindly and non-judgemental.' McCormick uses a mnemonic, Canape, when explaining it to his students: 'Concentrated Awareness of experience, Non-judgemental and Accepting in the Present moment, and characterised by Equanimity.' Hardly snappy, but it seems to work.

Business people who have taken up mindfulness meditation find it has helped them in different ways. David Huntley is one enthusiast. An actuary by profession, he has had a 25-year career in financial services, running the Australian and New Zealand businesses of Swiss Re and becoming head of Pearl Life after Pearl took over Resolution in 2008. Now he has a portfolio career, including coaching, working with a start-up business and taking on his first non-executive role. In 2006, newly back in Britain from Australia, he was introduced by his own business coach to Chaskalson. 'Within a week or so, I was sitting in a hotel room studying a raisin for 10 minutes, thinking, crikey, how much are we paying the guy?'

But he persisted with a range of meditation practices, including 'body-scanning', in which you focus on the sensations in various parts of your body, and 'sitting meditation', in which, initially, you focus all your attention on your breath. Something called the 'three-minute meditation' proved especially helpful. 'If I had a big meeting coming up, I'd nip into the gents and sit there and do it. I definitely felt calmer, more present and more centred.'

He liked it so much that earlier this year he went back for an eight-week course intended for business coaches. It has given him more focus, he says. 'I feel that I'm using a number of senses to be with clients, rather than just listening to what they say.'

Business, Huntley says, works at two levels: propositional and implicational. The propositional level is about setting out plans and projects; the implicational level is about what people think of each other, what people say about each other, how messages are received. 'So you've got this noise going on at this implicational level,' he says. 'Mindfulness has the capacity to calm that noise down and enable you to work more in the moment without that noise going on.'

While it may be a hot business trend, the roots of mindfulness go deep. It originated in the teachings of the Buddha 2,500 years ago, and similar ideas and practices are found in many religions. But the mindfulness being offered to business people is a secularised version, shorn of religious language, though many of its teachers it have Buddhist backgrounds.

Chaskalson has been a Buddhist since 1975. He created and ran an ethical import business before becoming a full-time mindfulness teacher. He teaches a course at Bangor University and runs a company offering business coaching.

He says: 'When you are better at working with your mind and mental states, things go better for you. If what you are after is greater emotional intelligence in your people, a greater capacity to empathise and connect with others and for them to regulate their own emotions, we know that mindfulness training will help.'

In the US, Michael Carroll, author of The Mindful Leader (Shambhala Publications), is a former Wall Street and Disney executive. Another Buddhist, he is a believer in a serious regime of practice 'on the cushion'. He emphasises that mindfulness is about being rather than doing.

'Business people are good at getting stuff done, meeting objectives, hitting the numbers, closing the deal. This is a different type of effort. It's not the effort of how to get somewhere, it's the effort of how to be somewhere. 'Out of that sense of presence and seeing clearly, we begin to notice that the social intelligence skills that we require begin to naturally manifest (themselves), because we are paying attention. We're listening to someone and we're resonating with their unspoken message, because we're not rushing past that to our goal.'

Reaching that state of calm is not always easy. Formal meditation can be boring and frustrating. You will probably fall asleep when you start. But all you have to do is keep doing it, it is said, to see its benefits permeating your daily life. In an analogy originated by Jon Kabat-Zinn, effectively the inventor of modern, secular mindfulness, it is better to weave your parachute before you jump out of the plane.

Kabat-Zinn is a medical scientist and a Buddhist. Creating a clinic at his Massachusetts hospital in 1979, he adapted the practice of mindfulness meditation from Buddhism, removed its religious trappings, and began using it in the treatment of chronic pain, then stress. Since then, mindfulness has been used for anxiety, depression - where it is recommended by Britain's NICE - sleeplessness, relationship problems, eating disorders and many more.

More recently, it has appeared in other areas. In the US, it has been used in education, in the prison and police services, by trial lawyers and even by marines heading for Iraq: the idea was to make them more resilient and able to cope with the extreme stress of battle.

Kabat-Zinn's background led him to insist that the benefits of mindfulness meditation should be measured scientifically: there are now hundreds of academic papers attesting to its worth. It is even claimed that after a standard Kabat-Zinn programme of eight two-hour sessions, held once a week and supported by daily homework, the brain itself expands in the areas associated with learning, memory, self-awareness, compassion and introspection.

Andy Parsons is a pharmacologist and neuroscientist and a vice-president at GlaxoSmithKline. An internal coach at GSK, he says that for him mindfulness is about 'being completely present and listening to what's going on around you. Being truly present and mindful allows you to really focus without running scripts from past experiences.'.....   Full article


It's Dharma, Jim, but not as we know it.
So should Buddhist techniques of mind-management be presented without any reference to their origin?  

Is this a form of plagiarism? 

Or is it skillful means to sneak dharma-teachings into the secular establishment under the radar of the religion detectors?   If people learn a little about meditation techniques, might they want to find out more?

- Sean Robsville

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Buddhism Subject Index

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The International Symposia for Contemplative Studies: A Landmark Event

From The Mind and Life Institute

"If you had wandered by accident into the enormous foyer of Denver’s Hyatt Regency Centennial Ballroom on the afternoon of April 26, you might have been forgiven for thinking there was going to be a concert by a major rock and roll band that night. Hundreds of people crowded the large space, with many camped by the doors to the ballroom hours before the event was to start, and the excited chatter of conversation, the many happy hugs, and the palpable electricity in the air only added to the sense of imminent rock royalty. You might have been surprised, then, to discover the actual event was the International Symposia for Contemplative Studies, a professional gathering of neuroscientists, social scientists, and contemplative scholars there to share their research.

The Symposia, which was organized by the Mind & Life Institute on behalf of 25 cosponsoring organizations and which took place in Denver April 26-29, was indeed a landmark event, the first of its kind. And while there were no rock stars in attendance, there was at least one celebrity: U.S. Congressman Tim Ryan.

The Ohio representative was at the event because he has just published a book titled A Mindful Nation, which looks at how contemplative practices can address a host of pressing national issues. In his remarks during his closing keynote address, he said that the idea for the book came to him as he was attending a mediation retreat led by Mind and Life board member Jon Kabat-Zinn: “I went up to Jon afterward and said, ‘This needs to be in our schools, in our healthcare system, in the military for our returning veterans.’” “This gets to the heart of the issues in the United States of America,” he told the Denver audience. “If we really want transformational change in our country, not just more money for this or more money for that, not just this new program or that new program, but fundamental change that could reform education, reform healthcare, and all the things we talk about, then this is going to be it.”

Ryan’s comments were notable for several reasons: of course, just having a congressional representative address a scientific conference is significant in any circumstances, but having a congressman attend an event on contemplative research to talk about his own book on mindfulness indicates just how far this field has come.

No one was in a better position to appreciate that idea than Mind and Life board member and renowned neuroscientist Richard Davidson, who gave the other closing keynote speech. Davidson, who in 2006 was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, has been involved in contemplative research since the early 1970s. In his talk, he provided a retrospective on the path this work has taken. He described how, as a graduate student at Harvard in 1972, the idea of meditation as a scientific research subject was so unheard of that the only place he could publish his work was in journals like the Journal of Abnormal Psychology.

With that perspective, it’s hard to fully appreciate what he must have felt looking out from the stage on the Hyatt’s vast ballroom filled with more than 700 researchers and contemplative scholars who were there presenting rigorous and enormously varied studies. “It’s just an extraordinary event for us to be here together,” he said. “This meeting is, in so many ways, the realization of a dream; I haven’t been to a professional meeting in more than a decade where I really wanted to be at every single thing. It’s a testament to the vibrancy of where we are now.”

The audience was impressive not only for its size, but also for its diversity. When one of the keynote speakers asked how many people in the audience were from outside the United States, a third of the audience raised their hands. And a significant number of younger researchers were present (a testament to the effectiveness of Mind and Life’s Summer Research Institute, which many of them said they had attended). Just as important, the scientists represented a very wide range of disciplines. Psychologists, educators, neuroscientists, contemplative scholars, medical specialists, and many others presented their work.

The research itself was equally wide-ranging, studying the benefits of meditation for everything from post-partum depression to PTSD, compassion training for medical specialists involved in caring for the dying, defining and measuring compassion, work on the uses of mindfulness training in the military, and the substantial benefits of using contemplative practice in education settings from kindergarten to graduate school.

In addition to 137 research paper presentations, there were 122 poster presentations, 27 master lectures, and 6 keynote speeches. But as impressive as the statistics are, they cannot convey that unflagging sense of rock-concert excitement that pervaded the whole event. The lunch periods and breaks between simultaneous research-paper presentations were packed with people enthusiastically sharing ideas, sparking inspiration, and renewing old acquaintances. The only reason they could be broken up for the next session was because they didn’t want to miss a minute of the presentations. (At a post-conference town-hall-style evaluation session, the only substantial concern voiced by researchers was the happy problem of having too much excellent content and the challenge of taking it all in—along with a desire for even broader content at the next Symposia.)

And at the end of each day, that excitement spilled out onto the streets of Denver, where you could see groups of scientists all through the downtown area, walking together to dinner, still excitedly exchanging ideas and triggering new areas of research to be explored.

The Symposia’s keynote lectures served as a thematic anchor for the research presentations, discussing the larger ideas and principles that frame the work. (To see video of all of the master lectures and keynote addresses, go to the conference website: www.contemplativeresearch.org.) Among the speakers were author and founder of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society Jon Kabat-Zinn, who opened the conference by leading the attendees in a mindfulness exercise and a discussion of the meaning and importance of mindfulness; former Wellesley College president (and new Mind and Life board member) Diana Chapman Walsh, who gave examples from her professional life of how mindfulness affects leadership in any setting; and Marsha Linehan, a psychology professor at the University of Washington, who discussed using contemplative practices to treat people with the most severe psychological disorders, especially those who are suicidal.

Saturday night’s keynote was especially powerful, featuring renowned neuroscientist Wolf Singer, philosopher Evan Thompson, and prominent Buddhist monk, author, and cellular geneticist Matthieu Ricard. Together, they explored an aspect of what scientists call “the hard question”: the nature of consciousness and its relation to the brain. Their three very different perspectives made for an invigorating debate and resulted in an appropriately open-ended conclusion.

“The International Symposium was a landmark meeting for Mind and Life,” said Mind and Life president Arthur Zajonc. “Beyond the superb science and contemplative scholarship, the conference brought together our whole community in a way that celebrated each person and their work. The conference demonstrated the power of the vision of Mind and Life to animate the imagination of scientists, contemplatives, and scholars alike in a common enterprise. The energy and excitement was palpable, and at its conclusion, many expressed to me their gratitude for the gathering and their impatience for the next.”

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Buddhism Subject Index

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Applying Buddhist Mindfulness to Eating for Slimming by Natural Weight Loss

Mindful Eating

By Miriam Stoppard in The Daily Mirror     

Slim down naturally with mindful eating - Old fashioned idea of eating has a lot in common with the Buddhist discipline

My mum (and my granny) used to tell my sister and I as children to chew each mouthful 20 times, slowly, to enjoy the taste of our food.

This old fashioned idea of eating has a lot in common with the Buddhist discipline, which encourages eating slowly, and sometimes silently for health and tranquillity.

What my mum (and incidentally Buddhism) was attempting to do was to break the habit of wolfing down our food. Instead patiently chew, pause, put down the knife and fork between mouthfuls, take a sip of water, appreciate the flavours, don’t talk (with your mouth full) and certainly don’t spoil the ritual of enjoying food by watching TV at the same time.

Think about the food in your mouth. Examine the flavours. Feel the textures. If you roll the food around your mouth you experience each bite more intensely and more pleasurably.

Welcome to “mindful eating”, the kind that stops you eating too much, too quickly and consuming too many calories, not giving your appetite time to switch off.

With the pace of life speeding up and our speed of eating with it, a nutritionist from Harvard University is advocating mindful eating as a way of stopping you short, asking yourself questions like: Why am I eating this? Do I really need this? Do I feel full yet? Am I eating out of unhappiness? Or because I’m depressed? Eating thoughtfully means we soon realise we don’t need to eat so fast or so much, and that we feel fuller sooner. We give our brains time to tell the stomach we’ve eaten enough.

Nutritionists are excited by mindful eating because it offers a psychological barrier to overeating.

Mindful eating also means we can confront our cravings, take a few deep breaths to deflect them and stop ourselves resorting to reaching for the chocolate biscuits or ice cream.

If all this sounds a touch New Age, wait for this...

Big business corporations are adapting mindful eating in their canteens to lower workplace stress. Businesses like Google now have silent vegetarian lunches once a month.

Start with baby steps. Switching to mindful eating has to be learned, practised and worked towards.

You will gradually discover flavours. You will eat about 25% fewer calories. You will lose weight. Your blood pressure will fall. Your heart will be healthier. You will live longer.

What’s stopping you?

Mindfulness about Food

See also  A Buddhist approach to eating and drinking  

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Teens meditate to reduce stress

From Times Online

Pupils at a leading public school are to receive weekly 40-minute classes in meditation and stress relief in a ground-breaking addition to the school curriculum.

Schoolboys aged 14 and 15 at Tonbridge School, in Kent, were given their first lesson yesterday as part of a course designed with psychologists from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

The project — the first to introduce meditation skills as a regular subject on the curriculum — has been designed specifically for adolescents and comes after the success of a pilot study at the school last year.

The “mindfulness” course for Year 10 pupils will last for eight weeks. It is designed to develop skills in concentration and to combat anxiety, showing teenagers the benefits of silence and helping them to identify and escape corrosive mindsets that could lead to mental health problems such as depression, eating disorders and addiction.

The course develops other exercises to help to improve attention — rather than allowing the mind to be “hijacked” by emotional issues, regrets, worries about the past and future and other distractions. This can be done in a number of ways, such as by focusing on breathing, parts of the body or movement.

Mindfulness originated in Eastern meditation traditions such as Buddhism but is now an established secular discipline. A growing body of research supports wider use of the approach to address transient stress and deeper mental health problems, including recommendations from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence that it be offered on the NHS to patients suffering from depression.

The project is a collaboration with staff at Charterhouse and Hampton schools — with both institutions planning similar schemes — as well as the Mindfulness Centre at Oxford and the Wellbeing Institute at Cambridge.

Richard Burnett, a divinity teacher and housemaster at Tonbridge who is leading the course, told The Times that the course demanded a “culture change” in the perceptions of silence for teachers and pupils.

“One of the things about schools is that silence is associated with power — the teacher tells the pupils to be quiet. What you need to do is convey the idea that silence is a positive activity to be savoured and enjoyed,” he said.

He said that while some children involved in the trial had been sceptical, most had embraced the challenge that it posed in the classroom. The pupils said that they hoped to use the mindfulness in the future to help to battle anxieties and to put things in perspective. They also said that they found it helpful for getting to sleep and becoming less nervous about school cricket matches.

Mark Williams, director of the Mindfulness Centre at Oxford, said that Tonbridge was the first school to introduce a full meditation course in a practical rather than academic context.

Professor Williams said: “This is not about converting people to Buddhism, but showing there is scientific evidence that these practices are useful. So why deny them from being used?”

In March Tonbridge is to host a conference, with Professor Williams as a speaker, that aims to encourage mindfulness uptake in schools.

Andrew McCulloch, chief executive of the Mental Health Foundation, said that mindfulness training also offered the chance to take proactive steps to avoid depression and anxiety in later life.

“These problems have their roots in early life, so if you can learn techniques when you are young you might never have a breakdown,” he said.

Staying focused

• The first lesson, being run this week, is described as “puppy training” — comparing the mind with a puppy that needs to learn how to “stay” and focus on one thing, rather than running around in a distracted fashion

• Other stages of the course include establishing calm and concentration; recognising rumination; developing present-moment awareness in the everyday; slowing and savouring activities; stepping back from thoughts that hijack you; allowing, accepting and being with difficult emotions; reflection and making it personal

• It uses figures from popular culture to help to explain the benefits of mindfulness, including rugby player Jonny Wilkinson, who uses meditation techniques to help his concentration when kicking for goal, and Po, a lethargic panda who transforms his attitude in the Dreamworks’ film Kung Fu Panda

• Each class has one 40-minute lesson a week, with a weekly MP3 file of mindfulness exercises that they are encouraged to listen to before evening homework


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Buddhist Mindfulness Meditation Alleviates Depression

Medicine Buddha

Meditation therapy should be routinely available on the National Health Service to treat recurring depression and to help tackle Britain’s growing mental health problems, according to a new report.

The study, commissioned by the Mental Health Foundation, found that fewer than one in 20 GPs prescribed meditation therapy for patients suffering depression, despite NHS guidance suggesting that it could halve depression relapse rates.

The report calls for much wider use of “mindfulness” treatment, which combines meditation with orthodox “thought training”. The report argues that if more GPs offered the therapy it would sharply reduce the financial burden of depression, which costs Britain £7.5 billion a year.

Mindfulness brings peace

Replacing reliance on antidepressants
Mental health specialists said that greater use of meditation would reduce an over-reliance on antidepressants. They said that while the drugs were effective, they did not help address the possibility of future depressive episodes.

Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), which has its roots in Eastern philosophy and Buddhism, trains people to focus attention on one place instead of allowing the mind to be “hijacked” by emotional issues, regrets, worries about the past and future, and other distractions. This can be done in a number of ways, for example by focusing on breathing, parts of the body, or movement.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence issued guidance on meditation in 2004 after studies suggested that it might bring benefits.

Five years later, only a fifth of GPs said they can access the treatment for their patients, and just one in 20 regularly prescribes the therapy, according to the Mental Health Foundation report Be Mindful.

MBCT costs on average £300 per patient for a course of two-hour sessions over eight weeks. Since patients are treated in groups of up to 20, the cost is said to be much lower than one-to-one cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT).

A key difference between the new approach and traditional CBT is that patients are seen between episodes of depression, and not when they are in the grip of the illness. Another difference is the inclusion of meditation, as research has shown that relying on CBT alone to prevent recurrent depression does not work as well.

Abandon self-destructive guilt

Switching off brooding recrimination
Mark Williams, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Oxford, who contributed to the report, said that meditative therapy enabled people to switch off “brooding recrimination” and, while acknowledging these thoughts, move beyond them.

“People begin to see thoughts and feelings as a temporary weather pattern in the mind, and realise they don’t have to judge themselves,” he said.

More than 100 studies, some involving Buddhist monks, have shown that brainwave activity changes during meditation, and that areas of the brain linked to controlling emotion are bigger in people who have meditated regularly for five years.

Mindfulness training has also been shown to increase activity in the pre-frontal cortex, a part of the brain associated with positive emotion that is normally subdued in depressed individuals.

One in 10 people in Britain is affected by clinical depression — defined by a range of symptoms within a single two-week period — and 50 per cent of sufferers experience it more than once. After two bouts of depression, there is a 70 per cent risk of relapse, which rises to 90 per cent after three episodes.

Andrew McCulloch, chief executive of the Mental Health Foundation, said that doctors prescribed antidepressants too often. “Mindfulness-based therapy could help prevent thousands of people from relapsing into depression every year. This would have huge knock-on benefits both socially and economically, making it a sensible treatment to make available, even at a time when money is short within the NHS,” he said.

At least as effective as antidepressants

Preventing relapses
“Depression tends to come back for many people, with the odds of further bouts increasing each time. A single episode is serious enough, but having the illness return year after year can have a devastating impact on people’s jobs, relationships, and their chances in life generally.”

The case for making MBCT available on the NHS relies on two key studies of patients with recurring depression. One, undertaken ten years ago, showed a 37 per cent relapse rate for patients given MBCT, compared with 66 per cent for those not given the treatment. The other, conducted in 2004, showed an even bigger difference between the two groups, with relapse rates of 36 per cent and 78 per cent. Another recent trial in Exeter, with results published last year, indicated that MBCT is at least as effective at preventing relapses as antidepressants.

Jonty Heaversedge, a South London GP who learnt to meditate at a Buddhist centre and believes the practice can improve many aspects of health, said: “Depression is something that affects a huge number of my patients, often year after year, with devastating consequences. MBCT gives them the opportunity to develop a healthier, more accepting relationship with their thoughts and feelings.”

From http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/mental_health/article6975797.ece

Medicine Buddha Mandala

UPDATE FROM THE GRAUNIAD:

"2010 could be the year that mindfulness meditation goes mainstream in the UK. It's already endorsed as a treatment for depression by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, and today a major mental health charity is calling for meditation-based courses to be offered much more widely on the NHS.

A report I wrote for the Mental Health Foundation highlights the impressive clinical evidence for an approach called mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) – the eight-week courses have been shown to reduce relapse rates by half among people who have suffered several episodes of depression. The report also finds that very few patients who could benefit from mindfulness training are currently being referred for the treatment – just one in 20 GPs prescribes MBCT regularly, despite the fact that nearly three-quarters of doctors think it would be helpful for their patients with mental health problems. Changing that could make a massive difference not only to them, but to the economy – the cost of depression to the UK has been estimated at £7.5 billion every year.

Despite its convoluted name, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is pretty straightforward – a set of classes that teach meditation practices which help people pay attention to their breathing, body sensations, thoughts and feelings in a kind, accepting, non-judgemental way. Mindfulness training shows us how to notice and work with our experience rather than engaging in a futile struggle to fight or run away from it. That may sound simple – perhaps because it is – but developing this mindful way of relating seems to alleviate some of the suffering that struggling with life's pain creates.

Mindfulness is especially relevant to depression, in which sufferers tend to get caught up with cycles of 'rumination' - when people get depressed they churn negative thoughts over and over in their minds, a pattern which actually perpetuates their low mood. Mindfulness short-circuits rumination – by learning how to pay attention to our present moment experience, rather than getting tied up in negative thinking about the past or future, we create more space in our minds from which new, more effective decision-making can emerge. It isn't a miracle cure – while simple, the techniques take time and effort to master, but mindfulness-based therapies are now supported by a substantial and rapidly-growing evidence base that suggest they can help people cope better not just with depression, but also with the stress of conditions ranging from chronic pain and anxiety to cancer and HIV.

Mindfulness-based therapies are fundamentally and unapologetically inspired by Buddhist principles and tools – the Buddha both noted that suffering (as opposed to pain) is created by struggling with experience and prescribed mindfulness meditation as a way of working with it skilfully. However, the B-word rarely, if ever, gets a mention on MBCT courses – their reputation in health services has been built on scientific evidence rather than spiritual conviction. This is the only way it could be – while some of us Buddhists might argue that practising mindfulness can open up insights about the nature of mind that go way beyond what can be measured in a randomised-controlled trial, the most important thing here is that techniques which reduce suffering are presented in whatever way will make them most accessible to the largest number of people.

By secularising mindfulness training, and packaging it in a form that makes it amenable to clinical testing, an approach that might otherwise have been seen in medical circles as new-age flim-flam is being taken very seriously. So seriously that according to an ICM survey of GPs conducted for the Mental Health Foundation report, 64% of doctors would like to receive training in mindfulness themselves.

For that we can partly thank Morinaga Soko-Roshi, a zen teacher of Jon Kabat-Zinn, the doctor who first brought mindfulness training into US healthcare services in the 1970s. Kabat-Zinn knew that it would be considered unacceptably 'religious' to offer Buddhist training to his patients - however, he also had a strong hunch that the meditation techniques said to lead to insight on the Buddhist path might also help people cope with chronic illness. Unsure of what to do, he went to see Soko-Roshi and asked his advice. "Throw out Buddha! Throw out Zen!" came the abrupt reply.

From that, Kabat-Zinn's secular mindfulness-based stress-reduction course, a progenitor of MBCT, was born. MBSR is now taught in hundreds, perhaps thousands of institutions across the US – not just hospitals and medical settings, but schools, community centres, prisons and workplaces.

We are some way behind in the UK. Although there are now mindfulness centres at universities such as Oxford, Exeter and Bangor (the Scottish government also deserves great credit for investing strongly in mindfulness training for health professionals) most NHS trusts lack the infrastructure and personnel to offer MBCT courses to patients who could benefit from it. Even though the scientific evidence is persuasive, and GPs are on board, there simply aren't the courses for people to access.

But with the embracing of mindfulness by a growing range of powerful institutions, whose support is based on hard-nosed evidence rather than any particular commitment to Buddhism, that may now be about to change."


A beneficial religion! (Dawkins confounded?)
At a time when a certain 'religion' seems to be intent on causing as much death, destruction and mutilation as possible, it's good to know that the Buddha's gentle teachings from 2500 years ago are relieving the sufferings of growing numbers of people in the modern world.

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Collateral damage

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