5 elementos essenciais para spirituality
Walking meditation, where you focus on the movement of your body as you take step after step, your feet touching and leaving the ground—an everyday activity we usually take for granted.
Learn how the technique of mental noting unwinds anxiety, reduces our reactivity and anchors us in our calm center.
This idea is further supported by the fact that other stress-reducing therapies also seem to impact physical health, as well.
A Q&A with Jack Kornfield about giving feedback at work, using social media wisely, and the poetry in his teachings.
We could always meditate to reset ourselves before our last work meeting or after we drop the kids off at school. Anytime we feel overwhelmed, we can take a break and meditate instead of pushing through.
To develop these skills in everyday life, you can try these exercises used in Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR program and elsewhere:
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As the day moves on and the inevitable back-to-back meetings start, mindfulness can help you lead shorter, more effective meetings. To avoid entering a meeting with a wandering mind, take two minutes to practice mindfulness.
While we may espouse compassionate attitudes, we can also suffer when we see others suffering, which can create a state of paralysis or withdrawal. Many well-designed studies have shown that practicing loving-kindness meditation for others increases our willingness to take action to relieve suffering. It appears to do this by lessening amygdala activity in the presence of suffering, while also activating circuits in the brain that are connected to good feelings and love. For longtime meditators, activity in the “default network”—the part of our brains that, when not busy with focused activity, ruminates on thoughts, feelings, and experiences—quiets down, suggesting less vibration raising rumination about ourselves and our place in the world.
If sitting on the floor is uncomfortable for you, by all means, take a chair or another seat. Just make sure that you are comfortable, relaxed but alert, and can stay in that position for a while.
Jason Marsh: Mindfulness describes a moment-to-moment awareness of your thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. It’s a state of being attuned to what’s going on in your body and in the surrounding environment—being in the present moment without thinking about the future or what happened in the past.
Mindfulness helps prisons: Evidence suggests mindfulness reduces anger, hostility, and mood disturbances among prisoners by increasing their awareness of their thoughts and emotions, helping with their rehabilitation and reintegration.
Meditation doesn’t require much. But it’s easiest to get started knowing these meditation basics:
The benefits of meditation go beyond feeling more calm. Meditation has been found to support our health and also to improve our overall outlook. Maybe more importantly, meditation is a way to enter into a kinder, more generous relationship with yourself and others.