Wonder (emotion) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A great article on the benefits of mindfulness and meditation…

“The practice of meditation gave me the set of skills to guide my own transformation. It has been the most life altering skill that I have gained. I shifted from thinking that my emotion and thoughts owned me to feeling like I could play a role in changing my state.”

From Neuroplasticity: Changing our Belief about Change, by  Joanna Holsten

http://www.dailygood.org/view.php?sid=221

Energy Arc, central electrode of a Plasma Lamp. Français : Arc énergétique, électrode centrale d’une lampe à plasma. Român?: Arc energetic, electrod central al unei lampe cu plasm?. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of the key elements in an energetic approach to living is to FEEL good. Not only is this a goal, it is also a part of the method to achieve the goal. We are so accustomed to working hard, striving, pushing…efforting to reach our destination that it never occurs to us that there can be another way. It is not that we are to give up making an effort to reach our targets…the point is that we can do so with a lot less angst than most of us generate! The key here is in the attitude and inner state that shapes our approach.

Fortunately the same techniques that are used to help discover our problem patterns can also be part of the solution. Meditation and strategies encouraging healthier patterns of breathing can help heighten awareness of mind-body patterns that have resulted in a depletion of our energy resources. At the same time these methods begin to help develop an easier inner state of being and can be used to coach the mind to create new patterns and healthier ways of thinking and feeling. The enhanced well being that comes in the practice eventually spills over into real life!

Numerous studies have shown that these two simple techniques used on a regular basis result in ‘stress hardiness’ and improved health. So even if you have no interest in becoming knowledgeable about energy you can still benefit in very significant ways!  In addition to strengthening the nervous and immune systems, these practices also help quiet the mind and body so you can become aware of subtle energies within yourself and in your environment. They are the cornerstones for other methods that can eventually provide you with greater control over your energy.

Humor, music and spirituality may offer physical benefits

Monday, February 14, 2011; 8:17 PM

Humor, music and spirituality can boost your mood, but growing evidence suggests that they also offer physical benefits.

Image by Vinod Kumar M. via Flickr

Humor for your health

Laughter appears to have such physiological effects as:

l Increased blood flow. Watching 30 minutes of a comedy film (“There’s Something About Mary“) caused the arteries of volunteers to expand, according to a 2006 study from the University of Maryland Medical Center, while scenes from a stressful film (“Saving Private Ryan“) caused them to constrict.

l Strengthened immunity. Laughter might stimulate production of disease-fighting T cells and natural killer cells and might reduce levels of inflammation-triggering cytokines in people with rheumatoid arthritis. Watching funny movies might also help ease allergy symptoms and help people with asthma resist flare-ups.

l Reduced muscle pain. Laughter causes muscles in the abdomen, face and shoulders to relax, which might ease muscle tension.

l Lower blood sugar. People with Type 2 diabetes had smaller increases in blood glucose when they watched a comedy show after a meal than when they sat through a boring lecture.

l Lost calories. Laughing boosted people’s energy expenditure by 10 to 20 percent in a 2007 study.

What to do: If funny movies aren’t your thing, or if life of late hasn’t given you much to laugh about, consider “laughter yoga,” a variation designed to induce joyful, prolonged laughter.

Music for your brain

Image by Mario Inoportuno via Flickr

Reading music and singing might boost your brain’s auditory and language-processing functions, while playing an instrument strengthens reaction speed and manual dexterity. Other research has linked choral singing with physical and emotional health. Music might also improve symptoms of several health problems:

l Alzheimer’s disease. In people with this condition, music might curb aggression, irritability, restlessness and wandering.

l Insomnia. Listening to 45 minutes of soft music before bed improved self-reported sleep time and daytime drowsiness in a study of 30 older adults.

l Pain. People recovering from hernia or varicose-vein surgery who listened to music reported less pain than a control group did in a trial of 182 patients. Music might also ease the pain and distress of arthritis, childbirth, colonoscopy, fibromyalgia and herniated disks.

l Parkinson’s disease. Listening to rhythmic music can help patients move more easily.

l Stress. Listening to music can reduce stress, blood pressure and heart rate during and after eye surgery. And people who had music therapy after knee-replacement surgery had less depression.

l Stroke. Singing might help patients regain the ability to speak more clearly after a stroke.

What to do: Choose relaxing music. If someone you care about is in a health-care facility, consider asking about music therapy.

Image by BenSpark via Flickr

A spiritual life

Regularly attending religious services or practicing meditation appears to offer health benefits.

l Traditional religion. Regularly attending church was linked to a lower incidence of death from cardiovascular disease in a review of 69 studies. And a 2009 study found that men who attended church in their 40s had better physical health at 70 than men who hadn’t attended church, possibly because they tended to drink and smoke less.

l Meditation. The evidence is especially strong for an easy-to-learn form of meditation called mindfulness, in which people focus on the present while practicing measured breathing. Meditation induces rapid physiological changes, including reduced blood pressure, heart rate and muscle tension. It might also reduce cardiovascular risk, ease depression and help people with chronic pain, fibromyalgia, headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, multiple sclerosis, psoriasis and Type 1 diabetes.

What to do: If you already participate in an organized religion, these findings provide more reason to continue. To try meditating, look for a class or teach yourself with the help of a book or recorded program. Try for at least 10 to 15 minutes a day, the minimum amount linked with the benefits above.

Related articles

• Transcript: Paul Nussbaum on Meditation, Neuropsychology and Thanksgiving (sharpbrains.com)
• Advancing on the Spiritual Path 2: Religious Spiritual Practices (psychologytoday.com)

Even Beginners Can Curb Pain With Meditation

by Adam Cole 02:05 pm April 6, 2011

Robert Coghill/Wake Forest University School of MedicineSigns of pain disappeared from MRI images of the brain when freshly trained novices meditated.

Meditation has long been touted as a holistic approach to pain relief. And studies show that long-time meditators can tolerate quite a bit of pain.

Now researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have found you don’t have to be a lifelong Buddhist monk to pull it off. Novices were able to tame pain after just a few training sessions.

Sounds a bit mystical, we know, but researchers using a special type of brain imaging were also able to see changes in the brain activity of newbies. Their conclusion? “A little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation,” Fadel Zeidan, a neuroscientist and the study’s lead author, tells Shots. That finding’s a first, Zeidan says.

In the study, a small group of healthy medical students attended four 20-minute training sessions on “mindfulness meditation” — a technique adapted from a Tibetan Buddhist form of meditation called samatha. It’s all about acknowledging and letting go of distraction.”You are trying to sustain attention in the present moment — everything is momentary so you don’t need to react,” Zeidan explains. “What that does healthwise is it reduces the stress response. The feeling of pain is a very blatant distraction.”

So how did the researchers gauge the effect? They administered a very distracting bit of pain: A small, thermal stimulator heated to 120 degrees was applied to the back of each volunteer’s right calf.  The subjects reported both the intensity and unpleasantness of the pain. If pain were music, intensity would be volume.  Unpleasantness would have more of an emotional component, kind of like how much you love or hate a song.

After meditation training, the subjects reported a 40 percent decrease in pain intensity and a 57 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness.  And it wasn’t just their perception of pain that changed. Brain activity changed too.

Primary Somatosensory Cortex

Notes

This depiction of the body, the cortical homunculus, was first developed by Wilder Penfield.  Each body part maps to a specific spot on a cross section of the brain’s sensory processing region, the primary somatosensory cortex. The larger the feature, the more brain space devoted to it.

Source: NPR; Credit: Adam Cole, Nelson Hsu

Every part of the body is mapped to a specific part of the brain called the primary somatosensory cortex. “If I touch you on your left hand right above your left knuckle, there is an area in the brain that corresponds to that specific area in your hand that will be activated,” Zeidan explains. “When you are in pain it is much more activated — more intense and more widespread.”

This activation shows up on MRI brain scans.  When subjects experienced the heat stimulus under normal conditions, the “right calf” part of the primary somatosensory cortex lit up.  But after the subjects were trained in meditation, the activity in this region was not even detectable.

Brain images also show that meditation increased activation in areas of the brain related to cognitive control and emotion — areas where the experience of pain is built. What’s more, better meditators (those who scored higher on a standard scale of mindfulness) tended to have more activation in these areas and a lower experience of pain.

But can you achieve similar results by just approximating meditation, or believing you are in control of your pain tolerance? Zeidan says probably not. In this study, subjects who paid attention to their breathing to mimic meditation saw no significant change in pain.  And, in a previous study, subjects given fake training failed to see meditation’s effects, even though they believed they were actually performing mindfulness meditation.

Zeidan says he will run some more studies to get at how meditation relieves pain.  He hopes meditation can soon be applied clinically, perhaps to help patients cope with pain after surgery or chemotherapy.

“You might not need extensive training to realize pain-relief benefits,” Zeidan says. “Most people don’t have time to spend months in a monastery.”

Related articles

• More about Pain and Meditation (contemplativemind.wordpress.com)
• Regular Meditation Can Help Tune Out Distractions, Study Says (fitsugar.com)

Astronomy Picture of the Day: Mangaia's Milky Way, by Tunç Tezel.

This stunning view of the Milky Way reminds me of how each of us is a tiny spec within our ever-expanding universe. When our problems seem insurmountable I find it helpful to keep this in mind. Discovering peace from within is fundamental to living a healthy and happy life.

There is a flow of energy or consciousness, a way of BEING that we all have experienced from time to time— a state where everything flows together and feels in sync. We move easily from one moment to the next with a sense of meaning and purpose. We feel peace, joy, a sense of well being. This state has been called flow, living from center or simply– BLISS. It feels magical when we find it.

Our personal energy system holds the keys to enter into this state of flow as well as to access our inner wisdom and truth. Contact with these deeper aspects of ourselves provides inner peace, freedom of expression, and facilitates health on all levels.

Each of us can learn to manage our energy to generate greater health, peace, joy, meaning and purpose in our lives. Developing this ability helps eliminate much of the conflict, turmoil, feelings of emptiness and instability that create unnecessary difficulty on our journey. Through this broader consciousness we also develop greater resources of serenity and balance to deal with that which cannot be altered.

Meditation is one of the tools that helps us tap into the vast source of energy and limitless power that is available to all.

About the photo: This image holds the distinction of being selected as winner in the Royal Greenwich Observatory’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition in the Earth and Space category.

Related articles

• How the Milky Way got its spiral (eurekalert.org)

Take a time out when your energy is tangled or knotted!

Do you ever feel like your wires get crossed, knotted or all tangled up?  This happens to me periodically, particularly with technology. Yesterday I spent three times the length of time it took me to write a communication to rectify a technical snag in the program. The longer I spent trying to fix the problem, the more constricted my energy became. I knew what was happening, yet I continued down the path. I felt that if I just tried a little harder I just might “get it.” I took a break for a few hours while I went for a walk and prepared dinner before approaching it again in the evening. I made progress, which brought some relief, but there was still one piece evading me. By the time I was ready to call for help, online support was closed for the evening. I tried again … using a few different approaches. Still no luck. Late into the night I acknowledged that I would set the problem aside, get a good night’s sleep, and contact the Help Desk in the morning. I’m glad I did. The problem was fixed within half an hour.

As I was going through this process I realized that my experience was a replica of what many of us do each day. When we have a problem, we push and push, trying harder and harder. We might make some progress but often not enough to resolve it completely. As we get deeper and deeper into the issue, our energy gets all tangled up. Once it is knotted up inside it gets harder to extract ourselves and seek a different route. We experience blockages at many levels … mental confusion and frustration, physical tightness of breath and body, emotionally we may feel anxious, be short with oneself or those we encounter.  The more wrapped up or emotionally invested we are in the issue, the harder it is to solve.

There is an art to gently untangling knotted energy. The solution is to step away from the situation, create some space and allow options to present themselves. Anything that brings relief will ease such situations, open the door and allow options to present themselves. A walk usually helps me. I often get a lot of ideas and answers as I walk. Yesterday this was not the case. A good night’s sleep is next on my list. This is what helped me. I went to sleep knowing that I would get a resolution to my problem in the morning. After I finally set it aside, I knew getting the right help would take far less time than I had already invested. And that is exactly what happened.

The next time you realize that your energy is tangled, step away from the situation and create space. Withdraw your attention from the problem and change your pace. Breathe. Go for a walk. Meditate. Play. Watch a movie. Read a book. Spend time with family or friends. Do something creative. Sleep. Return with a fresh perspective and re-charged energy. Take a new approach. It will make a difference.

Related articles

• Untangled (chrisbrogan.com)
• An Untangled Moment (karmalifereadings.wordpress.com)

I have noticed that my brain feels frozen and even like I can feel the neural circuits all jumbled when I feel fear. Meditation, mindfulness and EFT have helped me immensely in shifting the energy flow in my brain so I am less vulnerable to the negative repercussions of brain drain!

Have you noticed how your responses vary from your norm when you feel fear rather than peace and calm?

What do you do to shift out of brain drain??

Monthly Women’s Meeting
Karen Kallie
Focused Guided Meditation & EFT Tap Along designed by your requests! 

Thursday, June 2, 2011
 7-9pm

Donation:  $10.00 includes snacks & beverage

Please call to sign up: 603-216-1440/603-216-1440        

Check website for directions: www.breathofsun.com

46 Lowell Road, Suite 3  

Windham, NH 03087