Psychotherapy Uses Mindfulness Meditation

In a story entitled Lotus Therapy by Benedict Carey, The New York Times reported on the use of insight meditation to deal with pain, both physical and emotional. And on how the practice is infiltrating psychotherapy.

“I was able to be there, present for the pain,” he said, when the meditation session ended. “To just let it be what it was, without thinking it through.”

The therapist nodded.

“Acceptance is what it was,” he continued. “Just letting it be. Not trying to change anything.”

“That’s it,” the therapist said. “That’s it, and that’s big.”

This exercise in focused awareness and mental catch-and-release of emotions has become perhaps the most popular new psychotherapy technique of the past decade. Mindfulness meditation, as it is called, is rooted in the teachings of a fifth-century B.C. Indian prince, Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha.

So what? What's the promise?

The promise of mindfulness meditation is that it can help patients endure flash floods of emotion during the therapeutic process — and ultimately alter reactions to daily experience at a level that words cannot reach.

Jon Kabat-Zinn is at the forefront of this and his book, Full Catastrophe Living:Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness, published in 1990. I have found this book to be invaluable. I recently bought it on DVD so I can listen to it when I'm too unwell to read. And he is featured in the Times report:

Buddhist meditation came to psychotherapy from mainstream academic medicine. In the 1970s, a graduate student in molecular biology, Jon Kabat-Zinn, intrigued by Buddhist ideas, adapted a version of its meditative practice that could be easily learned and studied... The goal of mindfulness meditation was different, to foster an awareness of every sensation as it unfolds in the moment.

Dr. Kabat-Zinn taught the practice to people suffering from chronic pain at the University of Massachusetts medical school. In the 1980s he published a series of studies demonstrating that two-hour courses, given once a week for eight weeks, reduced chronic pain more effectively than treatment as usual.

Word spread, discreetly at first. “I think that back then, other researchers had to be very careful when they talked about this, because they didn’t want to be seen as New Age weirdos,” Dr. Kabat-Zinn, now a professor emeritus of medicine at the University of Massachusetts, said in an interview. “So they didn’t call it mindfulness or meditation. “After a while, we put enough studies out there that people became more comfortable with it.”

A related technique is Action and Commitment Therapy, which is focused on results:

Steven Hayes, a psychologist at the University of Nevada at Reno, has developed a talk therapy called Acceptance Commitment Therapy, or ACT, based on a similar, Buddha-like effort to move beyond language to change fundamental psychological processes.

Harvard Brain Scientist Explains Bliss

A Superhighway to Bliss is the most read article at the New York Times web site. So I checked it out. It's about how a stroke at the age of 37 led a Harvard brain scientist to experience bliss and come back from that to explain her experience in scientific terms.

The story reports on the Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke:

Within minutes, her left lobe — the source of ego, analysis, judgment and context — began to fail her. Oddly, it felt great.

The incessant chatter that normally filled her mind disappeared. Her everyday worries — about a brother with schizophrenia and her high-powered job — untethered themselves from her and slid away.

Her perceptions changed, too. She could see that the atoms and molecules making up her body blended with the space around her; the whole world and the creatures in it were all part of the same magnificent field of shimmering energy.

And then explains the role of the two sides of the brain:

Today, she says, she is a new person, one who “can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere” on command and be “one with all that is.”

To her it is not faith, but science. She brings a deep personal understanding to something she long studied: that the two lobes of the brain have very different personalities. Generally, the left brain gives us context, ego, time, logic. The right brain gives us creativity and empathy. For most English-speakers, the left brain, which processes language, is dominant. Dr. Taylor’s insight is that it doesn’t have to be so.

The Times even interviews two religious and spiritual thinkers I've read and respect. First Sharon Salzberg:

“People are so taken with it,” said Sharon Salzberg, a founder of the Insight Mediation Society in Barre, Mass. “I keep getting that video in e-mail. I must have 100 copies.”

She is excited by Dr. Taylor’s speech because it uses the language of science to describe an occurrence that is normally ethereal. Dr. Taylor shows the less mystically inclined, she said, that this experience of deep contentment “is part of the capacity of the human mind.”

And Karen Armstrong:

Karen Armstrong, a religious historian who has written several popular books including one on the Buddha, says there are odd parallels between his story and Dr. Taylor’s.

“Like this lady, he was reluctant to return to this world,” she said. “He wanted to luxuriate in the sense of enlightenment.”

But, she said, “the dynamic of the religious required that he go out into the world and share his sense of compassion.”

This is how the experience affected Dr. Taylor's life:

she has dialed back her once loaded work schedule. Her house is on a leafy cul-de-sac minutes from Indiana University, which she attended as an undergraduate and where she now teaches at the medical school.

Her foyer is painted a vibrant purple. She greets a stranger at the door with a warm hug. When she talks, her pale blue eyes make extended contact.

And regarding organized religion and it's relationship to brain science, in light of her personal experience:

her father is an Episcopal minister and she was raised in his church, she cannot be counted among the traditionally faithful. “Religion is a story that the left brain tells the right brain,” she said.

Still, Dr. Taylor says, “nirvana exists right now.”

Okay, I'm off to my meditation mat to see if my right brain (empathy, creativity) can overflow my left (ego, context, time, logic, stories).

Try Walking the Labyrinth

Speaking of walking meditation, you can walk the labyrinth next Tuesday, May 27th at the Washington National Cathedral from 6:30 to 8:45. The stain glass windows of the Cathedral capture the setting sun beautifully.

Walking the path of a labyrinth is an extraordinary experience and a very unique form of meditation. Words can hardly capture the sensation of shifting perceptions as you twist and turn away and then go back toward where you just came from. You pass or shadow strangers, each off on their own path. You can be alone on one part and then suddenly congested amid twenty. So you step aside wait. Then you are alone again, stepping apart. The movement inward, arriving at the center, can be powerful, like entering a womb. Walking the labryinth becomes a metaphor for life, for the many journeys on which we embark.

The Center for Prayer and Pilgrimage opens at 6:00 pm for centering prayer (also known as meditation). The Center is right off of Resurrection Chapel and if you've never visit, you're in for a treat.

Upstairs in the nave, the Cathedral makes two labyrinths available for this special contemplative practice which is free and open to the public. A harpist will accompany you on your walk. And Compline is said at 8:45.

A special additional offering 7 pm a special program is offered in the Bethlehem Chapel. This month Deryl Davis offers Drama for Your Spirit: Acting Faithfully.

For more information about the program at the Washington National Cathedral, click here. The National Cathedral offers this program on the last Tuesday of every month.

If you don't live in DC, here is a world-wide labyrinth locator. And here's a link for all you might want to know about the types of labyrinths and the history of the practice from classical times through the Middle Ages to our own time.

Yogis Set Intentions For Lasting Change (Part 2)

Early this week, a dear old friend was in town and we got a chance to meet. We're both in our early 40s and discussed the humility of realizing how little we have directed in our lives.

Though no one controls outcomes, there are aspects of our life experience we can command. We can hone our approach, manage expectations, set intentions.

Back in January, nilambu notes set forth the yogic approach to setting intentions. Rather than make resolutions and focus on the results (the scale, your marital status, achieving lotus pose), yogis set intentions and concentrate on the steps that make up the process of change.

While we can't control results, we can direct our approach and our behavior.

This nilambu notes outlines how to do that, how to integrate your intentions into lasting change and new habits.

So what do you do?
There is another term in yoga – samskara. Samskara is an ingrained pattern or “grooves” of thought OR behavior. These ruts are changed by creating new ones.

And that’s where the three niyamas - burning enthusiasm, self-study and devotion to a higher power - come in. (See the last nilambu notes).

And they do so in four distinct steps, that you cycle through over and over: S.A.S.A. which stands for see, accept, set, act.

SEE You need to see clearly what is – what are your ruts, samskaras? What are your ingrained patterns of thought or habit?

An accurate perception of your limits, your unhelpful habits, your distractions is the entry point to change (and you’ll re-evaluate your perception along the way).

Nothing will change if you don’t see clearly. At this stage, others can help provide loving perspective. Turn a flashlight on in your life. See what is really going on in those dark corners so you can dust them up.

How do we do this? Using burning enthusiasm (tapas), we study ourselves (svadhyaya). That may mean keeping a food diary or examining your schedule to see where you allot your time. This self study reveals your patterns, your values and can help you see clearly what is. You do this again and again as you evaluate and reassess, and nimbly readjust your behavior. Self-study can help you see unconscious habits that could sabotage your intentions.

ACCEPT With devotion to a higher power (ishvara pranidhana), we humbly accept what is, what we don't control.

So, for example, we admit we don’t really as eat as well as we think, we have a serious illness with no cure, we are beyond our breaking point with stress, the mother/father of our children doesn’t want to be married any more. Further, we accept what we cannot change the outcome.

Some realities are mutable; some are not. When we accept the things we can not change, that yielding can allow us to relax. It can lift a tremendous burden. We can stop fighting.

A yoga teacher of mine told me you can have pain without suffering. What she meant was that we can't always control the pain, physical or emotional, but we don't have to suffer if we are able to adapt our response to the pain.

Admittedly, sometimes that may be easier to do than others. But by yielding to what is, to what we can't control, that acceptance can alter the experience. And in doing so, you may actually change the dynamic of your situation, your nervous system will ease and may even improve your vitality and ability to deal with illness, or divorce or grief.

So this is the interesting thing: sometimes things, situations, reality will change as a result of accepting what is. That shift in perception, that letting go, can confer a freedom that will in fact improve whatever situation was resisted, struggled with or burdensome.

SET You set an intention. Make a promise to yourself and remind yourself over and over of that intention. Plan, with specificity, a course of action that will support your intentions. You can do that for each intention and one intention may have several supportive steps.

Some examples are:

• Practice yoga 20 minutes every day.
• Keep a food diary
• Wind down your day by 10 pm by creating a night time ritual.
• Eat without the television on.
• Meditate 5 minutes.
• Speak to your partner lovingly, and if necessary with a therapist to navigate communication and prevent harm.
• Hug your spouse and hold them for a full minute every day.

Try to visualize and imagine yourself doing what you promised yourself. Schedule activities into your routine. Put up reminders around your home or in your car.

Not giving up helps too, which brings us to action....

ACT You act. You take a step. A small step, again and again.

Don’t visualize the goal; visualize the step, the action.

Don’t give up. Keep getting up. If you get knocked down, get up and get up and get up. Another said you might have to keep at it "a billion times." No matter how weary you are, keep going, keep trying.

Burning enthusiasm (tapas) works at this stage as well. Sometimes you can only get up with discipline or with burning enthusiasm for the intention because the short term result seems so undesirable.

This stage is crucial; no question it can be easier to stay on the floor and not get up. It is easy to stay in the old patterns and habits and ruts (samskara).

If your actions are not in line with your intention, with out judgment or self-laceration, see that clearly through your self-study and adjust your course. Be willing to adjust your course. And don't give up.

To sum up:
See (clearly) – using self study and discipline
Accept (reality) – using humility
Set (intentions, sankalpas) – using much specificity, planning, visualization, and imagery
Act (over and over) - using discipline and that burning enthusiasm

S.A.S.A. You go through this cycle over and over – See, accept, set, act.

Finally, be gentle with yourself. And you’ll be able to create new habits (samskaras), new grooves for your life, better actions and possibly a new outcome.

Oh yes, and according to a British study, yogis (men) do better if they are specific while yoginis (women) more often succeed if they share their intentions. So be specific and share! (depending on your gender)

And The New York Times earlier this month published a piece on changing your habits that echoes many of these themes. One of those quoted noted, "you cannot have innovation unless you are willing and able to move through the unknown and go from curiosity to wonder.”

nilmabu Guided Meditation

This month, nilambu yoga introduces guided meditation. 

Guided meditations can be helpful during the particularly stressful times in life. Intense emotions or stress make the "monkey mind" particularly rambunctious.  “Monkey mind” is Anne LaMotte’s wonderful phrase for unsettled thoughts.  A quiet, seated meditation can become challenging.  So listening to another's voice can enable you to approach the practice in a new way. 

Contrasts in your meditation practice can deepen your experience.  A walking meditation practice provides new experiences that can then alter your quiet seat.  In the same manner, a guided meditation can support and renew your quiet meditation practice.  

Here's how to listen:  Click here and wait.  Depending on your default settings, you computer will open either Quicktime or Realplayer.  You can listen right there at your desk.  The meditation is 9 minutes and 31 seconds.  

Here’s how to download:  To download the .mp3 file for your Ipod or other mp3 player, simply right click here.  If you are in Microsoft Explorer, select "Save Target As...".  If you are in Mozilla Firefox, select "Save Link As..."  

So give it a try.   I hope you enjoy.  And if you have a moment, please provide some feedback to aide and guide nilambu yoga in future recordings.