By practising mindfulness meditation our sense of kindness increases and in return we can be the recipient of many health benefits
In my last post I wrote about how we can train our brain to do, or better said, to learn pretty much whatever we want, at any age in our lives. I also promised to explain how mindfulness can be used to increase our sense of wellbeing, both mentally and physically.
To get a good handle on this, a great place to start is Mindfulness, a practical guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World by Mark Williams and Danny Penman. Although this is not the only book about the subject, it is, in my opinion, the best resource on this subject in that it explains the underpinning concepts with great clarity.
When I started looking into this, I was after an understanding of how meditating can provide us with all the goodness that is so widely advertised. Fundamentally, I needed to grasp the mechanics of the process and to get a scientific explanation of how our brain is impacted by dedicating a few minutes a day to meditation.
Firstly, let me outline some of the most beneficial results of mindfulness according to Williams and Penman before explaining how these have been proven by different scientists around the globe.
First of all, Williams and Penman clarify, for those who may have some apprehension, that meditation is not a religion but a simple method of “mental training”. It does not take a lot of time to master but persistence is vital. It is uncomplicated and it is about helping you to see things with more lucidity, ultimately helping you to make wiser decisions.
“Mindfulness meditation is so beautifully simple that it can be used by the rest of us to reveal our innate joie de vivre“, the authors reveal.
Scientifically Proven
The book identifies many positive effects achieved through mindfulness but as I was seeking to understand how deep meditation actually alters the structure of our brain, I will focus this post on the scientific explanation of the benefits of deep meditation.
According to Williams and Penman, it is possible to actually see the positive changes
occurring in the brain during mindfulness meditation. By using brain imaging, you can watch as “critical networks in the brain become activated, almost as if they were glowing and humming with renewed life”.
This realization is fairly recent, though. For many years, it was assumed that everybody had an emotional thermostat and some people were more inclined to happiness than others. “This emotional set point was presumed to be encoded in our genes or became set in stone during childhood. To put it bluntly, some people were born happy and others were not”.
This misconception was debunked several years ago by Richard Davison of the University of Wisconsin and Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. They found out that mindfulness training helps people to “escape the gravitational pull of their emotional set-point”.
According to both researchers, we may have the extraordinary possibility of altering on a permanent basis our “level of happiness for the better”.
This discovery has its foundation in Dr. Davison’s work on indexing (measuring) a person’s happiness by observing the electrical performance on different areas of their brain. This was done by placing sensors on people scalps to measure that activity or by using an fMRI brain scanner.
This procedure allowed Davison to find that when people are emotionally upset the right prefrontal cortex lights up more than the similar part of the brain on the left. Also, when people are in a positive mood, the left prefrontal cortex lights up more than the right.
After several experiments, Davidson and Kabat-Zinn concluded that “it was clear not only that mindfulness boosted their (people involved in the experiment) overall happiness (and reduced stress levels) but that this is reflected in the way their brain actually works”.
But it was Doctor Sarah Lazar, from the Massachusetts General Hospital, who found that as people continue practising mindfulness meditation over a period of years, these positive changes modify the physical structure of the brain itself!
This change in the brain’s circuitry is most pronounced in a part of the organ’s surface called insula, “which controls many of the features as we regard as central to our humanity”.
Lazar explains how becoming more empathetic towards others by increasing our sense of compassion and true loving-kindness, is a win-win situation.
“Empathy and feeling genuine compassion and loving-kindness towards yourself and others have hugely beneficial effects on health and well-being”.
The best news is that you can see and enjoy the benefits of mindful meditation after only a few weeks of daily practice. According to professor Barbara Fredrickson and colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, after only nine weeks of training meditation focusing on loving-kindness for the self and others, meditators developed an increased sense of purpose and had fewer feelings of isolation, along with decreased symptoms of illness as diverse as headaches, chest pain, congestion, and weakness.
If sitting for a few minutes, by ourselves, in a relaxed manner and in a comfortable setting can provide us with such a great benefits, what are we waiting for? Let’s cut a few minutes of TV a day and improve our lives. There is an array of wonderful sensations awaiting us.
In my next post I will explore the “weight” of our thoughts: A penny for my thoughts? How about a pound?
These are some useful links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEyaQ_iTBcs
The Eclectic Planet 