Sobre harmony

Sobre harmony

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JM: An early, small study suggests that mindfulness may help boost the immune system. By serving as a buffer against stress, mindfulness may also lower the risk of heart disease.

A 2007 estudo liderado por Richard Davidson, professor de psicologia e psiquiatria da Universidade de Wisconsin em Madison, prova ainda que a meditação muda o cérebro e como ele se concentra.

Mindfulness practices of MBCT allowed people to be more intentionally aware of the present moment, which gave them space to pause before reacting automatically to others. Instead of becoming distressed about rejection or criticism, they stepped back to understand their own automatic reactions—and to become more attuned to others’ needs and emotions.

Mindfulness can help combat bias: Even a brief mindfulness training can reduce our implicit biases and the biased language we use. One way this works, researchers have found, is by attenuating the cognitive biases that contribute to prejudice.

The raisin exercise, where you slowly use all of your senses, one after another, to observe a raisin in great detail, from the way it feels in your hand to the way its taste bursts on your tongue.

Still, it’s encouraging to know that something that can be taught and practiced can have an impact on our overall health—not just mental but also physical—more than 2,000 years after it was developed. That’s reason enough to give mindfulness meditation a try.

Incorporate meditation into other areas of your life: Try it on the bus or train on your way to and from work; take 5-10 minutes at the end of your lunch break to meditate; take 10 minutes to meditate before turning off the lights to go to sleep.

A visualization meditation that harnesses the image of a mountain to guide us into awareness of our own steady, still nature beyond the thinking mind.

During body scan, for example, participants saw the biggest increases in how aware they were of their bodies (unsurprisingly) and the sharpest decline in the number of thoughts they were having, particularly negative thoughts and thoughts related to the past and future. Loving-kindness meditation led to the greatest boost in their feelings of warmth and positive thoughts about others. Meanwhile, observing-thought meditation seemed to increase participants’ awareness of their thoughts the most. Previous research also suggests that observing-thought meditation has an advantage in reducing our judgmental attitude toward others. Taken together, these and other studies suggest that if you’re tackling a specific issue—say, feeling disconnected from your body—then you can choose a practice aimed at helping that issue, like the body scan. Loving-kindness might help in conflict with others, while observing-thought meditation can help break rumination. Body-Scan Meditation

Body scan, another common practice where you bring attention to different parts of your body in turn, from head to toe.

JM: Here in the San Francisco Bay area, we’re seeing growing interest. Initially, that was among stress relief tech and social media companies. Google has been a pioneer in spirituality providing mindfulness practice training for its employees. In fact, an engineer at Google first instituted a mindfulness training program there, which has now become the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, offering mindfulness training for companies around the world.

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When we get distracted by a thought, notice it, let it go, and return our focus to the area of the body we last left off. When we finish the body scan, open the eyes.

At the end, participants who’d practiced mindfulness had higher levels of the protein interleukin-oito in their nasal secretions, suggesting improved immune function. Another study found increases in interleukin-10 in colitis patients who took a mindfulness meditation course vibration raising compared to a mind-body educational program, especially among patients whose colitis had flared up. Yet another study found that patients who had greater increases in mindfulness after an MBSR course also showed faster wound healing, a process regulated by the immune system.