I’m so happy to have discovered this sequence from Mark Lynch, DC, to help with relief for sinus drainage, sinus headaches, and sore throats. It’s already brought relief to me and many of my students. Try it out and let us know how it works for you.
The Essence and Magic of Mindfulness Meditation: What, Why, How and Where
What is Mindfulness Meditation
Mindfulness is defined as the impartial awareness of ones inner and outer experiences practiced moment by moment.
Here is an effective mindfulness meditation exercise from Yoga Nidra for Complete Relaxation and Stress Relief, a book and audio set by Julie Lusk. Try it out and let us know how it goes. Your questions (and answers) are welcome!
B…R…E…A…T…H…E for Mindfulness *
This mindfulness meditation provides seven steps for practicing mindfulness with a twist of meditation. The word “breathe” will help you remember each step. Take your time to fully experience each of the steps before going on to the next.
Process
Breathe fully, slowly.
Release muscular tension.
Engage and Expand your awareness.
Alert to sounds, sights, and smells. Awareness without naming.
Think positive thoughts.
Here and now.
Enjoy the moment.
Why: Benefits of Mindfulness Meditation
Diane Poole-Heller reports that research has shown that the benefits of a mindfulness meditation practice helps develop all 9 functions of the brain’s prefrontal cortex. This happens by practicing 20 minutes daily for only 8 weeks.
- ANS Regulation – Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Balance
- Attuned Communication – felt sense of other’s experience
- Regulation of emotions
- Response flexibility
- Empathy
- Insight – self awareness
- Fear extinction – GABA fibers to amygdala
- Intuition – deep knowing
- Morality
How, When and Where
Mindfulness can be practiced formally by closing your eyes and sitting up straight as in meditation for 20 or so minutes. This builds up your capacity for mindfulness while also developing your brain. It will lift up your energy and lower stress levels. Your productivity will improve, your emotional fuse will lengthen, and your ability to enjoy living is enhanced. Your whole day will go better, even in the midst of stress.
In addition, mindfulness can be practiced informally as well. This is when you practice moment-to-moment awareness during your day-to-day activities. To get started, simply shift your attention to whatever is happening while it happens. For example, impartially check in with sensations from your body (cool/hot, tense/relaxed, etc.), notice how you feel, impartially naming the mood you’re in, and noticing how your emotions are being expressed physically, and by becoming aware of whatever thoughts are taking place. Practically speaking, this is done by taking time, for example, at meals to really look at your food and consciously smell it, taste it, and chew it. Throw in some gratitude if you wish. Or, take a few moments to feel the sunshine, to feel the actual texture of your pets fur or listen to whatever sounds are happening – all in a non-evaluative and nonjudgmental manner. This also goes for noticing however you’re breathing and the level of tension or relaxation that’s present in your shoulders.
* Reprinted from Yoga Nidra for Complete Relaxation and Stress Relief by Julie Lusk
Guided Mindfulness Meditations: Practicing Presence & Finding Peace CD
Julie eases your way into being more mindful with her clean, user-friendly, body-based, joyful approach. The net effect is calmer nerves, a brighter outlook, stronger memory, sharper focus, healthier body awareness and a more balanced perspective. With repeated use, listeners become more fully attentive to what is happening right now, neither resisting nor clinging to each moment, but letting experiences come and go and be just as they are. This program offers a 5-minute track of training tips; a long (18 min) and a short (6 min) mindfulness experience; and ways to be more mindful informally during the day (4 min). (39 minutes total) Published by Health Journeys. [WPCR_INSERT]
Mouth Yoga
According to the yoga tradition, 80% of your problems can be solved with mouth yoga. That is, what you eat and drink and put in your mouth, what you say, and who you kiss makes a big difference. Wise yogis ask us to consider 3 things before saying something:
- Is it true?
- Is it necessary?
- Is it kind?
Practice smiling, whether you feel like it or not, is the advice given by Thich Nhat Hahn, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by the Rev. Martin Luther King, He said you will feel more positive and at peace. He says in his book, Be Free Where You Are, he gives us the exercise of “Breathing in, I smile. Breathing out, I release.” If you’re wondering why you should smile when there isn’t joy inside, he answers, “Smiling is a practice. There are over three hundred muscles in your face. When you are angry or fearful, these muscles tense up. The tension in these muscles creates a feeling of hardness. If you know how to breathe in and produce a smile, however, the tension will disappear – it is what I call “mouth yoga.” Make smiling an exercise. Just breath in and smile – the tension will disappear and you will feel much better.”
Belleruth Naparstek calls smiling “affirmations for your face” and promises you’ll start getting smiles back from others. I call it smile-asana. Go ahead… and Smile Now!
Do you have jaw tension? Do you grip your teeth tightly? Try opening your mouth and moving your jaw up and down and sideways to relieve tension. Another method is to rub your scalp around the half-moon circling over the top of your ears. While you’re at it, rub your outer ears with your fingertips and thumbs for a nice energizer. Lowering your caffeine levels may relieve jaw tension too. Come on now, let go … and smile!
Do you know what the yoga police say? “You have the right to remain silent.”
What you see and hear matters too. Habib Sadeghi writes about a phenomenon called the Illusion of Truth Effect. Basically, it says that repetition increases our mental validation of anything we’re exposed to whether or not the information is true or not. Hearing or seeing something consistently is viewed as more valid than messages we’re exposed to only occasionally. A weak message repeated twice becomes more valid than a strong message heard only once, according to research from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Therefore, be careful of the messages you’re being exposed to since repetition matters. Think again about all those political messages and evaluate their accuracy with facts. Sadeghi offers these recommendations in his article:
1. MAKING WORDS WORK. To consciously harness the power of words for your benefit, start with the ones you’re using.
2. NO NAME-CALLING OR SELF-CRITICISM. Everyone is doing the best they can at any moment in time with the consciousness they have to work with, including you. Be kind and offer yourself the same empathy and compassion you’d extend to anyone else.
3. STOP ALL SELF-DEPRECATION. Never make your body, or something you’ve accomplished, or anything else in your life the butt of a joke. Words have power, and quantum energy doesn’t have a sense of humor.
4. RESIST GOSSIPING AND SPEAKING ILL OF OTHERS. It’s impossible for your words to resonate in anyone else’s body but your own.
5. GO ON A NEGATIVITY DIET. Instead of saying that a meal was terrible say, “I’ve had better.” You’ve basically said what you wanted to say without putting negative energy through your body—you even used a positive word to do it!
6. BOOST THE POSITIVE ENERGY OF WORDS. Instead of saying something like you had a good time at a concert, ramp up the positive energy by saying great, terrific, or fantastic, instead. These feel much better and generate a bigger energetic response in the body.
7. IF YOU HAVE SOME NEGATIVE NANCYS IN YOUR CIRCLE OF FRIENDS, limit the time you spend with them or find better friends. Negative energy has a way of dragging everything surrounding it in, like a big black hole. Avoid it when you can.
8. SURROUND YOURSELF WITH POSITIVE, UPLIFTING WORDS. Put affirmations on sticky notes around your home and office that say wonderful things about you, your family, or your goals. Wear clothes that have positive messages or phrases on them. Imagine the kind of positive energy you’ll be generating for yourself when you’re wearing positivity all day long. As you keep doing these things, you use the power of repetition in a highly effective way for your benefit. You have the power to change your world, and using words consciously is one of the quickest ways to shift the energy you bring into your life.
Empowering Intentions & the MindBody Connection
Have you run across The Hidden Messages in Water, a book by Masaru Emoto’s? He is the researcher who looked at the power of intention and the mind body connection and “discovered that crystals formed in frozen water reveal changes when specific, concentrated thoughts are directed toward them. He found that water from clear springs and water that has been exposed to loving words shows brilliant, complex, and colorful snowflake patterns. In contrast, polluted water, or water exposed to negative thoughts, forms incomplete,asymmetrical patterns with dull colors,” as reported in his book. Examples of his work using high-speed photography are below. A video of water crystals responding to the Blue Danube can be watched HERE.
His experiments were to “demonstrate that human thoughts and intentions can alter physical reality, such as the molecular structure of water.” What has put Dr. Emoto at the forefront of the study of water is his proof that thoughts and feelings affect physical reality. By producing different focused intentions through written and spoken words and music and literally presenting it to the same water samples, the water appears to “change its expression.” The implications of this research create a new awareness of how we can positively impact the earth and our personal health. In other words, if our bodies are 80% or so water, the messages we get and the words on what we wear just may make a difference on our health and well-being. After this work came out, plenty of people joined the bandwagon and believed what he reported. Others claimed he was a fraud, especially since his work had not been replicated.
As for me, I knew about plenty of valid, well-documented research about the power of the mindbody connection and its influence on health and disease and how thinking, positively or negatively, has an impact on results and outcomes. Emoto had a way to make this point by demonstrating these concepts in pictures. It always made an impact when these pictures were shared in my workshops and classes. However, I always wondered how valid his work really was.
All this came up for me again in an article, Scientific Evidence: Thoughts & Intentions Can Alter the Physical World Around Us, published by Mind Unleashed. Not only did it briefly summarize his work and conclusions, it also showed research that he did using positive and negative messages on bottles filled with water and rice. Ah haa! That’s something I could do to see what happened. Read on to see my results … [Read more…]
Memory, Multitasking & Mindfulness
How has your memory been lately? Is it easy to remember things that happened years ago but you have a hard time with what happened this past week? Can you remember what was for lunch yesterday? Do you get home from shopping and realize that you forgot to buy what you went after. Then there’s remembering conversations and what happened at meetings. Perhaps you’re starting to worry if your memory is starting to fail for real.
People like us regularly need to get more done in less time so we go online/watch TV/or work while eating. We talk on the phone and listen to music while driving. Perhaps go online to look something up and end up checking mail, reading some news, and looking at the weather forecast while there in the hopes of being efficie
nt and to save time. We all do it, right?
It’s possible that multitasking may be a big factor in not being able to recall things.
Multitasking seems smart but it does not work in the long run. While it can be useful in rote tasks that require little intelligent brainpower, multitasking is detrimental in tasks requiring brainpower. It contributes to stress, wastes time, lowers productivity, and hurts short and long-term memory.
The brain is not capable of taking in and dealing with two different streams of information simultaneously. It is impossible for the brain to encode more than one stream of information fully into short-term memory at a time. Information will never make it into long-term memory if it does not go into short-term memory first. Either way, information cannot be recalled and put to use. This pattern contributes to forgetfulness, poor memory, and more stress.
From Yoga Nidra for Complete Relaxation and Stress Relief by Julie Lusk
Solutions include:
- Stay focused by doing one thing at a time
- Don’t let yourself get distracted from the task at hand
- Increase your brainpower, ability to concentrate, and improve your memory with
- Yoga Nidra – Info here
- Mindfulness – What it is and how to practice.
- Kirtan Krya, the Sa Ta Na Ma 12-minute meditation for memory improvement and to decrease anxiety and depression – Resources here
- Complete Yoga Breathing for clearing your mind, calming down, and increasing energy
- Guided Relaxation and its benefits here
Guided Mindfulness Meditations: Practicing Presence & Finding Peace CDJulie eases your way into being more mindful with her clean, user-friendly, body-based, joyful approach. The net effect is calmer nerves, a brighter outlook, stronger memory, sharper focus, healthier body awareness and a more balanced perspective. With repeated use, listeners become more fully attentive to what is happening right now, neither resisting nor clinging to each moment, but letting experiences come and go and be just as they are. This program offers a 5-minute track of training tips; a long (18 min) and a short (6 min) mindfulness experience; and ways to be more mindful informally during the day (4 min). (39 minutes total) Published by Health Journeys.
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