Fascination Sobre meditative mind
A Q&A with Jack Kornfield about giving feedback at work, using social media wisely, and the poetry in his teachings.
Meditation is the practice of lightly holding your attention on an anchor, such as your breath, and gently bringing it back there when it wanders.
Mindfulness fosters compassion and altruism: Research suggests mindfulness training makes us more likely to help someone in need and increases activity in neural networks involved in understanding the suffering of others and regulating emotions. Evidence suggests it might boost self-compassion as well.
Fascinating though it is, we shouldn’t overplay meditation’s effects on physical health at the expense of its importance to emotional health. In fact, it may be difficult to separate out the two, as a key impact of mindfulness is stress reduction, and psychological stress has been tied to heart health, immune response, and telomere length.
People tend to lose some of their cognitive flexibility and short-term memory as they age. But mindfulness may be able to slow cognitive decline, even in people with Alzheimer’s disease.
To develop these skills in everyday life, you can try these exercises used in Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR program and elsewhere:
The authors speculate that bringing mindful awareness to uncomfortable experiences helped people to approach situations that they would previously avoid, which fostered self-confidence and assertiveness.
, argues that there is still much we don’t understand about mindfulness and meditation. Worse, many scientists and practitioners don’t even agree on the definition of those words. They end the paper calling for “truth in advertising by contemplative neuroscience.”
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Meditation does have an impact on physical health—but it’s modest. Many claims have been made about mindfulness and physical health, but sometimes these claims are hard to substantiate or may be mixed up with other effects. That said, there is some good evidence that meditation affects physiological indices of health. We’ve already mentioned that long-term meditation seems to buffer people from the inflammatory response to stress. In addition, meditators seem to have increased activity of telomerase, an enzyme implicated in longer cell life and, therefore, longevity. But there’s a catch. “The differences found [between meditators and non-meditators] could be due to factors like education or exercise, each of which has its own buffering effect on brains,” write Goleman and Davidson in
Cell aging occurs naturally as cells repeatedly divide over the lifespan and can also be increased by disease or stress. Proteins called telomeres, which are found at the end of chromosomes and serve to protect them from aging, seem to be impacted by mindfulness meditation.
It might also be easier for beginners to make meditation a habit if we can remember there’s no pressure to “get it right.” As long as we show up to take time for ourselves, we’re doing great.
JM: I think that’s definitely a risk. But given that stress is a reality in many people’s working lives, I think mindfulness can be an effective tool to buffer its negative effects. And ideally, mindfulness may even help change workplaces for the better. Research suggests that mindfulness training helps make people more compassionate and empathetic toward others. By improving the way people relate to one another, ideally it can change corporate culture for the better, creating a more supportive, friendlier workplace with better relationships.
You’ll be surprised how fast it goes by. Add a minute or two with each successive session until you find the ideal duration for your daily practice.