Meditation study shows changes associated with awareness, stress (2011)

I'm glad you found it usefull!

The relationship between this sort of meditation and the various schools that use meditation as part of their doctrine seems to me be like the difference between engaging in an exercise and exercising as part of a particular club/school.

Personally I've had a few moment in my life where there introspective skills I've gained from this have probably been for the better.

Not sure if it's from the practice, or just some anxiety relieving placebo effect caused by the practice, though. Seems to be good for me, whichever the underlying effect.

I'd argue, that meditation works best when treated like learning to play an instrument or doing sports. Regular practice is where the most benefit can be reaped. Doesn't have to be every single day, but it should be regular. Don't do it once a blue moon and expect any tangible benefits.

Well, I wouldn't say that I can control it better. These reactions are way too primitive to be consciously controlled. I simply do not get triggered by the same situations any more ... maybe the mind becomes more resilient and thus the "grounded" and "calm" feelings. There are some pretty good explanations about how mindfulness actually works and how it causes the amygdala (the brain region responsible for emotional reactions) to literally shrink and be less reactive (google it, really interesting stuff). Imagine it this way - you are in a situation, which normally causes you severe anxiety. You start feeling the unpleasant physical sensations, the obsessive thoughts come aaaand ... they simply pass. Like 2 minutes later you don't even remember that you were having them. This is what started to happen to me after 6-7 months of practice. Another thing that I have noticed: The need to mentally rehearse situations, which cause me anxiety, has disappeared. I used to waste a lot of time imagining what I would say, what would happen, etc. but the urge to do it is not there any more.

I'm currently reading The Instinct to Heal by David Servan-Schreiber [0]. It's not specifically about mindfulness, but so far I found it everything to be what I was looking for when I was looking for writings on these topics. On the internet I've seen a lot of essays pass by about mindfulness, but they're all a bit alike. This book is interesting to me because it gives info about methods I didn't know about, and provides scientific data and references to base its claims. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/153401.The_Instinct_to_H...

Not about mindfulness, but I highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Brain-That-Changes-Itself-Frontiers/dp...

Check out Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind for a good book on practicing meditation. It's not religious, but basically a transcript of a Zen Master's talks on zen and the practice of meditation to his group of students. It's what I recommend to people who want to 'get' meditation.

http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Mind-Beginners-Shunryu-Suzuki/dp/1...

Not specifically related to meditation, but The Tao of Pooh is still the best book I know of that deals with the concepts behind this stuff. I re-read these books whenever I lose my way, which happens more often than I'd like to admit ;)

I can't recommend his "Mindfulness for Beginners" book enough. Although I've been "meditating" for years, this book is packed with subtleties that are easily missed. In other teachings, it can be very difficult to separate religious dogma ("all you need is love, man") to the things that actually make a difference, scientifically, to your practice ("bring gentleness and kindness to the process").

One line especially made me realise I'd missed something important for years: Be aware "as if your life depended on it". That's about it.

I thought "atheist" is an insult, huh… But whatever, it doesn't have anything to do with a topic. Question was about what participants were told to do in this particular study, and other people already pointed it out. And it's not Vipassana.

I think he's criticizing the cultural caricature that accompanies any activity becoming mainstream... but perhaps misdirected as the context in which one finds value isn't really important in contrast to value itself. Perhaps the elegance is in how deeply individual a practice it can be (turning the locus of one's awareness inward).

And to the OP, isn't it great that yoga can hold so much value through both a spiritual and physical lens? I think the mental and spiritual component has a lot to offer, but it's hard to claim that someone pursuing a positive activity, regardless of motivation is a bad thing.

What I've written is nothing that I've thought of be myself. I've tried to describe the goal of traditional yoga, which really contradicts a lot of the modern interpretations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga_Sutras_of_Patanjali

Here's a great interpretation of the yoga sutras ...

http://www.swamij.com/yoga-sutras.htm

It's a personal choice. For me there is definitely an implied or because I struggle to make time for exercise as it is. I also prefer almost any form of exercise over meditation. :)

For one, it gives you 10, 10-minute meditations for free, so you get a sense of what the whole enterprise is about without laying down any cash. For some (many?), that's all you need to get going.

Second, having listened to quite a few guided meditations, I find the Headspace guy (I think his name is Andy) to be one of the best. The meditations strike a near-perfect balance of helping direct my energy and attention in a way that doesn't draw attention to himself or his voice/delivery. i.e. he gives excellent guidance and gets out of the way.

Focussing on breathing is one particular instance but not the only thing you can do. Essentially you are practising focus and learning things about your mind you might not have noticed before

I'd say breathing is sort of a two-way binding mechanism.

When you're at peace, it's slow and deep. And when you're stressed, exhilarated or angered it's turbulent and erratic. So when you're, say, stressed, you can transition to a peaceful state by deep-breathing; and as you are relaxing you find yourself not needing that much focus/energy to keep the breathing that way - the binding automatically happens.

One can use almost any object to meditate upon - visual image, mental image, sound, music, whir of a motor, randomness of objects around you, tick of a clock; just about anything; the more rhythmic, the better. But for us inexperienced ones, breathing works the best.

Also, we should not think about breathing, rather feel it, granted it starts with thinking :) Thinking is what meditation shuns, at least when we're practicing

> Why and in what way is thinking about sensations and one's body different from thinking about past or future?

The sensations are actually happening, right here, right now. Thoughts about the past or future are just mental constructs and have no reality beyond that. It's all about being present right here, right now, in this moment.

Not thinking about, as much as observing the current sensations.

> why is focusing on breathing the only way that meditation teaches?

It isn't. You can focus on whatever you like, and there are descriptions of using pretty much anything you can think of as meditation objects. What you focus on is not the most important part, but that you focus your attention and your ability to go of thoughts.

Breath is often recommended because it is always available (takes away the excuse of "oh, I can't mediate because I need X and I don't have it here"), it is simple yet it has many qualities for you to observe; it has distinct phases (in-out) that are cyclical, and that have distinct pauses (when you shift from breathing in to out). It also has the property that it calms as you get more relaxed and more concentrated, so that the more you focus, the more you have to focus to keep attention on the breath.

At the same time, as you get deep into concentration, the fact that the breath calms lets you (if that is your goal) more easily shift the breath into the background, to focus on other things (e.g. your emotional state; observing fleeting thoughts; other bodily sensations or whatever else).

For a lot of forms of meditation, focusing on the breath is considered an important part developing "access concentration", that is, your ability to easily and rapidly calm yourself and enter into sufficiently deep concentration to focus on your desired meditation object.

For vipassana / mindfulness meditation, for example, the goal is not to endlessly focus on the breath, but to observe various aspects of reality (including the breath, but not limited to it) in a "detached" state where you are not engaging or reacting to them but simply paying attention to them. E.g. notice a thought arising, notice how your body reacts to it, but don't "respond" to it with a new thought - just observe the qualities of it, until it fades, and wait for the next one.

Meditating on breath then is a method of getting into deep enough concentration to enable you to do that without constantly "waking up" to realise you got caught up in some strand of thinking and spent the last 10 minutes thinking about what to do about your taxes.

(You can certainly observe the breath as the focus of your mindfulness meditation, but if you limit yourself to the breath you are

> Why and in what way is thinking about sensations and one's body different from thinking about past or future?

Being aware activates a different part of the brain to thinking. See https://www.coursera.org/course/meditation and "The Science of Happiness" on edx.org for more.

I'm not OP, but I attended the same 10-day course last year and will likely attend another one at some point in the near future.

I started experimenting with meditation after listening to Howard Stern talk about transcendental mediation around seven years ago. At the time, I was struggling a lot with anxiety and bouts of depression. When I discovered Mindfulness and Acceptance Therapy, I started to move away from mantra meditation(TM) and towards mindfulness meditation. Over the years, I became more and more interested, not only in meditation, but in Eastern philosophy, and studied everything from Vedanta to Zen to Yoga to Tibetan Buddhism.

I meditated anywhere from 20-40 minutes a day, but I was never very consistent. Sometimes I would skip a day, and sometimes a week, but I always came back to it. The anxiety and depression eventually went away, but I still was a very unhappy person, and I didn't understand why.

Enter psychedelics. After a psilocybin trip last spring, I wrote about 40 pages worth of advice to myself. It was all very practical, very pragmatic, almost fatherly. Part of that advice was something along the lines of, "If you really want to figure out what's going on, you need to study your mind, study your thoughts." I signed up for the first available course.

> I went to one of these and got freaked out

That's the problem, you freaked out and left, even though they ask everyone multiple times at the beginning whether you are ready to stay for the full 10 days.

As someone who took more than one of these courses I can say that the single most important thing you should do during your first course is not quit. Strange things start happening to people when they are put into an environment where they can't do anything but eat, sleep and meditate. Your mind starts playing tricks on you and you start reacting to your thoughts. Wave after wave of anger, joy, confusion, happiness, sexual fantasies, tranquility, fear, etc, come and go. It's like your mind switches to different modes. You don't notice this during normal life, and that's the real beauty of these courses and centers. To give you an opportunity to observe all that is happening in your mind.

Although I experience this before, it still happens to me when I take a course and start wondering what am I doing here, this is a waste of time, this is all a cult, a scam, etc. Nope, it's just my mind reacting :) That's how you learn, I don't think there's another way to silence the mind.

>I tried to skip a session because I didn't get enough sleep and the management came and got me out of my room.

That's their job. It's not a holiday and you are there to work hard. In fact I can easily say that my first course was the hardest thing I've done in my life, it was just brutal. But my mind felt much clearer, I had way less anxiety and just felt kind of happy.

YMMV I guess. I did a similar course and the religiousy aspects did put me off a bit (bowing and prostrations), but the leader did explain there was no worship involved and that the practices were to remind you of what you wanted to aspire to. He offered the techniques and said they worked for some people but not others, and to take what worked best for you. Maybe your videotaped guy was too pushy?

We did have to read some Buddhist verses every morning which was incredibly boring, but hey ho, it was a Buddhist retreat so I expected something along those lines. And anyway, it provided a chance to be aware of the resistance I have to organised religions.

> the recorded chanting they play while you meditate is hypnotic programming

I probably wouldn't put it like that, but if the chanting didn't induce some sort of effect it would be pointless to do anyway. "Programming" isn't it though.

> I tried to skip a session because I didn't get enough sleep and the management came and got me out of my room. That's when I knew it was time to leave.

I got tired with the 5am starts, but the discipline is something I find lacking on a normal weekend so overall I found the experience valuable.

> Many of the people there mentioned they go several times a year, with that glassy eyed obsessed stare. At least one person mentioned they had moved their home to be near the group.

Yeah, some people can get a bit over-excited - but the benefit of it being a silent retreat is you don't have to listen to them go on about it :-)

TBH if you found a decent teacher you'd probably form a different opinion. I think these retreats need to be taught very delicately to emphasise the practices while not pushing a dogma or religion on you.

Video lectures during the meditation? That sounds bad... the only things that I think would be acceptable are guided meditations, where you focus on different parts of your body, or moving your energy or whatever. If they legitimately had video lectures unrelated to instruction or chanting that seemed to have an agenda, I would also have left.

Personally, I think the only thing you should hear during meditation is nothing. A guided relaxation process is fine for a half hour but after that you need to leave people to their thoughts (or lack thereof :). I wonder if you would have felt better at a more Zen-style meditation where anyone talking gets hit with a stick? That's the kind of place I would want to go.

The responses here are very interesting. I would think mindfulness would increase empathy, but many of them appear to be sidestepping your experience.

Was your course at one of the centers listed on dhamma.org ?

I did a full 10-day course and it was everything but a cult. I can see how one can perceive it as such, but my impression was entirely opposite - there is strong, effective and well-tested self-improvement methodology dressed into a tiny sliver of Buddhist religion. The dressing makes it easier to digest for some people and is easy to ignore for others.

The freak-out is not unusual, a friend of mine left in a hurry reporting something remotely similar to claustrophobia. She never mentioned being banned or anything like that, and I'd surprised if it happened. My other two friends shrugged off the whole experience. Yet another acquaintance reported permanent reduction in anger, and completely giving up alcohol, which was previously a problem. Myself I became less "jumpy", less likely to be frightened by a sudden noise or such. There were otherpositive effects like reduction in compulsive eating, but they worn out in about 6 months. None of us ever went back, and I only get an occasional email from them.

Which one did you go to?

Theres a lot of different people offering 10 day courses, and most I've heard of don't force the religious aspect on you.

You can go and not give a damn about it, and just do the mindfulness part, which is pretty intense in itself. (IF you are doing a vipasna course)

10 days of not speaking to anyone else, (really, even avoiding eye contact) - its rough on a lot of people.

I have attended two of these courses, and have benefited extremely from them, and I know they try very, very hard to make sure that they do not become a cult. They are very anti-cult, and I think it is important that this remains a priority.

I was diagnosed with panic disorder and no treatment worked, but after attending a course I was able to get it under control.

Don't see why this should be the case. I got into MM through a similar Vipassana Course and there couldn't have been a better start for me. Only meditating in this style for 10 days did a few things for me that 20-30 minutes a day would not have helped with : 1 - It helped me understand the power of this sort of meditation 2 - It REALLY motivated me to keep at it ever after I left 3 - I got to learn how to meditate properly as opposed to trying something on my own for 30 minutes a day without someone to guide me through it

Honestly it wasn't as brutal as people would like to think - all you need is an open mind.

It's like "I've never run before, hey let's go run a marathon right now."

I recommend starting with 15-20 sessions once a day. Just like a startup, you can always attempt to scale things up later once you get a handle on things.

I think you could just as well make the opposite argument: a retreat can be an easier way to get started, because it takes you away from your normal, everyday surroundings, and by really making it the main focus, and purpose of this time, it becomes easier to do, rather than to try and squeeze it into your existing schedule. There's a beautiful meditation retreat in Northern Thailand http://www.wetours.com/meditation-retreat-in-northern-thaila... (relatively meaning: get up early, no meals after lunch, very regimented day... but nobody will give you evil eyes and the people - especially the head monk - are very relaxed, easy going and have a great sense of humor). Not saying one way is better than the other, just that both are feasible choices :)

I disagree - I think doing a 10-day Vipassana retreat is a great way to start (it's how I started). I've heard this argument before, though, but it isn't like doing a marathon - you don't need to train beforehand. It is more like what I call "meditation bootcamp" - you break down from no distractions for 10 days, and then you build yourself back up, stronger.

Meditating 20-30 minutes a day at home is fine, too, but I think it would be a mistake to not participate in a course just because you haven't been meditating.

Good instructors start with people where they are. If someone is greedy, then you have to explain to them how what you want them to learn will help them satisfy their greed. Otherwise they'll just ignore you.

Here, for example, you'll note the pitch is that it's easy to improve one's brain, of great appeal to nerds. And it's backed up with high-tech science, a great draw to we technical people.

As a long-time meditator, I could happily talk about how it has improved my ability to make software. Deep awareness of my sensations and subtle reactions has made me very good at understanding exactly what parts of user interfaces work and what don't. The increased patience and focus is great for dealing with complex software. The greater self-awareness has helped me avoid things like gold-plating and architecture astronautics because I'm better at sorting out my motivations. I'm way better at noticing when I'm really too tired to be coding, so I create a lot fewer bugs. Et cetera, et cetera. If somebody starts because of that, great.

But knowing a lot of other meditators, I think the reason people start is relatively unimportant. As with almost anything deep (e.g., fitness, science, math), serious study and practice change you more deeply than you intend. More deeply than you can even understand when you start. For example, many people take martial arts classes because they crave the power to beat people up. But we don't have a problem with karate students roving in packs and attacking people because long study teaches them self-control, teaches them the limits of violence, the proper use of power. Similarly, even if people start meditating in pursuit of self-enhancement, they can't help but be changed more deeply.

We start with people where they are.

Seems to me me you're juggling several straw objects here. Obsession? What's your evidence for this? Who knows what people are finding meaning in, and not necessarily reporting that finding to you? People's internal life sometimes remains internal with certain elements permanently so.

I may be wrong but I suspect that you don't want to understand; rather you want to find fault in a raw naive meme that you think is held by a group of people - 'westerners'.

> The very idea of self that meditation is supposed to examine.

Meditation is 'supposed' to do something?

If the control group were doing nothing for eight weeks, they would expect no change. An expectation of change can illicit substantial differences. That's the placebo effect.

When administering medication and checking for results, the control group is given a sugar pill rather than nothing. If they were given nothing it would not eliminate the placebo effect.

You're right, meditation is relaxation with a sprinkle of woo.

A valuable result would be: what benefits does meditation impart over other similar activities? For example something like 30 minutes of walking every day.

A result over a non-treatment group in this case is scientifically noble, but practically useless. All it tells us is that doing something has an effect over doing nothing.

Can I get the same effects from 15 minutes of walking a day? 30 minutes? We don't know, because that wasn't compared. It should have been.

Thats a big leap, by your logic you could relax even more by taking a hit of Heroin.

I'm able to dismiss spirituality because I'm a skeptic and believe in evidence, not anecdotes. The power for the human mind to self delude is limitless.

Is that book the same as this free one? http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html

Does your book contain exercises?

I've been using the Headspace app for several months and found it to be very helpful. While doing the exercise, which is a daily 15 minute guided meditation session, I feel much more relaxed. And throughout the rest of my day I find that I'm more aware of my reactions to various events and sometimes I'm able to step outside an emotional reaction and see what I'm doing, and whether it's actually how I want to act, and then behave accordingly. It's no panacea, but I have found it useful enough to keep doing pretty much every day despite the friction which tends to lead to giving up on good habits.

Headspace link: https://www.headspace.com/headspace-meditation-app

I know Gil Fronsdal and the community he serves. His talks are always practical and empathic. There won't be any woo or supernaturalism in these, but a generous humanity.

I found Waking Up by Sam Harris pretty interesting. It's a bit more abstract than a how-to manual, more why and what. http://www.amazon.com/Waking-Up-Spirituality-Without-Religio...

The Mindfulness in Plain English book mentioned above, or the Insight Meditation Center talks linked below, are both without fake spirituality or mysticism.

How does that work, going to a therapist? He knows how to ask the right questions? How many sessions did you have to go to? I don't have massive amounts of money unfortunately.

Nice, I'll go trough this things. I'll be in touch if I have any questions. Thanks.

Thanks for this. I'd never heard of him, but after a bit of googling, reading and mentally going through my house, I can see that this stuff works. Cheers codyb.