…ective in helping people to choose their thoughts and stop overthinking is mindfulness. “Mindfulness is actually a way of connecting with your life, and it’s something that doesn’t involve a lot of energy,” said mindfulness expert Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn. “It involves a kind of cultivating attention in a particular way… It’s paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment non-judgmentally as if your life depended on it.” For the overthinkers out th…
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…sa Firestone: There’s been a lot of research showing beneficial effects of mindfulness meditation practice. Could you describe some of the recent findings or what your understanding is about that? Donna Rockwell: Well, there’s been a lot of research done, working with breast cancer survivors, other survivors of cancer, prisoners in prison and that is, you know, a lot of research there. They’re very interesting. You know, people say, “You can take…
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…of being. Lisa Firestone: So, you’ve talked about Buddhism in relation to mindfulness. Do you see mindfulness as inherently as part of Buddhism? Donna Rockwell: Yeah. I don’t, I never really felt that even Buddhism was a religion as much as a way to live awake, you know, they say we’re falling asleep if we just let our minds drag us through life. Well, this is falling awake, you know and I don’t think that’s religious per se. I mean, it would be…
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…itation practice. But, what I’ve discovered is that we can practice little mindfulness exercises all through the day. So we can awaken, we can become enlightened all day long. We don’t have to wait until we get to the meditation cushion. At traffic lights, you know, when you have nothing to do, in the waiting room, in the grocery store, when you’re heightening your cortisol because the line’s not going fast enough and killing yourself while you’re…
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…for women in the military at the moment. But they’re all talking about how mindfulness got their life back. They’d been given medications, or they were self-medicating with alcohol prior to that. And it wasn’t working. The nightmares were getting worse. And it seemed like when they each got involved with different mindfulness programs, they really had a big impact. Donna Rockwell: Because it creates space. You know, our minds are so cluttered with…
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…Editor Lisa Firestone, Dr. Donna Rockwell talks about the powerful impact mindfulness meditation has on stress reduction. You know, so much of this is really physiology and biology in that we have the sympathetic nervous system and we have the parasympathetic nervous system, which produces cortisol and the fight or flight response and we needed that when we were in the jungle and the lion’s bearing down on us. But unfortunately, we behave that wa…
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…p free ourselves from the mental and physical reactions we have to stress. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, developed by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, brings together mindfulness meditation and yoga has further proven to strongly reduce symptoms of anxiety and relieve individuals from pain. 2. Practice self-compassion – According to findings by leading self-compassion researcher, Kristin Neff, “self-compassion is associated with significantly less anxi…
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…restone, Dr. Donna Rockwell talks about how to introduce young children to mindfulness. Watch or read the interview below. Donna Rockwell: So, in parenting children, in Buddhist psychology they talk about the five senses as the five sense gates. So we actually experience life through tasting and smelling and how things feel, what they sound like, what they taste like. And we’re actually living from here up. We’re just all in our minds with that sw…
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…isha Goldstein, author of Uncovering Happiness: Overcoming Depression with Mindfulness and Self-Compassion. Mindfulness practice helps us to acknowledge and accept whatever we’re experiencing without judging it or letting it drag us into a panicky process of cyclical thinking. Many mindfulness exercises involve learning to focus on our breath. This process can help us feel calmer and more centered in the present moment. As we sit still and bring o…
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…1. Practice mindfulness Scientists are continually providing proof that a mindfulness practice can help alleviate worry. A recent study published in Behavior Research and Therapy showed that specific psychological exercises involving mindfulness techniques may reduce anxiety by “reducing the negative thought intrusions that characterize worry.” In her PsychologyToday blog reviewing the study, Dr. Marlynn Wei wrote: The most effective technique fo…
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