The key is to pay attention to the ever-changing process of thinking rather than to the contents of your thoughts. If you find yourself swept up in a thought or emotion, notice it and simply return to the breath. Inhaling, note “mountain.” Exhaling, note “stable.” Use the breath to focus on the present moment cultivate the ability to weather the storm. Some will be like fog or dark, ominous clouds. Some thoughts and feelings will be stormy, with thunder, lightning, and strong winds. Once you feel settled, widen your awareness to include all the sensations in your body as well as any thoughts or feelings. This will help you tune in to the sensorial presence of the body. Bring attention to your breath by placing your awareness at your belly and feeling it rise and fall. Mindfulness requires concentration, but rather than concentrate on any one object, we concentrate on the moment and whatever is present in that moment. This study provides strong evidence that chipping away at the illusion of separation can open us up to a far more meaningful connection to life.Īdapted from Yoga Journal by Kelly McGonigal Participants also reported a greater sense of self-acceptance, social support, purpose in life, and life satisfaction, while experiencing fewer symptoms of illness and depression. The more participants meditated, the better they felt. A study by psychology professor Barbara Fredrickson and her colleagues at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the University of Michigan, found that a seven-week lovingkindness meditation course also increased the participants’ daily experience of joy, gratitude, and hope. These meditation techniques may have benefits beyond the experience of spontaneous compassion. In other words, compassion meditation appears to make the brain more naturally open to a connection with others. These findings suggest that the meditators were having a genuine empathic response and that the experienced meditators felt greater compassion. The researchers also observed an increase in heart rate that corresponded to the brain changes. But the more experienced compassion meditators showed a larger brain response in areas important for processing physical sensations and for emotional responding, particularly to sounds of distress. As each of the participants meditated in-side the fMRI brain scanners, they were occasionally interrupted by spontaneous and unexpected human sounds-such as a baby cooing or a woman screaming-that might elicit feelings of care or concern.Īll of the meditators showed emotional responses to the sounds. So what does compassion look like in the brain? To find out, Lutz and his colleagues compared two groups of -meditators-one group whose members were experienced in compassion meditation, and the other a group whose mambers were not-and gave them the same instructions: to generate a state of love and compassion by thinking about someone they care about, extend those feelings to others, and finally, to feel love and compassion without any specific object. “We are trying to provide evidence that meditation can cultivate compassion, and that you can see the change in both the person’s behavior and the function of the brain,” Lutz says. Researchers have found that feeling connected to others is as learnable as any other skill. But research is revealing the possibility that we may be able to cultivate and increase our ability to feel the emotional state of compassion. We typically think of our emotional range as something that is fixed and unchanging-a reflection of the personality we’re born with. The cultivation of friendliness creates inner strength.
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