A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook

Here is Mondays Mindful Quote with Thich Nhat Hanh:

“When we settle into the present moment, we can see beauties and wonders right before our eyes—a newborn baby, the sun rising in the sky.”

This quote directly speaks to the fact that coming down from our busy minds allows us to break out of our habitual tunnel vision of seeing and experiencing life and retreain our neural networks to open up to perhaps the pleasant things that are also occurring in our daily lives.

It’s good to be mindful of the lenses we’re using to interpret the world we live in.

These lenses are often mindlessly crafted over time through the experiences we have in the world. If we grew up in an anxious household we likely had to practice being on guard all the time creating neural networks that allowed for an anxious survival reaction to happen without the need for deliberate thought. These neural networks were adaptive when we were young, but not as adults perhaps. In fact, as adults, these networks hinder us as we find ourselves in an unconscious tense reaction to our own feelings because it wasn’t ok to express these when we were young.

Oh boy, how do we unwind these neural networks that are no longer adaptive and begin to open ourselves to pleasant events in daily life?

One answer is through the awareness of this reaction. Come down from the reactive mind and just stick to the facts of the moment, the tension in the body. In other words, interrupt the cycle between thoughts, emotions and physical sensations.  

We can also begin unpacking the pleasant moments in life to get the mind used to recognizing these. One way of doing this is thinking of moments as a collection of thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations.

Here’s an example we can use right now:

Look back on this day (if it’s early in the morning, look to yesterday) and consider, was there a pleasant event, however small, that occurred today?

If yes, do you recall how what thoughts were on your mind? What emotions were there, and what were the associated physical sensations (e.g., relaxation, softness, butterflies in the stomach)?

The idea here is not to get caught in a Pollyanna rose colored lens way of looking at life, but just to get the mind used to recognizing these moments that are also very real.

Try this out. Feel free to comment below on what your pleasant event was and the associated thoughts, feelings and emotions. Your interaction below helps others flesh it out for themselves, so in a way, it is an act of care for yourself and also an act of altruism for others.

Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com

In an earlier post I published Jeffrey Schwartz, M.D.’s article focusing on why empathy can be a two edged sword, which stirred a lot of discussion. Jeff is a psychiatrist, researcher in neuroplasticity at the UCLA School of Medicine and internationally recognized expert in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He is also author of the popular books Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior and The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force.

Today it is my pleasure to bring to you a wonderful interview with Jeff where he gives us some more insight into neuroplasticity and why the vast amount of research in neuroscience has been a “gargantuan waste of money.”

Elisha: Donald Hebb made the statement, neurons that fire together, wire together. A lot of people are now using this phrase to refer to neuroplasticity. Can you give us some more insight into this concept?

Jeff: That’s a great question Elisha! I’ve been using that principle (aka Hebb’s Law) in connection with the term “self-directed neuroplasticity” and I’ve co-authored an article in Progress in Brain Research on exactly that. This jumps right into the quantum aspect of the work that I’ve done. To give the short answer, there is a physical phenomenon in quantum mechanics, called Quantum Zeno Effect that I’ve written a great deal about.  This is work I’ve done over many years in collaboration with physicist Henry Stapp at UC Berkeley-Lawrence Berkeley labs. What the Quantum Zeno Effect does is that it allows, in a neuroscience context, for focused attention to stabilize brain circuitry

So the Quantum Zeno Effect stabilizes or holds in place the neural circuitry that is involved in whatever someone is focusing on. So if you focus on something, the neural circuitry involved in what you’re focusing on will be stabilized by this physics effect called Quantum Zeno Effect.  This is very tied in to how Hebb’s Law causes neuroplastic change. For humans, it’s specifically how self-directed neuroplasticity can allow a human being to make Hebb’s Law work for them in a creative fashion because it is very true that Hebb’s law can be summarized as saying neurons that fire together wire together.  However, there’s never been any functional way in vivo in humans to answer the question, how do you get neurons to fire together?

If they fire together, they wire together, but how do you get them to fire together? The Quantum Zeno Effect is the answer to that. So, focused attention, via the Quantum Zeno Effect will stabilize neural circuits, get them to fire together, and when they fire together they will wire together by Hebb’s Law. That is the physiological basis of self-directed neuroplasticity.

Elisha: The amount of books that have been and continue to come out in this renaissance in neuroscience is staggering; any predictions for the net effect of all of this writing and research?

Jeff: I’m going to give a somewhat controversial answer to that since even as we speak in our current era, the vast majority of neuroscience writing and research, perhaps over 99% of it, is written from such a doctrinaire ideologically materialist position that it doesn’t have very much practical application to human function, and especially to how humans can change their own brain function. It’s exactly because the quantum approach that I advocate has not been accepted in research circles, who rely on the National Institute of Health (NIH) for primary funding, that the vast majority of this output of neuroscience publication is written from a radically materialist point of view that doesn’t allow for consciousness or attention to do anything in the brain. So the materialist position does not allow for conscious attention to have a function in the brain. Attention at its best is an epiphenomenon in materialist ideology.

Because of that, this vast output of neuroscience research over the last many years is largely a waste of money.

Why? Because it doesn’t really have any real world human application. Neuroscience is increasingly looking like a passing fad – at least in its current version. Until it changes to a form in which conscious attention has physiologic effects or has a dynamic causal role in how the brain functions, all this research is basically not applicable to anything that’s particularly useful, and so the whole thing has been a gargantuan waste of money.  What’s worse, in its current version it has massively increased the use of drugs in our culture, and now is even leading to the use of electrodes being placed inside people’s brains to treat mental health problems! This goes under the Orwellian name “deep brain stimulation” and it is, in my view, a very dangerous development.  The terrible past abuses of psychosurgery seem to have largely gone down the memory hole of the current psychiatric establishment.

Elisha: When you talk about conscious attention, is one synonym of that mindful attention?

Jeff: No, it’s absolutely not a synonym, but mindful attention is one small, but massively important, sub-category of the general term conscious attention.

I would say that mindful attention is one of the highest functioning parts of what is included under the much larger category of conscious attention. You can have neutral attention and you can also have negative non-mindful attention.  A classic example of this being pornography. Pornography has a huge capacity to holds people’s attention in place, but it is certainly not mindful. But it has the opportunity to wire the brain, by Quantum Zeno Effect, in very negative ways. On the other hand, mindful attention and prayer or meditation, all traditional forms of rigorously practiced meditation would have an adaptive role in brain function. But anything that causes focused or stable attention, whether the subject matter is adaptive or maladaptive or whether it is conducive or not to well-being is going to wire the brain. Focused attention wires the brain, for good and for bad.

Mindful attention, prayer, meditation are the good examples, but there are very many bad examples.

Elisha: Another way of saying that would be as negative attention states of flow. In other words, you could have a sense of flow while looking at pornography or mindlessly shooting guns.

Jeff: Exactly, that’s why I’ve never been a big advocate of flow, unless you couple flow with a worthwhile goal. If you go out and market it the way it’s been marketed as a good in itself, you could do a lot of harm and a lot of harm has been done with that concept.

Thank you so much Jeff!

To the readers: As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com

A funny thing happened to me on the way to writing this blog. I found myself getting a late start in my day and rushing to my local writing spot in order to get going on my work for the day. My writing spot is walking distance so I was on foot.  As I hit a light at a crosswalk I found myself texting a friend of mine who is also an exercise buddy. He was telling me about the challenge of doing exercise this morning which reminded me that I skipped over this morning and my mind started planning for a time later in the day to get it in.

Part of my exercise routine is doing just 20 pushups. In that moment I realized I was waiting at a crosswalk and thought why couldn’t I just do 20 pushups right then and there. All kinds of reasons came up in my mind, “oh, I’ll just get to it later, the sidewalk is dirty, and even maybe I’ll just skip the pushups today.” 

My mind was in auto-pilot, and as I began to realize that I was reminded that this was an “in-between moment.” A moment in the day where there was a space to make a choice. I chose to do it, got down on the ground and worked out 20 pushups. Wow, it was done (and yes I washed my hands once I arrived at my destination).

In-between moments abound throughout our days. Think of any time that you’re waiting for something, which happens a lot for most of us. We wait for the bathroom, at red lights, at crosswalks, in lines at the post office, the movie theatre, the grocery store, etc… We wait on hold on the phone or during commercials while watching television.  

Waiting doesn’t need to be a source of frustration, it can be seen as an in-between moment to flexibly engage in things you’re interested in doing.

As an example, some parts of exercise don’t require going to a gym or carving out large pockets of time, but can be done in a few minutes. Practicing being present is the same, we can carve out a few minutes or even 30 seconds to practice being here by coming to our breath, or nonjudgmentally investigating the feeling that’s here. Perhaps the feeling is impatience and learning how to be mindful of it, frees us from its control.

Take 30 seconds in this in-between moment and reflect on where your in-between moments are throughout the day. Could you choose to engage in small things to help with stress reduction, exercise, or anything else that is something you’re interested in? There are often many of these moments throughout the workday.

If you need help thinking of those things you may be interested in Jeff Brantley’s book Five Good Minutesor Allan Lokos’ Pocket Peace to give good examples.

Set the intention to do engage with these in-between moments today.

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction provides a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com

As we grow up in this world there is a tremendous emphasis on importance of being up in our heads to fix, do and achieve. We witness it is in the increasingly competitive environments in pre-school and kindergarten. Last I checked I believe pre-schools are asking for the kids’ resumes (only halfway joking). However, there is an entire body here that is teeming with intelligence that we are often disconnected from. Did you know you have over 100 billion neurons on in your stomach and over 40,000 neurons on your heart? The body speaks to our brain to inform us when we’re imbalanced, what emotions are actually here, and most importantly, what’s happening in our bodies is often a fact, unlike most of our thoughts.

The following is a poem that Bob Stahl (co-author of A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook) and I thought was written by Martha Elliot. Upon further research we could not confirm this and also could not find a single author connected to thsi poem, so we could not include it in our book. But, I will sneak it in here.

Allow yourself to read this over a couple times, perhaps slightly slower than you might normally think to:

Your history is here inside your body.

Your body is your storehouse

Of learnings, feelings,

Thoughts, and experiences.

Only waiting to be invited to

Reveal your treasures to yourself.

Help yourself.

As you let the learning emerge

And take shape, you can

Appreciate the wisdom of the body.

Each cell alive with

Spirit, emotion, and intelligence.

Ready to help you at any moment,

Always with you and for you.

In psychotherapy, there is a growing interest and focus on this body of ours as a means toward health and well-being.

Allow this to be a day where you spend a few moments here and there connecting to the reality of this body.

Right now: Breathe in, notice how your entire body slightly expands, and breathe out notice how the entire body slightly contracts.

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction provides a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com

Jeffrey Schwartz, M.D. is a psychiatrist, researcher in neuroplasticity and author of the popular books Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior and The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. He recently sent me a write up he did on empathy titled Homo Empathicus: a creature with a two-edged sword that I found interesting and worthy to share.

Without further ado:

“Empathy is an aspect of the human mind that gets really good press, but as so with many of the qualities esteemed in our celebrity culture it’s a trait that starts to send up warning signals when looked at more than superficially.

We all tend to think we know intuitively what empathy is, and in some sense we do — empathy is that well known mental sense of “making a connection” with other people. It seems so warm and fuzzy.  But problems start when we go a little deeper and realize that empathy is a lot more than merely connecting with others.  Empathy is in fact a skill, and can very much be a cultivated ability, namely the ability to discern what other people are thinking and feeling.

Well, what’s the problem with that you might ask? Just this: there need be no particular emotion involved in that discernment.  Empathy can be practiced very effectively in an entirely cold-blooded, almost reptilian like way.

Think of the classic example of the highly skilled but unscrupulous used car salesman.  As he assesses his “mark,” the poor sap standing in front of him needing a car but perhaps short on cash and sophistication, the shark-like aspects of homo empathicus kick in: the salesman, using skills honed with thousands of previous suckers, starts assessing the emotional, educational, cognitive strengths and weaknesses of his potential patsy.  He, in some very real sense, gets to “know” him.  If he’s really talented at his craft, he actually gets “inside” his mind.   We all know the game, for we have all been on both sides of it in various ways all our lives.  It’s a deep intrinsic part of the human experience.

The problems arise when we fail to see that this salesman is using empathy just as much as the most charitable and well-intentioned social worker, in fact maybe more so.  Because the cold-blooded variant of homo empathicus is not projecting her own good will onto the other person, she is just observing and discerning what’s actually there in the other person.  All for the purpose of advancing one’s own narrow self-interest.  All very non-judgmental in its own way.  Just cold-blooded insight in action –- seeing what’s actually there.   Clearly people who are especially adept at this skill set tend to end up in politics and law, where they can really make a killing.

Recent advances in brain science are highly supportive of this take on homo empathicus.   For instance, key developments in research on the hormone oxytocin, recently called the “goody-goody hormone” in Scientific American magazine.  To be sure, oxytocin is clearly linked with maternal bonding to infants in breast-feeding mothers, and has been tied to various experimental models of enhanced positive empathy (or “mind-reading”) in social neuroscience research.

But the most recent work is digging a little deeper and disclosing the darker sides of intensified social connectedness.  For example, work in 2009 at University of Haifa showed that a dose of oxytocin increases both greed and gloating in competitive situations.  The same group of researchers followed up this study by showing that a dose of oxytocin significantly increased the ability of healthy male subjects to recognize fear in facial expressions, but not other emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger or surprise.

So yes, empathy is real and has clear biological aspects to it that are important to understand, but by no means is it always used for good or pro-social cognitive-behavioral outcomes.  It also has deep relevance to understanding conflict and the will to power that all humans share.

From our perspective, the key to understanding pro-social mental states and behaviors comes from enhancing one’s moral judgment and deepening our faith in the power of wholesome action.  And my advice to anyone standing face to face with homo empathicus is this:  assess his or her commitment to moral action and wholesome behavior, not the capacity to empathize, before you engage any serious interactions.  Try not to learn the hard way that empathy is a two-edged sword.”

How does this strike you? What are your thoughts on empathy?

As always, please share your thoughts, questions and stories below. Your interaction is a living wisdom we can all benefit from.

Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com