What Will Mindfulness Do For Me?

I regularly get asked this question. Many people comment on it being a fad or far too difficult.

So here goes, perhaps this will clarify a few things.

Mindfulness, the origins

Mindfulness has its roots in ancient practices from all over the world. Thich Nhat Hanh was central to Buddhist practices being introduced to the Western world. Buddhist practices describe two types of meditation, firstly meditation which calms the mind and secondly, the type of meditation that allows a deeper insight and understanding.

Jon Kabat-Zinn was the pioneer who enabled mindfulness to be viewed as a practice for all, without the attachment of religion. Extensive research by the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice has demonstrated the health benefits. Including changes to mental and physical health.

What actually is Mindfulness?

Its stepping off the runaway ‘autopilot’ train for a while. We can get caught up in living a life where we are not actually present. This results in missing out on the good things, not listening to what our bodies need, and losing sight of what we need and our potential. Its so very easy to live in past events, analysing and trying to untangle things in our minds and also trying to control or anticipate the future can also take up hours and hours of our day. Being able to attend to the moment to moment experience and pay attention to current emotions can have an extraordinarily positive impact on our health and wellbeing.

Mindfulness is giving attention to the experiences happening now, internal bodily sensations and external every day experiences. Rather than always being caught up in a web or thoughts or rushing from one activity to the next, we start to experience pauses and gaps to allow for insight.

What will mindfulness do for me?

When we live in the moment we see things much more clearly. There is a deeper understanding and insight into our lives. This could impact on us by giving more confidence to follow our hearts desires, or perhaps it could reduce the internal suffering we experience when we get caught up in thinking. Challenges will still come and go in your life but you will find yourself responding in different way, a way that is kinder for you and others. Which often results in a challenge being resolved a lot easier.

Having more insight and understanding is something that will benefit every area of your life. When we experience more clarity we tend to make decisions that are healthy and wise and we tend to lead a calmer and more balanced life.

What do I need to do?

To start with just a gentle practice of mindfulness of breathing will work wonders. There are several key considerations to starting this practice. Firstly, the mind will wander when you sit and bring your attention to your breath. Its OK to just acknowledge the thought and come back to focusing on your breath. The more we become preoccupied with the thought or irritated by becoming distracted the further we get from the present moment. Its absolutely OK for your mind to wander, just notice and come back. Secondly, we need to be engaging in this practice for at least 10 minutes every day to reap the rewards.

You can start to be present for all of the activities of your day. Taking a really curious interest in everything from drinking your cup of tea to noticing everything around you when you leave the house will enhance your ability to live here and now. It also makes all activities much more enjoyable, you experience them to a greater extent, with all of your senses.

Consider attending a mindfulness group or meditation meeting. This will support you to develop your practice and get support with queries and initiating your practice of other meditations. Meditating in a group can be a very enriching experience.


Source:  Dr Elizabeth Sparkes, Mindfulness teacher, Health Psychologist, Lecturer, Mother

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-elizabeth-sparkes/what-will-mindfulness-do-_b_11649478.html

Follow Dr Elizabeth Sparkes on Twitter: www.twitter.com/lizzeduarte

3 Ways To Use Yoga To Attract True Love

If you're like most people, you were fed fairy tales during your childhood and romantic comedies as you grew into adulthood.

These romantic comedies followed the same basic premise: There’s a damsel in distress, she’s in distress because some evil, powerful female figure betrayed or neglected her in some way, and the only person who can save her is a prince on a white horse.

Culturally, we are taught that happiness lies outside of us. We will be happy when we lose 10 pounds, find the perfect job, live in a huge house, drive a fast car, and meet the person who's going to "complete" us.

So, how is all that working out for you? For me, I bought into that myth for most of my childhood and well into my young adulthood. I was a little confounded because my dad seemed to need the attention of many damsels, and my mom was not waiting in a tower for someone to save us. Nonetheless, I believed happiness was something I could attain, as if it were a place where I could sink my flag, if only I worked hard enough and made myself worthy enough to get there.

The reality is, true love and true happiness have to be discovered within us before we can find those people and interests around us that enhance and enrich our joy and before we can offer up the best of ourselves to those we love and to the world at large. When we head into relationships of any kind without a clear sense of who we are, what scares us, where we may have healing to do, and what it is we want to offer this world, we are almost sure to encounter disappointment and confusion.

Of course, we don't control timing and circumstance, and you may find you've met someone amazing before you find that amazingness within yourself. But when at all possible, the best way to avoid the most common trap in any romantic relationship is to work on the one you're having with yourself first.

Here's how you can do that — and how yoga can help.

1. Don't look to anyone else to complete you.

Want someone to complete you? Look in the mirror. In yoga, we have the Yama and Niyama, and they comprise the first and second of the eight limbs of yoga (Yama, Niyama, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana, Samadhi). Svadhyaya is part of the Niyama, and it means "self-study."

Knowing yourself is the key to your inner peace and your greatest joy. Culturally, we are encouraged to edit our uncomfortable feelings. For example, the princess should not be enraged, and the prince should not be scared.

That's not how it works, though. We are all going to feel everything, whether you're a princess who likes other princesses, a prince who likes other princes, or any combination thereof. We are all going to feel it all. A lot of the time, people develop coping mechanisms as they grow, and there are three main ones — repression, denial, and numbing out.

When we push down our pain, run from it, pretend it doesn't exist, or try to blur the edges with drugs, alcohol, binge-watching Netflix, and even relationships, it doesn't magically disintegrate. In fact, it comes up harder and will keep biting us in the ass until we deal with it.

Yoga and seated meditation give us the tools to breathe through intense sensation. Emotion creates sensation. If you're enraged, you will notice sensation flooding your body — you might feel your blood pressure going up as you become "hotheaded" or notice your jaw is clenching, your heart is racing, or your breath is shallow. All sensations, right?

So if you learn to breathe through the intense sensation that arises in your quadriceps when you hold a lunge for 12 breaths, you are training your nervous system and your mind to stay calm as you feel challenged, to stay curious about your experience so it doesn't send you spinning.

When you're on your meditation cushion, you learn to witness your thoughts without identifying with them so strongly. You don't have to believe everything you think, as the saying goes. Yoga practice gives us the tools to lean in when we might rather take off and to know ourselves well and deeply.

Not knowing yourself is the loneliest thing there is.

2. Don't assume.

Some of our biggest difficulties in any relationship come from our assumptions and projections. We all have our frames of reference, which are shaped by our experiences and the lessons we've gleaned along the way. There's this idea that we're "on the outside looking in," but I think that's backward — we are on the inside, looking out. We are constantly processing data and moving it through our "Information center" (frame of reference) to decipher our experience and categorize it.

We tend to think that what is obvious to us will be obvious to everyone else. We assume if we know something is hurtful, other people should also know that. The thing is, sometimes our frames are really bent, or the window through which we're looking is distorted or foggy.

You might have learned from your experience, for example, that "everyone leaves," or "everyone cheats," or "you can't count on anyone," and your frame of reference is hinged on those ideas.

Sometimes our work is to unlearn things we've learned along the way. Sometimes we're taught that our feelings don't matter and don't have an impact on the people or the world around us. Sometimes we're taught that love is conditional and will be withdrawn if we fail to be perfect.

Sometimes we're taught that our value is measured by what we can do for others. Those are just some possibilities, but if you learned any of those lessons, you'll have to unlearn them if you want to see clearly and love deeply and fully. In yoga, we have a practice of discernment, called Viveka. We use our mind to distinguish what is real from what is not real.

Am I in a 90-degree bend with my front leg, or do I just think I am? We also look to work through the obstacle of Avidya, which translates to "ignorance about ourselves and the world at large," so we can come to a place of vidya or "clear-seeing."

A lot of the yoga practice is about peeling away the layers of ideas we've taken on that aren't ours, or aren't real, so we can discover what is real for us. In the first three months of a relationship, it's hard not to get swept away in the lust and dust.

When the smoke clears, though, reality emerges. Maybe this person you're so enamored with is exactly like the list you made on your vision board, and you really did manifest him or her. But probably not. It is more likely that this person has his or her own history, tendencies, ideas, and beliefs that shape the way he or she moves through the world. It takes time to really get to know a person, and we get ourselves into a lot of trouble when we decide six weeks into a relationship "This is it!"

Try to stay curious about people and allow situations to unfold instead of gripping to an outcome you've written too soon.

3. Don't confuse love with control.

Sometimes when we say "I love you," what we're really saying is, "I love you when you do what I want you to do, feel how I want you to feel, or want what I want you to want."

You may have heard the term "radical acceptance" along your travels, and that's a lot closer to my definition of loving myself, and loving other people. When we reject essential parts of who we are, or who others are, we create a state of dis-ease within us and around us.

If you want people to relax and invite you into their interior worlds, you have to create a safe environment. If you want to be at ease in your own skin, you have to integrate it all. That doesn't mean we don't all have work to do, places where we could step up and be more accountable or pay more attention to our weaknesses so we can strengthen. It just means that if you start with a rigid idea of what is acceptable and what is not, you close the door for real understanding and intimacy, with yourself, and all the people closest to you.

Sometimes life will break your heart; there's no doubt about that. But a lot of the time, our suffering is coming from our own thinking, and our attachment to a picture of "how things should be."

The greater the distance between that picture and our reality, the more we suffer. If we feel powerless to change things, we get depressed or anxious, but a better alternative is to open to circumstances and people, as they are, and to choose the thoughts that are going to strengthen rather than weaken us. In yogic philosophy, there are five Kleshas or poisons that prevent us from being free, and one of them is Raga, or attachment.

Attachment leads to suffering. Of course we are going to be attached to our loved ones and their well-being; this is part of the human condition. When you love people, there's an implicit understanding that heartbreak is inevitable because we don't last forever in these bodies.

People leave because of all kinds of factors, or they leave because they're taken from us, or we leave because we grow in a different direction, or we stay and develop deep and lasting bonds.

Regardless, at some point, we will all leave this earth and everyone we know and love, and that is a painful reality. Sometimes in an effort to feel secure in an insecure world, we try to pin things down, or pin people down, but people are not possessions, and we don't write the story, we just co-create it based on how we respond to what we're given.

Yoga practice gives us the tools to stay present and face reality as it is, which is not always as we'd like it to be. It shows us how to come back to love, even if, and maybe especially if, our hearts are broken.


If you're stuck in a tower and looking for the way down so you can join the world and live life in a way that feels good to you, yoga practice gives you the tools to build the rope, climb down, slay the dragons, and open your heart. You're the hero you've been waiting for.

Source: by Ally Hamilton 

http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-26243/3-ways-to-use-yoga-to-attract-true-love.html

How to Kick That Summertime Sadness

How mindfulness, meditation and positive psychology can help us beat the summer blues.

People seem to believe that the second summertime rolls around, it’s all sunshine and butterflies, pool parties and late summer nights, hanging with friends or meeting that summer fling. But that’s not always true. Sometimes our expectations for the summer deflate like that flamingo floatie that’s been sitting in your pool since May. 

It’s not hard to get stuck in a state of summertime sadness, as Lana Del Rey would put it. And that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with having the blues every now and then, but when it starts to interfere with who you are on a day-to-day basis or affect us in other areas of our lives, then enough is enough. Maybe you’ve recognized that you want to shake things up in your life so you can feel happier again, but how?

There are countless ways of going about this, but some of the most effective techniques you can introduce into your daily life are positive psychology, mindfulness, and meditation. You can probably see how mindfulness and meditation would go together, but what exactly does positive psychology have to do with this trio? The Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania defines it as the scientific study of the strengths that enable individuals and communities to thrive. It’s founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play. In his TED Talk, Martin Seligman, professor at the Positive Psychology Center at UPenn, talks about the three different happy lives one can lead—the pleasant life, the life of engagement, and the meaningful life.

The pleasant life involves as much positive emotion as you can achieve and the skills to amplify it. The life of engagement involves your work, parenting, love and leisure. And the meaningful life is a craving for deeper connection and meaning, and knowing what your strengths are and using them to belong to something larger than you are. Basically, he’s saying that there is more to happiness than just feeling happy.

We’ve all heard the saying “money can’t buy happiness,” and the reason for why materialism fails to satisfy us is because of our human capacity for adaptation. We are able to adapt to a given level of stimulation and react to changes in that level. For example, we strive to reach a certain level of income, yet once we reach it, we are only satisfied for a short span of time before we feel we need to reach higher. This is because we adapt to the level we have achieved and need to continue achieving.

Another reason we are never satisfied with our own lives is due to social comparison. Social media is famous for this phenomenon because we scroll through countless pages of other people’s happy and successful lives, and think, “that should be me.” The problem is, we’re so involved with other people’s lives and happiness that we sometimes tend to forget about our own. 

As for our own lives, our happiness is in our hands. Researchers have found that happiness is determined by:

• 50 percent variability due to genetics (thanks, mom and dad)
• 10 percent circumstantial factors (demographics, personal history, etc.)
• 40 percent happiness-related activities/practices

We can’t do much to change our genetics, and as much as we would like to think we can control the world around us, sometimes we are thrust into some unfavorable circumstances. Many studies have proven that the way we think determines the way we feel and act. Therefore, although we have heard countless times that a positive outlook can make the difference, sometimes it’s good to know that just by thinking a certain way, you can feel that way, too. Finally, engaging in activities such as acts of random kindness, thinking positively, practicing gratitude and setting new goals for yourself are key ways to increasing and sustaining happiness levels. As easy as that sounds, the actual practice can be difficult. That’s where mindfulness and meditation comes in.

Mindfulness and meditation can go hand in hand, enhancing and balancing each other. Mindfulness is the process of bringing your attention to both your internal and external experiences and sensations occurring in the present moment. It’s almost as if you zoom into your current being, both the outside world and your inner thoughts, and explore that moment in exquisite detail. You allow everything to be, and merely experience.

While there are many forms of meditation, the basic practice trains the mind to realize a benefit or simply acknowledge its content without becoming identified with that content. Both mindfulness and meditation benefit from another essential component of positive psychology—flow. Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. When we can invest our whole being unto a single moment or activity, we are strong and we are present.

Mindfulness meditation is a basic practice of taking a good seat, allowing you to be comfortable yet strong in posture, paying attention to your breath and your relation to the environment around you, and being mindful of your thoughts. When your mind wanders—and it will—gently coax it back to attend to your breath and environment. A great example of mindfulness meditation in practice is called the Body Scan. You aren’t thinking about deadlines or schedules, or what you need to cook later that night—you’re living in the moment and becoming more in touch with yourself, which is something we tend to struggle with and a vital part to being happier and living a fulfilling life. 

All in all, the combination of these three techniques can help in more ways than just getting that temporary happy fix. They take time and practice, but truly do lead to helping live rewarding lives with a deeper sense of happiness.

Source:  Miranda Proctor

http://www.houstoniamag.com/articles/2016/7/28/how-to-kick-that-summertime-sadness

How To Rewire Your Brain for Positivity and Happiness

Ever go through a phase where you feel like every day is a Monday? You wake up, you hit snooze. Then you hit snooze again and you just don’t feel it?

Yes, I know that negative emotions can eat away at my productivity, creativity, decision-making skills. And yet, I have to admit that sometimes it’s really difficult to reverse the course of a slump.

The unfortunate superpower of the negative is that it has a stronger impact than the positive.

In fact negative impact of setbacks in your work is three times as powerful in affecting motivation than positive progress. It’s just easier to remember the bad stuff that has happened to you during the day than the good.

So why is it, that our brains have a such a negativity bias? The reason is quite simple: They’re actually wired to pay more attention to negative experiences. It’s a self-protective characteristic. We are  scanning for threats from when we used to be hunter and gatherers. But such vigilance for negative information can cause a narrowing, downward spiral and a negative feedback loop that doesn’t reflect reality.

Fortunately, we aren’t doomed by our natural disposition towards negativity.  What’s amazing is that we have the ability to break out of that negative feedback loop and we can actually rewire our brains to think positively. Understanding how the brain can refashion its own connections is the key to unlocking the durable power of positive thinking.

And that’s exactly what this post is all about. Let’s dive in:

The Tetris Effect: What it tells us about how our brains learn new things

Anyone who’s ever played the classic, old-school game of Tetris will know this. Whether on a clunky computer or gameboy or the latest mobile device we all know the game’s surreal ability to spill into real life. After you shut off the game, you still see those Tetris blocks falling in your mind’s eye.

You’re grocery shopping, and you find yourself thinking about rearranging items on grocery shelves and carts in the parking lot. Somehow your mind continues to play the game, even when you’re physically not.

Robert Stickgold, Harvard professor of psychiatry, noticed something similar after a day’s hiking a mountain in Vermont. That night, he dreamt that he was still going through the motions of mountain hiking, clinging to rocks. Curious about this dream replay he tried something: Stickgold got a group of college students of varying skill levels to play Tetris and sleep in the Harvard sleep lab.

Over 60% of the study participants (including, surprisingly, those who suffered from amnesia) reported dreams of images of Tetris pieces falling, rotating, and fitting together. Interestingly, half the Tetris expert participants reported such Tetris dreams while 75% of the novices did. The mind was continuing to work on making sense of the game during sleep.

A more recent study from 2009 it was found that playing Tetris can grow your brain and make it more efficient. Adolescent girls played the game for an average of 1.5 hours a week over three months. The cerebral cortex, or the gray matter, of the girls grew thicker while brain activity in other areas decreased compared to when they’d started. Richard Haier, who had previously found in a 1992 study that there was a “Tetris learning effect” in which the brain consumed less energy as mastery of the game rose, concluded,

“[W]e think the brain is learning which areas not to use. . . . As you learn the game, it becomes more automatic.”

Haier’s 2009 study demonstrated how Tetris affected the brain’s plasticity, or the brain’s ability to change structurally, as the girls practiced and learned how to play the game. Neurons, or nerve cells, in your brain make connections, communicating through synapses. When you learn something, you change those neural connections. Every time you reactivate a circuit, synaptic efficiency increases, and connections become more durable and easier to reactivate. 

Stickgold’s study and subsequent research that sleep plays a role in this memory process.

So to sum up, whenever you do specific tasks over and over again, they take up less of your brain power over time. And that’s pretty amazing, as this will be the basis for a huge opportunity to change our behavior for the better:

So how can we combat our negativity bias? The Positive Tetris Effect.

Indeed, it’s quite simple: We can harness the brain’s plasticity by training our brain to make positive patterns more automatic. When we practice looking for and being more aware of positive aspects of life, we fight off the brain’s natural tendency to scan for and spot the negatives. Naturally we bring ourselves into better balance.

Shawn Achor frames this rewiring as “The Positive Tetris Effect” in The Happiness Advantage, drawing from the way Tetris impresses our brain so that we end up parsing the world in terms of the game. According to Achor, with the positive Tetris Effect,

“we can retrain the brain to scan for the good things in life—to help us see more possibility, to feel more energy, and to succeed at higher levels.”

Yes, so something as trivial as the game of Tetris can have a scientifically measurable effect on people’s brains and invade their dreams. If that’s the case, the impact of practicing and retaining a more positive thinking pattern, especially on our wellbeing and happiness, can be even more powerful.

We are basically trying to find an undiscovered path that if walked once, makes us happy. The path being the synaptic connections in our brain. And then, because we enjoy it, we go along that path, hundreds and hundreds of times. Slowly a track forms and becomes very clear and easier to walk every time.

Here is an example of a synapse, which represents the path we want to go over and over again, to make it a strong, easy to recognize pattern for our brains:

The best thing about such a practice is its long-term effects. In one study, people who did a “three good things” exercise for a week felt happier and less depressed after one month. The study then did the three-month and six-month follow-ups. Not surprisingly, the happiest participants were the ones who had continued the practice throughout.

What this tells me right of the bat is this: There’s hope for us all! (Even for a curmudgeon like me who reacts to the idea of spending time trying to accentuate the positive with a growl.)

So I think a good way to see the positive Tetris Effect like learning a foreign language. It will be the most difficult and unnatural-feeling at the beginning. And yet, the rewards will make you feel unbelievably happier if you stick with it.

4 Awesome Ways to Change Your Life to Be More Lastingly Positive

Ok, now that we’ve been through the background it’s time to get our hands dirty. How can we put all of this into practice?

At the core, the Tetris Effect is about building a habit that becomes more automatic and therefore longer lasting. In turn, this will sustainably boost your productivity and creativity. As Achor notes,

“Happiness is a work ethic . . . . It’s something that requires our brains to train just like an athlete has to train.”

So with that in mind here are some of the top ways that Achor and others identified to rewire your brain for positivity:

• Scan for the 3 daily positives. At the end of each day, make a list of three specific good things that happened that day and reflect on what caused them to happen. The good things could be anything — bumping into an old friend, a positive remark from someone at work, a pretty sunset. Celebrating small wins also has a proven effect of powering motivation and igniting joy. As you record your good things daily, the better you will get and feel.

• Give one shout-out to someone (daily). I love this technique and it is also something the Buffer team is using internally. Take the positive things you’re getting better at recognizing and let people know you’ve noticed! Take a minute to say thanks or recognize someone for their efforts, from friends and family to people at work. A great way to go about this is by sending 1 daily email to someone. It can be your old school teacher, who’s advice you are now appreciating every day. A co-worker or someone you’ve only met. Show courage and say thanks, I love doing this and just checking in with a nice note.

• Do something nice. Acts of kindness boost happiness levels. Something as small and simple as making someone smile works. Pausing to do something thoughtful has the power to get you out of that negativity loop. Do something nice that is small and concrete like buying someone a coffee. You can try and have that even on your to do list – have you done anything nice for someone today? I love this technique and it’s one of the most amazing ways to feel happier.

• Mind your mind.  Mindfulness is paying attention to the present moment without judgment. Opening our awareness beyond the narrowness of negativity can help bring back more balance and positivity into the picture.

The regular practice of mindfulness meditation has also been shown to affect the brain’s plasticity, increasing gray matter in the hippocampus, an area of the brain important for learning, memory, and emotion, and reducing gray matter in the amygdala, an area of the brain associated with stress and anxiety. Take a look at these tips on mindfulness and meditation to get started.

Over to you now. Have you discovered some of these techniques to focus on creating more happiness for yourself? I’d love your thoughts on this topic.
About the author: Walter Chen is the co-founder of iDoneThis, a simple way to preserve and celebrate progress at work, every day, that amazing companies like Zappos, Shopify, and reddit use.  He’d love to hear from you on Twitter at @smalter.

Source:  By Walter Chen
https://blog.bufferapp.com/how-to-rewire-your-brains-for-positivity-and-happiness