Date published: Thursday 7th September 2017 12:05

Its hard to find respite from the world, but its even harder to find a way to get away from ourselves.

Theres always myriad little threads of thought going around, many of them unpleasant or worrying, all of them in our own inescapable inner voice. Weve all, to some degree or other, had the experience of wanting to take a holiday from our own head.

The suggestion to take up yoga and meditation is unbelievably common from therapists and doctors as a way to take a little daily mental holiday, particularly for people with issues around anxiety and depression, like me.

The idea is that it teaches not only patience, but the ability to let your own thoughts pass through your mind uninterrupted, rather than continually getting hung up on seeing every single thought from every single critical angle.

While those ends would undoubtedly do me the world of good, I am wary of the new-age woo pseudoscience that often seems to go hand-in-hand with yoga and meditation.

Shallow and short-sighted though it may be, I just cant turn off my critical faculties long enough to get out so much as a namaste without wanting to shatter the nearest fire alarm with my face and run into the night screaming Forgive me, Immanuel Kant!

This puts me in a bit of a bind: I want to experience the benefits other people get from their daily yoga, but I need it to be packaged in a way I can actually stand. It was only when I started talking to people in more detail that I realised hang onI get all of that from watching crap football matches.

Most Saturdays and Sundays, Ill be at some game or other as a neutral fan or as a reporter, and its only there, in the stadium, with a really boring match unfolding in front of me, that I am able to spend minutes at a time slipping into idle thoughts.

My eyes reflexively track forwards runs and defensive shapes, before jolting back into full consciousness after a promising passage of play, and then I realise I have absolutely no idea what happened whatsoever in the six minutes leading up to that wasted half-chance.

At that point the cycle begins anew: analysis once again becomes thoughtfulness, and then thoughtfulness becomes thoughtlessness, which sticks around until the swell of noise as a striker goes through on goal jerks you back into analytical mode.

The word hypnotic is always deployed in football to describe elaborate, fast-paced attacking, but it should more properly be used for games devoid of action. There is a lot happening the relentless shuttling of players around the pitch, looking to take up an advantageous position and yet, at the same time, nothing happening. If that isnt some sort of Zen then the mystics are missing a trick.

There must be thousands of people out there who, like me, would never dream of setting foot on a yoga mat, but who go to the game every week and enter that wonderful trance. Even those who are not sitting studiously, but joining in with the rhythm and repetition of familiar terrace mantras, are surely experiencing the kind of weightless, carefree state that churches and yogis aspire to create.

This is what makes football different from other forms of entertainment, and there are certainly similarities in the evangelical fervour of a football fan and that annoying yoga convert who occupies every workplace in the country. A football fan lost in the same chant he sings every week has more in common with a Hare Krishna than she does a theatre-goer; this is more gospel choir than armchair fan.

Bad footballs meditative quality also helps explain why we so gladly lap the game up, even when we know theres a decent chance the game will be utterly awful. When its good its exciting and passionate; when its bad, it is therapeutic and tranquil. It is vital therapy for a huge number of people who would never dream of seeing a mental health professional.

We all want the glitz and glamour of glory, we all want exciting football, and we all want to be entertained but for me at least, even bad football is capable of serving an important mental function.

Namaste.

Steven Chicken

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Namaste: We use bad football as meditation - Football365.com

You cant go home again. The final scene of Twin Peaks: The Return offers the most literal interpretation possible of this old idiom, couched in a typically Lynchian abstraction, when Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) attempts to bring Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) back to her mothers housethe quixotic righting of a quarter-century-old wrong, the replacement of the missing piece that allowed the darkness lurking beneath this placid Pacific Northwest town to break throughonly to find that everythings changed. It isnt Lauras home anymore; it belongs to a Mrs. Tremond, and even shes not as we remember. Lauras no longer Laura either, even if she screams like her.

Even Cooper isnt himselfnot really. Hes crossed so many thresholds and inhabited so many tulpa versionsnot so much fire-walked between worlds as fire-straddled themthat we cant be quite certain which one stands before us now. As he tells Diane (Laura Dern) earlier in the episode, before they drive across some mystical line in the sand, Once we cross, it could all be different; their softcore sex scene that follows and Coopers waking up to find hes a man called Richard confirms as much. Worse, even Coopers ostensible heros return in the previous episode was undercut by a close-up superimposition of his own face while he intones, We live inside a dream, implying that we cant trust anything were seeing. It looks like Twin Peaks, but is it?

Thats a question a lot of fans grappled with across the entire 18-episode revival, with this show that often looked like Twin Peaks, andin the strains of Angelo Badalamentis score that gradually broke through the alien, ambient buzzoccasionally sounded like Twin Peaks, but so often, steadfastly refused to be Twin Peaks. And if David Lynch and Mark Frosts revival of the series could be said to be about anything, it was about the impossibility of ever doing that. Twin Peaks has existed in our imaginations for 25 years, even as it has been endlessly recycled and picked apart, its recognizable strains churned into obvious imitators and costume parties and tote bags. Throughout it all, Twin Peaks has lingered in our minds despite this limiting nostalgia thats been forced upon it, primarily by resisting the exact kind of tidy ending a decades-later sequel threatens. Twin Peaks isnt Mayberry; you cant just return there. And not for nothing, but its corrupted-innocent high schoolers are now middle-aged; many of its players are long retired from acting; some of them are dead.

So naturally, when the series was first announced, a lot of fans had some immediate reservations. How can you reprise a series that was based on such a nigh-supernatural confluence of talent and timing, with so much of it dictated by what Lynch calls his happy accidents? How do you recreate its strange atmospheres and idiosyncratic quirks, which are by now thoroughly folded into our pop culture lexicon, without creating a pandering facsimile of itself? How do you go home again, when home exists immutably, safely ensconced in a collective dream? (Especially when, suddenly, Jim Belushi is living there?) You cant, and The Returnits subject ironically telegraphed right there in its deceptively innocuous titlewas all about Lynch and Frost telling us that.

The word meta doesnt really appear to be in Lynchs vocabulary; hes long resisted the idea of his art as allegory, doesnt like to reveal his own intentions lest it influence the audience, and openly regards his own ideas as messages channeled from the great unified field. Yet the fact remains that a lot of the biggest ideas he catches while hes quietly sitting and listening often have some bearing on his own life: the formative childhood traumas that cracked open Lynchs suburban idyll in Blue Velvet; his paranoia about fatherhood and the surreal ugliness of life in Philadelphia in Eraserhead. There is much about Twin Peaks: The Return that suggests its similarly about Lynch, now 71 and teasingly retired from filmmaking, marking the passage of time between himselfand usand these worlds he created, and making peace with the idea that we can never fully go back there.

There are many ways of interpreting The Return, of course; were only a few days into the next 25 years of articles, books, and Oberlin courses it will inspire. But this one might be the most satisfying, at least emotionally: In all its thrilling, occasionally maddening elusiveness, the real closure Twin Peaks gave us was the chance to say goodbye.

This was especially true in its inclusion of actors who have died since the shows original run, and those whom we know now were dying at the time: Frank Silva as BOB; Jack Nance as Pete Martell; Don S. Davis as Major Garland Briggs; David Bowie as Phillip Jeffries; Catherine Coulson as Margaret Lanterman, a.k.a. The Log Lady; Warren Frost as Doc Hayward; Miguel Ferrer as Albert Rosenfield. In many of these cases, inclusion is actually too light a word. Some of them amounted to little more than sentimental cameos: Frost popping up via Skype to exchange some dad jokes with Sheriff Frank Truman (Robert Forster); Marv Rosand, whose Double R line cook Toad is only known to diehards scouring DVD deleted scenes, but nevertheless popped up here to take a bread delivery from Becky (Amanda Seyfried); Nance, tugging heartstrings by popping up in archival footage from the pilot alongside the lamented (but not late) Piper Laurie and Joan Chen.

But some of these ghosts also turned out to be major players, to the point where the spotlight The Return afforded themand the shadow of their deaths that surrounded itfelt like deliberate commentary on the gulf of time, the impossibility of traversing it, and the lost pieces that, like Laura Palmer, can never be put back. This intentionality is most deeply felt in Coulsons scenes, which Lynch filmed, quite remarkably, at the very beginning of production in September 2015, only weeks before Coulson would die of cancer on Sept. 28and so secretively that even her agent was surprised by it. In her conversations with Hawk (Michael Horse), Coulsons Margaretfrail, missing hair, a breathing tube beneath her nosesays a series of protracted goodbyes that feel movingly direct, gazing into the camera at Lynch (a friend and collaborator since his early short films), as well as at us, which gives her pronouncements the tinge of last testament.

You know about deaththat its just a change, not an end, Margaret says in her final lines. Theres some fear in letting go. My log is turning gold. The wind is moaning. Im dying. Good night, Hawk. There is special meaning in hearing these words from The Log Lady, who became the de facto voice of Twin Peaks when she recorded a series of Lynch-scripted intros for its initial Bravo run in syndication, where she teased outsometimes ominously, sometimes playfullythe shows more metaphysical questions, becoming the most recognizable embodiment of the shows spirit. That voice is fading now, The Return said; the spirit is moving on. The subsequent moment of silence Hawk holds for Margaret around the sheriffs department conference room is also for us, grieving not only for The Log Lady, or for Coulson, but also for Twin Peaks itself, and the times we have shared together.

Knowing that Lynch filmed those scenes first, one imagines it couldnt help but color the entire productionwhich was already being assembled under the onus of time running outwith an added aura of finality. Miguel Ferrer was diagnosed with cancer in 2014, and his condition reportedly worsened in 2016, to the point where NCIS: Los Angeles wrote his illness into his character. But rather than sideline Albertor even use him relatively sparingly, like he was in the original seriesLynch brought him to the fore, keeping Ferrer close at hand as the most frequent recipient of Lynchs own dialogue as Gordon Cole.

I fell deeply in love with Miguel on the latest Twin Peaks, Lynch told The New York Times after the actors death in January. I liked him before, but it wasnt deep love. I just didnt know him that well. This time I fell in love. And indeed, as Albert and Gordon exchange their respective confessions about the past, bringing up things theyve kept from each other for decades, that love is felt implicitly, even when the two are just discussing cold cases. Again, there is the sense of goodbye.

Garland Briggs, whose portrayer Don S. Davis died in 2008, similarly became a much larger presence, mostly by being scattered across various dimensions: Briggs was a naked, decapitated corpse who turns up in South Dakota; a ghostly, floating head who occasionally drifts across the void; and, most effectively, a father still capable of moving his son, Bobby (Dana Ashbrook), to tears from across the span of decades and the divide of death. In the original series, Major Briggs was an outward hardass who revealed himself to have a great inner well of enlightenment, and whose greatest fear is the possibility that love is not enough. In The Return, Briggs is lovea benevolent spirit still sharing messages from beyond, still putting people on their path. Death is not the end, but a change.

The loss of David Bowie in January 2016 came right before he was meant to film the reprisal of his swamp-accented Fire Walk With Me character, Agent Phillip Jeffries. Most showrunners would have just written around it; Jeffries, though beloved for his David Bowie-ness, is a character who opens more questions than he answersquestions he explicitly didnt want to talk about, and which could have easily been addressed without his direct participation, or elided altogether. And yet, Lynch made those questions and Jeffries central to The Return, resurrecting Bowie as a giant teakettle (a literal Tin Machine) and giving him what appears to be the final word on the shows overarching mythology as he fills Cooper in on Judy, sort of, from beyond.

As great as it would have been to see Bowie againto discover that his death was just a setup for the greatest TV cameo ever recordedas with Major Briggs, its hard to imagine his character having as profound an impact if it were being performed by a living man. The loss of Bowie and Davis adds a melancholy subtext to their characters being trapped inside their respective spiritual holds. Their deaths give themand the showfar greater resonance. They are the shadows of the dream were now struggling to retrace.

Jeffries was the first to declare, We live inside a dream, way back in Fire Walk With Me, as we looked upon Bob, Mike, The Man From Another Place, The Woodsman, and Mrs. Tremond and her grandson et al., cooking up a batch of garmonbozia above the convenience store. (Goddamn, how I will miss writing sentences like that one now that the shows over.) But Coopers We live inside a dream also parallels a scene set earlier in The Return, when Lynchs Gordon recalls a far more pleasant dream he had about Jeffries dreamone that featured a cameo from Monica Bellucci.

Aside from telling us a lot about Gordons taste in women, the sequencelike the real-world owner of Laura Palmers house turning up at the door in the finalemarks a rare intrusion of our reality into Twin Peaks carefully quarantined dream world, as disarming as a needle drop on ZZ Tops Sharp Dressed Man. And while Lynch would probably blanch at the phrase, it can be interpreted as the shows most meta commentary. We are like the dreamer who dreams and lives inside the dream, but who is the dreamer? Bellucci asks Gordon/Lynch, before pointing over Lynchs shoulder to the younger version of himself. I doubt Lynch ever intended the scene to be read this bluntly, but there is certainly something here suggestive of Lynchs extratextual role as the shows creator, now living inside his own dream.

Like Albert, Gordon has a notably bigger presence in The Return, interacting with just about every major character and narrating the plots myriad twists in much the way Cooper did in the original show. His more central role takes on greater significance when you consider that The Returns cast wasnt just a reunion for the Twin Peaks cast, but also assembled players from Lynchs vast repertory company. Robert Forster, Naomi Watts, Patrick Fischler, and Brent Briscoe (and had she not turned it down, Laura Harring) from Mulholland Drive. Balthazar Getty from Lost Highway. Chrysta Bell, from his side gig as a musician. Along with some new additionsincluding actors, like Tim Roth and Jennifer Jason Leigh, who seem like they should have been in a Lynch movieThe Return was a homecoming for Lynchs far-flung flock. Most notably there is Laura Dern, whose role as Diane comes close to creating some Grand Unifying Theory Of Lynch by bringing her into an another intimate pairing with Blue Velvet love interestand Lynchs other longest collaboratorKyle MacLachlan.

In what will surely go down as one of The Returns most analyzed sequences, shortly after Cooper utters that line about living inside a dream (and says to those assembled, I hope I see all of you again), we watch as that trinityLynch, Dern, and MacLachlan, the dreamer and his musesenter an abstract plane, where a door yields to Coopers nostalgia-evoking Great Northern hotel key. Before Cooper passes inside, returning to the seasons earliest scenes, back to the beginning of the loopback to the very beginning of our collective love of Twin Peaks, heralded by Mike greeting him with its famous, cryptic poemCooper turns to Lynch and Dern and says, See you at the curtain call.

Twin Peaks: The Return was that curtain call. You cant say the series was solely about Lynch bringing his players out for one final bow, or saying farewell to us, or even grappling with the enormous, occasionally burdensome legacy of his most famous creation (though the scene of a crazed Sarah Palmer stabbing Lauras prom photo definitely had the ring of catharsis). The show is far too rich in meaning for just that; we can start writing our think pieces now, and Ill see you again in 25 years, when we still havent talked it all out yet.

But the entire season was littered with enough nods to Lynchs pastreturning faces, recurrent themes, visual references to his films and paintings (Twitter user @ramontorrente has done an excellent job of cataloging these)that it definitely lends itself to being read as a distillation of his entire body of work, which he then closed the door on by removing its hinges. By creating the uncertainty of a loop, he gave Twin Peaks an elliptical, open-ended closureone that extends its mysteries and allows those players to go on playing in our imaginations forever, wondering whether Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn) ever finds her way out of her mind trap, or whether Coopers machinations truly altered the timeline and what that means for the Palmers and the rest of the town, or if Sheriff Truman ever gets to see Jesses new car. The uncertainty renders it immortal, existing beyond time and death, where no matter when youre watching it, you cant even be sure what year it is. It will always be confounding and oblique; it will always be Twin Peaks.

If you know anything about Lynch, its that he is a devout practitioner of transcendental meditation; if you know two things, its that he treasures The Art Life, never happier than when he is going through the many granular motions of a restlessly toiling painter. In both disciplines, he preaches and practices finding the joy in the moment, taking pleasure purely in the work. To resolve that work, to be finished with it forever, would be the end. This is death. Instead, he gave Twin Peaksthe people within and without it, those living and gonethe gift of change, to always be working, to remain eternally unfinished. You cant go home again, it tells us. But The Return isnt about looking backward. It was about the dreamer, happy to still be dreaming the dream, for as long as we are still able.

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Twin Peaks gave us a moving meditation on death - The AV Club - AV Club

So you fell asleep easily enough, but now its 3 a.m. Your mind is spinning, and rest is elusive. Youre reliving every foolish or embarrassing thing you did in the past 24 or 48 or 72 hours, and that is a lot of material to run through. And you simply cant stop.

Except maybe you could, if only you knew how to be mindful.

When youre caught in that loop of rumination, thats very real, and it creates very intense feelings, explains psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman, who reported on brain and behavioral sciences for the New York Times. If youre mindful, you realize its just a thought. You dont have to believe your thoughts. You can question them, and that changes them. It takes energy from the brain that creates the heaviness. Looking at it in a different way makes the rumination less intense.

You might think, on hearing such praises of mindfulness a form of meditative practice that it will solve just about every problem in your life. Meditation can halt the late-night rumination cycle, right? So cant it also make you into a better person? Enlarge your brain? Make you taller and thinner and richer?

Well, no, says Goleman, whos also the author of the best-selling book Emotional Intelligence. Some claims of meditations power are overblown. Some studies are less rigorous than they should be. But science has proven that meditation can induce healthy and important physical improvements, such as lowering your blood pressure, decreasing relapses into depression and managing chronic pain.

Which leaves us with a question: As our interest in meditation grows, how do we know whats too good to be true?

Goleman has some answers. With Richard J. Davidson, who directs a brain lab and founded the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Goleman has just published Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body (Avery, $27). The book separates truth from fiction, debunking studies and highlighting truth about meditations startling effects on the brain.

Altered Traits also chronicles the authors decades-long friendship and lifelong interest in the subject of meditation, which began at a time during which scientific circles had little patience or interest in the subject.

The book is important because it represents the coming together of two very important voices, says Scott Rogers, founder and director of the Mindfulness and Law Program at the University of Miami School of Law.

Rogers, co-founder of UMindfulness, the universitys inter-disciplinary collaboration that marries research to training, notes another benefit: Not only are Goleman and Davidson experts in their fields, theyre also meditation practitioners.

We need responsible, reasoned voices speaking from a variety of perspectives, and here we have the hard science and the journalist, and both are practitioners. We need a book we can look to as a reliable source of information, Rogers says. They both practice and have for a long time. A lot of researchers have been interested in this over the last 10 or 15 years, but they havent historically practiced mindfulness. There are a bunch of people practicing, but theyre not scientists.

Altered Traits examines scientific studies on meditation and the benefits of intensive retreats, learning to view our selves and our brains in a whole new light and the importance of a good teacher (I feel strongly the quality of the teacher is important, Goleman says). The book also challenges notions we (or at least our bosses) hold dear, such as the idea that multitasking is a positive endeavor.

Multitasking is a myth, Goleman says. You cant really do two things at once. What happens is your brain switches rapidly. As it switches, you lose the power of your concentration. You do many things at once, you do them less well.

But there is good news for multitaskers, according to Altered Traits: Cognitive control can be improved. One test of undergrad volunteers tried short sessions of focusing or breath-counting. Just three 10-minute sessions of breath counting was enough to appreciably increase their attention skills on a battery of tests. And the biggest gains were among the heavy multitaskers, who did more poorly on those tests initially, the authors write.

Which brings up another important question: If the benefits of meditation expand the deeper a persons practice goes, is meditating in short sessions still useful?

Casual practice helps you in surprising ways, but the deeper you go and the more you practice, the more benefits you get, he says. The research shows that right from the beginning mindfulness practices counter the ill effects of multitasking. Were all doing so many things a day. But the improvement in attention starts at the beginning.

And if you can only spare 10 minutes at a time for meditation, Goleman suggests spreading your practice throughout the day.

Intersperse it through the day. Ten minutes in the morning. Ten at lunch. Ten at night. The effect is prolonged. If you can do 20 minutes, even better. If you can do it for a year, thats good. Five years is even better.

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Meditation expert tells us what science really says - Atlanta Journal Constitution

Author Robert Wright says mindfulness can help us live better lives and 'endure the Trump era'

Buddhists had it right all along, and we have the science to prove it.

Thats the premise of a new book from New York Times best-selling author, journalist and Princeton University professor Robert Wright (The Evolution of God, Nonzero).

In his new book, Why Buddhism is True, Wright examines the Buddhist practice of mindfulness meditation from a scientific perspective to explain how it can hold the key to letting go of harmful illusions.

Thought patterns weve developed through evolution served a purpose historically, but they are often at odds with the modern world, Wright explains. Our natural tendencies can result in excessive anxiety and apocalyptic daydreams and lead us to crave pleasures without considering the consequences.

But with the simple practice of mindfulness meditation, Wright contends, we can begin to see these delusions for what they are and begin to experience a life free from their influence.

His book blends evolutionary psychology and evidence from various neurological studies with Buddhism truths and his own personal meditative path. The result is an approachable and at times humorous introduction to Buddhism, meditation and how the human brain functions.

The book guides readers to view their own thoughts with more objectivity, and it may lead some to question the old philosophical adage I think, therefore I am.

Wright will be at Powells City of Books on West Burnside at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 15 for a book signing and discussion.

Wright has written for The New Yorker, Time, The New Republic, Slate and The Atlantic, and he has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award.

He is also the president of The Nonzero Foundation, which operates two websites featuring split-screen interviews aimed at bridging national, religious, cultural, ethnic and ideological divides: BloggingHeads.tv and TheMeaningOfLife.tv.

Street Roots recently spoke with Wright about his new book, how natural selection has led to delusional thoughts and how mindfulness meditation can help calm anxiety during the era of Trump.

Emily Green: First, its probably important that we establish what aspects of Buddhism your book argues are true. Can you explain what secular, or naturalistic, Buddhism is?

Robert Wright: If you take away all the supernatural parts of Buddhism, like reincarnation, youre still left with a kind of amazing claim, which is that the reason we suffer and the reason we make other people suffer is that we dont see the world clearly.

We have illusions about ourselves, about other people, about the world broadly. Buddhism offers a practice, a path, to solving the problem. Its a path that includes meditation. Im defending both the diagnosis that our problem is that we dont see the world clearly and Im also defending the cure; that is mindfulness meditation in particular can help us become happier people, become better people and see things more clearly.

Most of us dont have time for a meditation practice that might promise us full-on enlightenment, as they say in Buddhism, but I think we can all make real progress with a fairly reasonable commitment of time.

E.G.: Lets talk about the diagnosis first. This is as much a book about how the brain works as it is about Buddhism and about how natural selection has shaped our thought patterns. How does evolutionary psychology affect the way we perceive the world around us?

R.W.: A key point is that natural selection basically designs animals to get genes into the next generation, period. Humans are designed to be good at doing that in a particular environment: the hunter-gatherer environment that we evolved in.

But natural selection does not design animals to be happy or to see the world clearly, necessarily. If suffering or having illusions will help you get genes into the next generation, then suffering and illusions will be built into us by natural selection.

A good example of that is the gratification we feel upon indulging our senses, like when eating junk food or whatever, tends to evaporate, and we tend not to really reckon with that in advance.

In other words, when youre pursuing any gratifying goal, whether its food or sex or getting a promotion, you focus on the gratification it will bring and not so much on the fact that the gratification will be fleeting.

When you think about that, it makes sense as a way for natural selection to engineer animals. Right? If after eating a meal, we were contented forever, we would never eat another meal and we would die. If after one sexual encounter, we just lay there basking in the afterglow forever, wed never have sex again, and natural selection wants us to have sex multiple times because that increases our chance of getting genes into the next generation. So this is a case where both suffering, that is to say the restless longing that ensues after gratification evaporates, and a certain kind of illusion, that is to say, not fully anticipating the evaporation of the gratification, are built into us by natural selection. And this particular thing not really reckoning with the impermanence of things, especially the impermanence of gratification was a central theme in Buddhism from the beginning.

E.G.: What are some of the ways that our modern environment tricks our hunter-gatherer minds?

R.W.: There are two problems: One is that natural selection built suffering into people that they will experience even in the kind of environment they were designed for, like a hunter-gatherer environment. The second problem is that the modern environment can make things even worse.

For example, its natural to feel anxiety about the safety of your children, or about what people think of you. You would expect to find a certain amount of anxiety for that reason even in a hunter-gatherer environment. But in the modern environment that natural selection had no way of anticipating, you get whole new forms of anxiety. Like dropping your child off at a day care center where you dont know anybody; thats something that doesnt happen in the environment that we were designed for. Or having to give a presentation in front of people youve never met before; that didnt happen in the environment we were designed for, so you get whole new kinds of anxiety, and fortunately, meditation is pretty good at dealing with anxiety at least it can be if you work at it. And it can change your relationship to unpleasant feelings in general.

Ive had experiences where, if I start out by just accepting an unpleasant feeling like anxiety and experiencing it and examining it, ironically, I wind up viewing it from a critical distance, with a kind of detachment or non-attachment that reduces or even eliminates the suffering it causes me. And more broadly, mindfulness meditation promises to let you examine your feelings carefully and choose which ones you want to be guided by, and since some of these unpleasant feelings are not only unpleasant, they actually blur our vision in a certain sense, anxiety can sponsor crazy, apocalyptic scenarios about whats going to happen to you while public speaking or whats going to happen to your child in some situation. Given that some of these feelings that make us suffer also distort our vision, it only makes sense to approach them with some skepticism and lessen their grip on us, and meditation can help us do that.

E.G.: How would you describe mindfulness meditation to someone who is unfamiliar with it?

R.W.: It usually starts by focusing on something like your breath. If all goes well, you will stop your mind from wandering restlessly, and it will allow you to start focusing on things.

What you then do is just observe, carefully, things you might not normally notice, including things inside your mind, like feelings, thoughts. You basically heighten your awareness of the elements of experience, and some of the most important elements are parts of your mind.

But in principle, having attained this focus and attained some equilibrium, you can also focus on things like sounds with much more clarity than usual. In fact, you can find beauty in things that you normally might not.

When I meditate, sometimes the refrigerator near me starts humming. Believe it or not, the humming of a refrigerator can be a beautiful thing, and you can notice things about it you wouldnt ordinarily notice. It turns out that the hum actually consists of at least three different noises that are independently varying and together they can create a sound that can be beautiful in a certain way.

E.G.: One thing I think will probably resonate with any reader who has ever dabbled in meditation is the way you humorously and honestly talk about your own failed attempts at maintaining focus during meditation. Is that something that has gotten easier with practice, or does it still happen to you now and again?

R.W.: Oh, I still have trouble. I consider myself the opposite of a naturally good meditator. I have a very limited attention span. I dont, by nature, have a ton of emotional equilibrium. And thats why, in my case, it took a weeklong silent meditation retreat to really make me appreciate meditation. A lot of people can pick it up much easier than that, but for me, the retreat convinced me it was worth developing a daily practice. And it has ups and downs. There are days you just feel you cant concentrate at all and you got nothing out of it, but by and large, I find the day goes better when I meditate and that the rewards are sufficient to keep me doing it. I also find the more time I find to do it each day, the better things go and the fewer regrettable things I do.

E.G.: I had an Aha! moment while driving the other day, and I thought of your road rage explanation that you describe in your book how evolutionary psychology created the road rage phenomenon. Just thinking about that really helped me to let go of the anger. Im having a harder time letting go of negative feelings when it comes to annoying people who I know. Any tips on how to do that with mindfulness?

R.W.: Natural selection designed us to have this category of enemy, and once somebody is in that enemy category, its hard for them to get out because we are designed to evaluate their behavior in ways that reinforce the enemy label.

If they do something good, we tend to explain it away as some kind of ploy or some kind of showing off, but if they do something bad, we say yeah that is the real them emerging.

I think it helps for starters to understand the cognitive bias that creates and sustains the enemy category and to understand that our labeling of enemies is biased in favor of selfishness.

Its not an objective view. Its not a pronouncement of Gods that this person deserves your wrath. Its a reaction you had while pursuing your own agenda. Which isnt to say there arent people who have truly earned the enemy label; its just to say that not everybody has. That is step one, and then I think meditation can help, but I think it can help more if you first understand what I just said about the very origins of the concept of enemy.

Now, there are specific types of meditation designed to deal with this one is called loving-kindness meditation. I have never had huge success with that, but everyday mindfulness meditation does sometimes put me in a frame of mind that allows me to think of someone that I basically dont like, and just think about them in a more charitable way almost like their mother might think of them where I suddenly understand that there are reasons that they behave in a way that bothers me. You know how good mothers are at explaining stuff like that She didnt get her nap and I find that meditation can give me a little of that perspective, but its a real challenge. This stuff isnt easy.

E.G.: You started this journey with a meditation retreat back in 2003, and since that time, smartphones have proliferated society. Do you think they add another hurdle to liberation from delusion, considering what theyre doing to our attention spans always being on with notifications?

R.W.: I think one reason meditation retreats are becoming more popular is because they allow you to get off the grid. At most retreats, youre encouraged to leave your smartphone at the desk. When I go on retreat, Im totally out of touch with the world. But even daily meditation, if you focus on the problem, can make you less enslaved to your electronic devices.

One thing mindfulness meditation can do in general is make you more aware of how little subtle feelings tug at you and govern your behavior and your thoughts. So like when youre doing work and suddenly you have this urge to check in with Twitter or Facebook, or do some online shopping, if you meditate, you are more likely to recognize the feelings that are at work.

First of all, theres a feeling of aversion to the work itself. Maybe youve gotten to a difficult part in some writing youre doing so it doesnt feel good to keep writing, and then theres the craving, the attraction of Twitter or Facebook, and if you become aware of those feelings before following their guidance, you have the option of just sitting there and experiencing and observing them until their power lessens.

And this is true of self-discipline in general. In fact, there are studies that show this approach to something like quitting cigarette smoking can be very effective. Once you feel the urge, observe the urge in a meditative way, until its power weakens, which isnt the same as pushing the urge away. Ironically, it starts with accepting the urge, at least enough to get close to it, without following its guidance.

E.G.: At Street Roots, we cover social justice issues in a very left-leaning city, being in Portland, and theres been a sort of collective anxiety here since the election. How can someone use mindfulness to kind of calm that anxiety when stressors are external, and in some ways very real?

R.W.: I think daily meditation allows you to endure the Trump era with somewhat more equanimity now there may be such a thing as too much equanimity in other words, if you quit fighting the things that you think are worth fighting.

In my own case, that is just not a danger. I think, if anything, a more common problem is overreacting to Trumps provocations, often in ways that play into his hands and confirm his narrative that everyone hates him and holds his followers in contempt and so on.

In fact, I just started a site called MindfulResistance.net. Were putting out a weekly newsletter. Its not for meditators only, but it is premised on the idea that the kind of mindset meditation cultivates, a mindset of very clear vision and awareness without overreacting emotionally to things, can be helpful in combatting Trumpism.

I also think being aware of how the world is perceived by Trump supporters can be very helpful. Thats called cognitive empathy, as distinguished from the kind of feel-your-pain emotional empathy. Its just a matter of perspective taking. I think the more we understand the various reasons, and I think there are a lot of reasons that people voted for Trump, the better we will be able to make it less likely that someone like him will be president again.

I think meditation is good for cognitive empathy because it can weaken the emotional obstacles to seeing things from the point of view of somebody who is in the other tribe, so to speak. And I think one thing we shouldnt lose sight of is the people who voted for Trump have grievances, and some of them are not imagined.

Globalization, technological change these things have complicated a lot of peoples lives, and we need to think of ways to address the problems they create. I think the more time we can spend doing that thinking, the better, and if we spend too much time overreacting to Trumps daily provocations, we wont have time to do that.

E.G.: It almost seems like he kind of plays into some of those hunter-gatherer brain tendencies, especially with tribalism, as you mentioned.

R.W.: Totally, I think this is a big problem with the world, whether its like sectarian conflict, Sunni-Shia, or national conflict, U.S.-North Korea or ideological conflict in America. Its what you could call the psychology of tribalism and the cognitive biases that entails, and I think it inflicts both sides.

I think anyone on either side who thinks the other side is the entire problem is deluded. I think almost all of us have spread fake news. I know I have sometimes retweeted things without really carefully examining the information I was spreading, and the reason I did it is because it felt good to do it. It was information that reflected badly on the other tribe, or on Trump, and again, I think mindfulness meditation can make you a little more aware of when you are being pulled into something like that by your feelings, and it can help you step back and ask yourself, wait a second, do I really want to retweet this? And if everybody on both sides did this, America would be a massively better place.

E.G.: Anything else youd like to add for anyone who might be interested in reading your book?

R.W.: What you hear most about mindfulness meditation, that its good therapy and can help you deal with anxiety and stress and so on, is true in my view. But I think its also true that this therapeutic view of meditation can be the first step toward a deeper kind of exploration that is philosophical and even spiritual in nature. In the book, I tried to provide enough information about the Buddhist philosophy that is the context of Buddhist meditation to help people who are so inclined explore that path.

Email staff reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites.

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The science of Buddhism: 'Real progress' through meditation - Street Roots News

Given Rockaways popularity with young professionals from Manhattan and Brooklyn, one might write off a new meditation center as the latest trendy offering to cater to day-trippers seeking a quickie yoga class between their surf tutorial and cocktails.

But its location is a working-class residential neighborhood apart from the newer food and drink spots. And while many participants do tend to be under 40, they do not seem to be pleasure-seekers coming to for a day at the beach, but rather people seeking spiritual relief from the daily grind of the city.

Retreats are extended, disciplined experiences that range from a weekend to more than 10 days, and are offered year-round. Participants are expected to remain silent throughout no cellphones permitted and eat only during meals, which are provided by the center.

Sometimes people have a hard time putting down their phones, but its rejuvenating, said one attendee, Charity Burns, a college English teacher from Forest Hills, Queens.

The retreats are not completely ascetic. For one, the cooking is done by the Italian-born Ms. Maselli, who said she uses produce grown in the houses expansive yard, as well as products donated by organic companies that support the retreat house. One company donated 2,000 boxes of pasta, which goes nicely with the gardens bounty of tomatoes.

So spaghetti night is pretty much every night, Mr. Suddhaso said. Actually, he added, the offerings are varied, with an emphasis on healthy, ethical food, that is vegetarian and made from organic ingredients.

On a recent day, Ms. Maselli was cooking a huge bowl of mung bean stew, preparing focaccia and roasting yellow peppers for dinner. Several retreatgoers chopped vegetables, fulfilling the daily work assignments expected of each participant.

In the adjacent meditation room, participants waited for lunch while reading or sitting silently. Stan, the resident black cat, lolled in front of a Buddhist altar.

Ms. Maselli, a former fashion magazine editor and writer, moved to New York City about nine years ago and eventually settled in Rockaway. She began taking classes at various locations with Mr. Suddhaso, who grew up in Colorado and began practicing meditation as a teenager and trained in monasteries in California and Canada. He moved to New York City two years ago to lead classes on Buddhist concepts and their practical applicability to everyday life.

The pair formed Buddhist Insights, a group offering meditation classes and retreats throughout the city, and then moved to the large Rockaway house when it came up for rent.

They renovated the house, leaving the first floor as a spacious meditation hall and kitchen, with the two upper floors as sleeping space. The center can sleep 20, and can accommodate 40 for meditation classes.

In the kitchen, Ms. Maselli finished preparing lunch and leaned over the food and said softly, I offer this to the sangha, using the Sanskrit word for community.

Participants lined up to help themselves, with Mr. Suddhaso first. They brought their food into the meditation room and sat cross-legged and silent on small cushions, with Mr. Suddhaso seated in front of the altar.

This food is not for fun or pleasure, but for the health of the body, so we can continue our spiritual practice, Mr. Suddhaso said, urging attendees to maintain mindfulness and contentment while eating and remain fully present with the experience, without either desire or attachment.

He urged them to resist the natural inclination to think forward to the next bite, and to put down their forks between bites.

The desire for that next bite actually prevents us from enjoying the bite we are currently eating, he said, and then rang a bell known as a singing bowl, to formally begin lunch. Everyone began eating in silence, as the ocean breeze wafted in through the fully open windows, as did neighborhood noise.

Attendees were not distracted by cars blasting loud music, and the commercial airliners overhead, ascending from Kennedy International Airport just across Jamaica Bay.

As the participants finished their lunches, the cat walked around inspecting the finished dishes until a laughing Ms. Maselli picked him up.

There is no fee for sessions at the center, which relies on contributions. Donations are not even formally requested of the attendees.

I wouldnt use the term request, Mr. Suddhaso said. We say the opportunity to donate is available.

The policy opens the retreats to people of lesser means, and lets guests practice generosity by donating out of gratitude, instead of obligation, in accordance with Buddhist principles, Mr. Suddhaso said.

Securing a slot for a retreat involves exchanging emails with Ms. Maselli, to ensure that our program is a good fit for the applicant, he said.

There was the participant who balked at the centers obligatory one-hour-a-day of light work and expected her meals to be served to her.

She wanted to be waited on, Ms. Maselli said. She left in the middle of the night.

Mr. Suddhaso said: You dont come here for a four-star hotel if we were a hotel, wed be 1.5 stars.

Ms. Maselli gave him a look.

Except for the food, he quickly added. Which is five stars.

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Surf's Up in the Rockaways? Let's Meditate on That - New York Times

Do nothing for 15 seconds.

The ad on my iPad screen taunted me with its invitation, set against a soft-focus image of rain-kissed greenery.

Do nothing for 15 seconds! I cracked up. Id already been doing nothing for 15 minutes. Doing nothing is pretty much my raison d'tre when I pick up my iPad. I do nothing in the form of playing Words with Friends. I do nothing in the form of making rows of colored blocks disappear in the game 1010! I do nothing in the form of almost anything you can imagine except actually, literally, doing nothing.

Now this come-on for a meditation app called Calm was offering me a window into tranquility. Of course, the ad didnt truly want me to do nothing; it wanted me to install the Calm app. The thought arose in my mind: Peddling a mindfulness app via digital advertising is like depositing a temperance pamphlet at the bottom of a booze bottle. Youve got the right target market, for sure. But its kind of an awkward place to put the message.

I bit anyway. Ive dabbled in simple, non-flaky meditation for yearsno crystals, please!but have never managed to make it a regular part of my routine. I installed Calm on my phone, clicked impatiently through the pop-up box that told me to turn on notifications to fully experience Calm, and checked out its offerings: introductory meditation sessions; guided sequences; sleep relaxation techniques. I made a mental note to give the app a try early the next morning. And then I went back to my usual drill of doing nothing, unassisted.

Bzzzz! Not more than five minutes later, my phone vibrated, nagging me with a notification from Calm. Its time to meditate. Really?

Then my eye snapped to the next notification on the screen. The New York Times wanted me to know that a violent protest in Charlottesville, Va. turned tragic. Of course, I clicked on the news. Nirvana would have to wait.

With 12 million downloads, Calm is part of a broader wave of apps that aim to counter digital anomie and smartphone numb-out by planting a flag of mindfulness in the citadel of distraction. It's an alchemical strategya bet that you can somehow transmute your phone from an engine of diversion into a lens of mental focus. Its almost like a bit of jiu-jitsu, Calms CEO Alex Tew explained to me. You use the devices power against itself in order to fix some of the issues that its causing. Could that possibly work?

Andy Puddicombe, the monk-turned-entrepreneur behind Headspaceanother popular meditation appthinks so. As he put it on a recent TV appearance, for most of us, the phone is the most stressful thing in our lifeand I love the paradox in that, the irony. The phones a piece of plastic, a piece of metal, a piece of glass. Its not good or bad...We define the relationship with the phone. I love the idea that the phone can actually serve up something really good, thats good for our health.

Headspace claims 18 million users who tune in to Puddicombes phlegmatic British accent to build a meditation habit. Both Calm and Headspace provide free intros to a basic follow-the-breath style of meditation, teaching you not to suppress or fight wayward, restless thoughts but simply to observe them and detach yourself from them. Its the same approachnondenominational, stripped of myth and chantthat Id first encountered decades ago in the pages of Lawrence LeShans classic book How to Meditate.

But unlike the book, which you can buy for a one-time cost of $8.66, these apps are masters of the upsell. Like the free samples? They will offer you upgrades that unlock more advanced lessons and lectures. This mercenary approach might feel out of place, but I dont resent the in-app purchaseseveryones got to eat, app makers and meditation teachers alike (for the latter, at least, you know, in between fasts).

The notifications are more of a problem. Headspace uses them, too; its less pushy than Calm, but it will, if you allow it, litter your lock screen with messages like, Is it time for your daily meditation?

Still, you can always tame or turn off notifications, as a growing chorus of declutter-your-life advocates urge. The tougher question meditation apps raise stems from their reliance on the tactic of gamificationthe app makers irrepressible impulse to track every activity, incentivize every decision point, and transform any pursuit into a competition, whether with others or yourself.

Some meditators swear by gamifying, but to me, it seems ludicrously wrongheaded and self-defeating. This is not an endeavor where offering gold stars for milestones makes any sense; if anything, it is one that ought to lead you gently away from the entire score-keeping mindset. Thats why I found Calms encouragementsYou star! You completed your first session!so jarring. This articles editor, Jessi Hempel, reports uninstalling her Mindfulness App when she discovered herself cheating by setting the timer to count minutes while she was actually in the shower. Another app, Buddhify, boasts, More than 50MM minutes of meditation clocked up so far. Maybe when they hit 100, as in the famous Arthur C. Clarke story The Nine Billion Names of God, the stars will start extinguishing.

All these apps scorecards and minutes meditated counters are intended as motivators, and Im sure they work for some users. For me, they just bring to mind the old comic gem from The Onion, Monk Gloats Over Yoga Championship, in which a guru pumps his fists and cries, I am the serenest! (From the article: Bikram averaged 1.89 breaths a minute during the two-hour competition, nearly .3 fewer than his nearest competitor.)

When theyre not trying to turn meditation into a statistics game, these apps insist on transforming an inner experience into something shareable. Each time you finish a session with Insight Timer, a useful app Ive employed for years to time intervals in yoga poses, the program insists on routing you through a screen that tells you how many other people around the world have used it to meditate at the same time. I guess for some people, even mindfulness has to be social. Pics or it didnt enlighten!

Between their nagging screens and their gamifying tendencies, todays crop of meditation apps might well drive you to find a lower-tech alternative. People somehow managed to meditate for thousands of years without the help of iPhones. As Lifehacker reminds us, like music, incense, and floor cushions, apps are never necessary to meditate. You need nothing at all to get started...Youre even meditating when you are being mindful about washing the dishes or walking around your neighborhood. For a bit of inspiration, just head over to YouTube, take in a fine old Alan Watts lecture, and then sit down and start following your breath.

At least, thats the path Im more likely to take. To hell with 15 seconds of nothing! Meditation isnt about doing nothingits about learning to do one thing deliberately. Computers and phones are general-purpose devices; multitasking is their essence. Apps will always want to add more features and track new data. I began getting seriously worked up about the absurdity of expecting an app to lead you to enlightenment when my phone lit up with yet another message: Its time to meditate. And I laughed again.

I wont claim any sudden flashes of insight. But the reminder did prompt me to dial back my critical reflex for a momentto realize that my rebellion against my meditation app wasnt a simple, open-and-shut example of the superiority of unplugging. Theres a long, rich debate in humankinds meditation traditions about the choice between seclusion from the world or immersion in it. Some people need to become monks to tune out the world; others pursue tranquility from inside the chaos of life. Smartphones just confront us with the latest version of this choice. App makers like Calms Tew say theyre aiming to meet people where they already arewhich is glued to their devices.

Theres a road to calm that leads away from your phone, and another that routes you right through its touchscreen. Why quarrel over which is superior? Better just to figure out which one works for you, and then to take a few steps.

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Meditation Apps Are Incredibly Ironic | WIRED - WIRED

So you fell asleep easily enough, but now its 3 a.m. Your mind is spinning, and rest is elusive. Youre reliving every foolish or embarrassing thing you did in the past 24 or 48 or 72 hours, and that is a lot of material to run through. And you simply cant stop.

Except maybe you could, if only you knew how to be mindful.

When youre caught in that loop of rumination, thats very real, and it creates very intense feelings, explains psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman, who reported on brain and behavioral sciences for the New York Times. If youre mindful, you realize its just a thought. You dont have to believe your thoughts. You can question them, and that changes them. It takes energy from the brain that creates the heaviness. Looking at it in a different way makes the rumination less intense.

You might think, on hearing such praises of mindfulness a form of meditative practice that it will solve just about every problem in your life. Meditation can halt the late-night rumination cycle, right? So cant it also make you into a better person? Enlarge your brain? Make you taller and thinner and richer?

Well, no, says Goleman, whos also the author of the best-selling book Emotional Intelligence. Some claims of meditations power are overblown. Some studies are less rigorous than they should be. But science has proven that meditation can induce healthy and important physical improvements, such as lowering your blood pressure, decreasing relapses into depression and managing chronic pain.

Which leaves us with a question: As our interest in meditation grows, how do we know whats too good to be true?

Goleman has some answers. With Richard J. Davidson, who directs a brain lab and founded the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Goleman has just published Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body (Avery, $27). The book separates truth from fiction, debunking studies and highlighting truth about meditations startling effects on the brain.

Altered Traits also chronicles the authors decades-long friendship and lifelong interest in the subject of meditation, which began at a time during which scientific circles had little patience or interest in the subject.

The book is important because it represents the coming together of two very important voices, says Scott Rogers, founder and director of the Mindfulness and Law Program at the University of Miami School of Law. He will be in conversation with Goleman at Miami Dade College.

Rogers, co-founder of UMindfulness, the universitys inter-disciplinary collaboration that marries research to training, notes another benefit: Not only are Goleman and Davidson experts in their fields, theyre also meditation practitioners.

We need responsible, reasoned voices speaking from a variety of perspectives, and here we have the hard science and the journalist, and both are practitioners. We need a book we can look to as a reliable source of information, Rogers says. They both practice and have for a long time. A lot of researchers have been interested in this over the last 10 or 15 years, but they havent historically practiced mindfulness. There are a bunch of people practicing, but theyre not scientists.

Altered Traits examines scientific studies on meditation and the benefits of intensive retreats, learning to view our selves and our brains in a whole new light and the importance of a good teacher (I feel strongly the quality of the teacher is important, Goleman says). The book also challenges notions we (or at least our bosses) hold dear, such as the idea that multitasking is a positive endeavor.

Multitasking is a myth, Goleman says. You cant really do two things at once. What happens is your brain switches rapidly. As it switches, you lose the power of your concentration. You do many things at once, you do them less well.

But there is good news for multitaskers, according to Altered Traits: Cognitive control can be improved. One test of undergrad volunteers tried short sessions of focusing or breath-counting. Just three 10-minute sessions of breath counting was enough to appreciably increase their attention skills on a battery of tests. And the biggest gains were among the heavy multitaskers, who did more poorly on those tests initially, the authors write.

Which brings up another important question: If the benefits of meditation expand the deeper a persons practice goes, is meditating in short sessions still useful?

Goleman says yes.

Casual practice helps you in surprising ways, but the deeper you go and the more you practice, the more benefits you get, he says. The research shows that right from the beginning mindfulness practices counter the ill effects of multitasking. Were all doing so many things a day. But the improvement in attention starts at the beginning.

And if you can only spare 10 minutes at a time for meditation, Goleman suggests spreading your practice throughout the day.

Intersperse it through the day. Ten minutes in the morning. Ten at lunch. Ten at night. The effect is prolonged. If you can do 20 minutes, even better. If you can do it for a year, thats good. Five years is even better.

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The science behind meditation and why multitasking is a 'myth ... - Chicago Tribune

Its 9 on a Tuesday morning, and Larry Lowndes is setting out the cushions.

The lights are off and the ceiling fan turns gently overhead, making the room feel distant from the brighter, louder world outside. One by one, people slip off their shoes, shuffle through the door and find a seat. Everyone introduce themselves by first name, starting with Lowndes, and everybody echoes it back Hi, Larry because this is a group for recovering addicts.

Lowndes is the assistant director of the Second Wind Foundation, which operates an addiction recovery center in Wilder that serves as a space for a number of recovery groups, including Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step meetings. But Lowndes has recently introduced a new, less conventional program at Turning Point: Refuge Recovery, a peer-to-peer, mindfulness-based recovery group, grounded in Buddhist principles.

Some of the participants in the group have been practicing meditation, and sobriety, for decades; others are new to both. Their testimonies, as well as insights from experts in related fields, suggest that the Buddhist-based practices of mindfulness and meditation hold real promise as another tool in your toolbox of recovery, as Lowndes put it.

The Refuge Recovery program was devised by Noah Levine, a tattooed, gold-toothed, punk-loving Buddhist from Santa Cruz who turned to meditation after his drug addiction landed him in a padded room at 17.

When Lowndes learned about Refuge Recovery a few months ago, he was immediately excited he himself is a practicing Buddhist, who has been using meditation to help with his own recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction for the past 30 years. Lowndes knew firsthand that Levines experience was not an isolated one. He thinks the group offers a good alternative to traditional recovery programs that, while helpful for many people, also can be alienating for others.

Some peoples metaphysical beliefs dont line up with a higher power, said Lowdnes, who also started a recovery group for agnostics and atheists at Turning Point several years ago. Refuge Recovery is non-theistic, meaning that while it draws from Buddhist philosophy, there is no religious component.

And this is important theres no one in charge, he added. Its just one person in recovery helping another.

The group meets for an hour twice a week: Tuesdays at 9 a.m., and Fridays at 5:30 p.m. Lowndes estimated that an average of 12 people attend each meeting, though Fridays group is usually a bit better attended, and skews younger.

Once everyone has introduced themselves, a volunteer from the group reads aloud the Four Tasks of Refuge Recovery, adapted from the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism: Addiction creates suffering. The cause of addiction is repetitive craving. Recovery is possible. The path to recovery is available.

A volunteer then facilitates a 20-minute mindfulness exercise, guided by a laminated script that offers suggestions for what to say and when to say it. Afterward, group members read a passage aloud from Levines book, Refuge Recovery. A 20-minute group discussion follows, during which members of the group share their thoughts about the days exercise and reading, or talk about how their recovery is going.

Because of the stigma surrounding addiction, and because anonymity is a main tenet of the Refuge Recovery program, most of the participants interviewed for this story have agreed to share their first names only.

One of those people is Mike, a recovering alcoholic who started drinking in eighth grade.

The very first time, I drank to get drunk, he said in an interview after one of Tuesdays meetings. Not for the camaraderie of it, but for the effect it had on me. He drank until he passed out and his friends carried him home, where, oh boy, I was sicker than a dog.

This became a pattern: Hed drink until he was sick, or unconscious, and hed drink like this every day.

Talk about an acute cellular need, he said.

Now 64, hes been sober 30 years, and going to AA for 29. He said the meetings have been useful in their way, but learning how to practice meditation and mindfulness was a game-changer, he said. The single biggest event in my recovery.

A former nurse at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Mike described himself as a science-based person. Hed joined AA because he needed it, and because theres some good stuff in there, but he couldnt help but get hung up on all the God words.

He first started meditating when things hit the fan at work. He was finding it harder to take care of patients and fill out paperwork, and eventually was accused of diverting drugs a charge he vehemently denied. He ended up getting sent to a neurologist, where he found out the reason for his cognitive impairments: He was in the early stages of Huntingtons disease, a fatal genetic disorder that destroys brain cells and affects movement, cognition and mood.

During this ordeal, rather than relapsing, it came to me to meditate, Mike said. Instead of feeling like the victim, instead of feeling anger, I found that if I was just able to be for a couple of minutes, it put things more in perspective.

Lowndes said this is what speaks to him about the practice, too.

Mindfulness is not about controlling your thoughts, he said. Its about realizing my thoughts dont control me, and learning to sit with discomfort, rather than reacting to it.

Of course, meditation and mindfulness stem from an ancient tradition that has only recently worked their way into mainstream Western culture. Reiko Ohnuma, a religious studies professor at Dartmouth College who specializes in South Asian Buddhism, wrote in a recent email exchange that while she generally has no problem with secular applications of Buddhism, or even with white Americans practicing Buddhism per se, what bothers her is when people conflate meditation and mindfulness with the true essence of Buddhism.

In fact, many Asian Americans continue to take part in the rituals and modes of worship that have characterized Eastern Buddhism, but many Americanized versions of Buddhism treat these traditions as inessential to the practice, and as cultural baggage that Asian Americans should shed in order to better assimilate into Western society, she wrote.

Though Levine is a practicing Buddhist, and Refuge Recovery is based in Buddhist principles, the group itself is explicitly non-theistic. Ohnuma believes this to be an important distinction.

I think its great if the principles behind Buddhist meditation can help people overcome addiction, she wrote. Its a secular application of Buddhist principles that really makes sense to me (i.e., coming to see that cravings are ephemeral and learning to experience their rise and fall in a detached manner, etc.).

For John, who asked to have his first name changed in this story because of his potential future employers views on addiction, these insights have helped shape the last few years of life.

John, who primarily struggled with heroin addiction and alcohol, has been sober for three years. Fighting the battle for much longer, he added with a dry laugh.

Ten years ago when John, now 30, was in jail, he came across a copy of Dharma Punx, Levines first book, which chronicles his experience using meditation and Buddhist principles to overcome addiction. It resonated with John: He, like Levine, was incarcerated, addicted and in great psychological pain and he, like Levine in Dharma Punx, was skeptical that meditation could help him find peace of mind.

And so he, like Levine, gave it a try. Though John hit some potholes on his road to sobriety, he said Refuge Recovery has been absolutely essential in getting to where he is now.

He said mindfulness was especially helpful when he was trying to figure out how to spend his days, now that they didnt revolve around using.

Being an addict is a 24/7 job, he said. After getting sober, you dont know what to do with all the emptiness. Suddenly you have all this time, all the time in the world, to think about everything you dont want to think about. And its easy to fall into really bad emotional states.

Learning how to recognize this discomfort as fleeting keeps you from going into full-blown panic mode, John said, adding that this tendency to fill the void with overthinking is part of why so many addicts suffer from low self-worth, and feel they dont deserve to find happiness.

Levines work has helped John come to the conclusion that the fact that you exist gives you the right to be happy, and that one way to move toward happiness is simply to learn how to be a good person.

Like Mike, he bristled at some of the religious overtones of traditional 12-step programs. And hes no stranger to those, either: When John was growing up, his father was in recovery and would bring John along to his meetings.

I remember sitting there as a kid and just thinking, Oh my God, this is so boring, he said. Maybe thats why I didnt get that much out of it later.

Noting that most of the AA programs hes been to tend to be attended by older folks, Refuge Recovery has a more universal appeal because its explicitly non-authoritative and non-theistic, and because, as John put it, someone has to say it: Its more hip.

It may be hip, but Levine was not the first American to suggest that Buddhist practices could help people dealing with addiction.

The notion reaches back to the 1970s and 80s, when the MIT-trained scientist Jon Kabat-Zinn created the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program, which was pretty much what it sounds like. Though hed studied meditation with some well-known monks, including the Buddhist leader and activist Thich Nhat Hanh, Kabat-Zinns program removed mindfulness from its historical and cultural roots.

Instead, he began studying it from a purely clinical perspective. An offshoot of that program, called mindfulness-based relapse prevention or MBRP, sprouted up at the University of Washington soon thereafter. MBRP is now an established research niche.

A phone interview with Hedy Kober, who runs the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Lab at Yale and conducts research on meditation and substance use disorders, helped shed some light on how and why these Buddhist-based practices can help people like John, Mark and Lowndes.

In part, its because of the way meditation acts on areas of brain involved with one of the most common reasons for relapse: stress and craving.

Researchers have found that people whod completed an eight-week program in mindfulness-based stress reduction also underwent physical changes in their brains. The amygdala, a part of the brain that plays an important role in regulating fear and anxiety, got smaller a change that correlates with reduced stress levels. Other areas of the brain, such as those involved in cognition, emotional regulation and empathy, thickened over the course of the program.

And craving is closely tied to the parts of the brain involved in reward-seeking. Mindfulness exercises have been shown to reduce activity in some of these areas, thereby helping to mitigate the cravings that drive so many addictive tendencies.

(Being mindful) teaches you to notice your craving without judging yourself and going into the whole oh my god this is so bad, and makes it easier not to act on that feeling, she said. You recognize that the feeling rises, rises, but eventually it falls if you just let it be.

This has proven invaluable for Judi, who is new to sobriety and has gone to a few Refuge Recovery meetings at Turning Point so far.

She got sober in April. Shes been primarily an alcoholic for 45 of her 60 years, but Ive gotten into every other drug, too, except for heroin, she said.

Shes been in and out of AA for years. But all that God stuff made me put up a block. I never was religious. I felt like it was missing something for me.

In these past few months, though, shes realized that a higher power doesnt have to be a god. One of her higher powers is nature. The other one is love: Part of why she stopped drinking in April was because she knew it was time to put down her 17-year-old dog.

My drinking buddy, she said. I knew I needed to be sober for that. If not, I knew I would go over the deep end.

It was also in April, while she was staying in a rehab facility in southern New Hampshire, that a teacher introduced her to meditation and mindfulness. It was hard at first, but with a bit of practice, it led to an epiphany.

I saw myself in the mountains, in the Alps, like in The Sound of Music, she said. She heard the song Edelweiss. I started crying for the first time in 20 years.

She realized that because she had always suffered from low self-worth, she hadnt felt comfortable expressing her emotions since childhood. Shes working on it, though: The other weekend she stood up for herself at work when her coworkers were harassing her, and she was surprised at how empowering it was to feel compassion for herself.

Now, every morning, she sits quietly for 15 or 20 minutes.

It helps. Sometimes I just wake up in a crap mood, and its only the thing that calms me down before all the commotion starts up in my head, she said.

Though she enjoys meditating on her own, she likes coming to Refuge Recovery for the social aspect of the meetings. Shed been so used to isolating herself that shed forgotten people could be accepting, and not mean, she said.

This time around, Im really learning how to find me again, and Im learning how to let go not let God, but just let life happen, on lifes terms.

Upper Valley Turning Point in Wilder holds Refuge Recovery meetings Tuesdays from 9 to 10 a.m. and Fridays from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Meetings are open to anyone with an interest in recovery from addiction. For more information about Refuge Recovery, visit refugerecovery.org.

EmmaJean Holley can be reached at eholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.

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Meditation for Recovery: Program Adapts Buddhist Practice to Fight Addiction - Valley News

So you fell asleep easily enough, but now it's 3 a.m. Your mind is spinning, and rest is elusive. You're reliving every foolish or embarrassing thing you did in the past 24 or 48 or 72 hours, and that is a lot of material to run through. And you simply can't stop.

Except maybe you could, if only you knew how to be mindful.

"When you're caught in that loop of rumination, that's very real, and it creates very intense feelings," explains psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman, who reported on brain and behavioral sciences for the New York Times. "If you're mindful, you realize it's just a thought. You don't have to believe your thoughts. You can question them, and that changes them. It takes energy from the brain that creates the heaviness. Looking at it in a different way makes the rumination less intense."

You might think, on hearing such praises of mindfulness a form of meditative practice that it will solve just about every problem in your life. Meditation can halt the late-night rumination cycle, right? So can't it also make you into a better person? Enlarge your brain? Make you taller and thinner and richer?

Well, no, says Goleman, who's also the author of the best-selling book "Emotional Intelligence." Some claims of meditation's power are overblown. Some studies are less rigorous than they should be. But science has proven that meditation can induce healthy and important physical improvements, such as lowering your blood pressure, decreasing relapses into depression and managing chronic pain.

Which leaves us with a question: As our interest in meditation grows, how do we know what's too good to be true?

Goleman has some answers. With Richard J. Davidson, who directs a brain lab and founded the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Goleman has just published "Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body" (Avery, $27). The book separates truth from fiction, debunking studies and highlighting truth about meditation's startling effects on the brain.

"Altered Traits" also chronicles the authors' decades-long friendship and lifelong interest in the subject of meditation, which began at a time during which scientific circles had little patience or interest in the subject.

The book is important because it represents "the coming together of two very important voices," says Scott Rogers, founder and director of the Mindfulness and Law Program at the University of Miami School of Law. He will be in conversation with Goleman at Miami Dade College.

Rogers, co-founder of UMindfulness, the university's inter-disciplinary collaboration that marries research to training, notes another benefit: Not only are Goleman and Davidson experts in their fields, they're also meditation practitioners.

"We need responsible, reasoned voices speaking from a variety of perspectives, and here we have the hard science and the journalist, and both are practitioners. We need a book we can look to as a reliable source of information," Rogers says. "They both practice and have for a long time. A lot of researchers have been interested in this over the last 10 or 15 years, but they haven't historically practiced mindfulness. There are a bunch of people practicing, but they're not scientists."

"Altered Traits" examines scientific studies on meditation and the benefits of intensive retreats, learning to view our selves and our brains in a whole new light and the importance of a good teacher ("I feel strongly the quality of the teacher is important," Goleman says). The book also challenges notions we (or at least our bosses) hold dear, such as the idea that multitasking is a positive endeavor.

"Multitasking is a myth," Goleman says. "You can't really do two things at once. What happens is your brain switches rapidly. As it switches, you lose the power of your concentration. You do many things at once, you do them less well."

But there is good news for multitaskers, according to "Altered Traits": Cognitive control can be improved. One test of undergrad volunteers tried short sessions of focusing or breath-counting. "Just three 10-minute sessions of breath counting was enough to appreciably increase their attention skills on a battery of tests. And the biggest gains were among the heavy multitaskers, who did more poorly on those tests initially," the authors write.

Which brings up another important question: If the benefits of meditation expand the deeper a person's practice goes, is meditating in short sessions still useful?

"Casual practice helps you in surprising ways, but the deeper you go and the more you practice, the more benefits you get," he says. "The research shows that right from the beginning mindfulness practices counter the ill effects of multitasking. We're all doing so many things a day. But the improvement in attention starts at the beginning."

And if you can only spare 10 minutes at a time for meditation, Goleman suggests spreading your practice throughout the day.

"Intersperse it through the day. Ten minutes in the morning. Ten at lunch. Ten at night. The effect is prolonged. If you can do 20 minutes, even better. If you can do it for a year, that's good. Five years is even better."

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Meditation expert tells us what the science really says and why multitasking is a 'myth' - Southernminn.com

Sitting still can almost feel like torture at times, so when I think of meditation, I'll admit I'm not always excited to jump into it. Although I can saythat, once I'm in it, I love it, but to actually coax myself into meditation sometimes feels likean exercise in and of itself. So, even as someone who has practiced meditation before, I still find myself searching for advice about how to meditate for beginners, because if I'm being honest with myself, there's always room for me to learn.

If this sounds like you, and sitting still just isn't your thing, then don't be so quick to swear off meditation. Maybe you just need to learn a little aboutmeditation movement.

Movement meditation is a practice in which you are still able tap into a higher consciousness and enter a blissful, peaceful meditative trance only this time, without feeling like you have to commit yourself to one corner of the room for 10 to 20 minutes.

Wellness should always be something you enjoy, so if you aren't enjoying it, or if it takes more than a little bit of coaxing, then it's fair to find other alternatives. In fact, you should look for other options. Don't ever feel like you have to hop on the prevailing wellness trend just because it's trending. What someone else considers their wellness may not be your wellness, so make sureyou find what works best for you.

With that said, in light of those who just can't sit the f*ck down, I've compiled a list of five different types of movement meditation to try if you suck at sitting still.

Yoga is considered movement meditation because it focuses heavily on breathing. With each mindful inhale and exhale, it becomes easier and easier to tap into the present moment, and be in tune with the movement of your body.

With yoga, you enter a trance-like state, but you feel preoccupied, because you are literally stretching your body this way and that. In this way, yoga is healing for your spirit, as well as your physical body.

The queen of wellness herself, Erykah Badu, likes to do a little thing calledwalking meditation.

Badu explained the concept in the above video,

I practice walking meditation, meaning the breath honing my breath at any moment.

When I feel it getting shallow, that means I'm anxious about something, and then I consciously slow it down and do some deep breathing.

If Queen Badu is an advocate, I'm an advocate.

If you watch a tai chi video on YouTube, then you'd see just how relaxing this movement meditation is.

Tai chi is an ancient Chinese tradition that is a graceful, non-competitive, self-paced system of gentle exercise and stretching. Unlike yoga, tai chi is less of a challenge to move your limbs this way and that. It's more low-impact, which means that your muscles and joints are able to rest, and yet, you're still moving.

Each movement flows into the next posture without interruption to ensure that your body is constantly in motion. It's a wonderful form of meditation for someone who resists stillness of the body, but is still looking for a meditative state of mind. With this practice, you're able to effortlessly zone into a tranquil breathing trance.

Qigong, pronounced chi-gong, is similar to tai chi in that the practice is also an ancient tradition of China that is composed of slow, soft-flowing, low-impact movements, and focuses on cultivating good energy.

The difference is that tai chi is a martial art, while qigong is used for healing.

Think about it this way: When you are in transit, you have no choice but to sit still.Whether or not you regularly meditate, you'd be sitting still in that seat regardless, right? So you may as well use that time to tap into your spirit and be in the present moment.

Practicing meditation while on a bus or a train is also great for beginners because it won'tfeel like you're totallymandated to sit still. Rather, you'll feel like you're using your time wisely. It's a way to easily trick the brain into willfully meditating in stillness if that is something that would usually be difficult for you.

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Imani Brammer is a writer, on-air talent and YouTuber, where she produces videos on how to navigate the nuances of adulthood. Subscribe to her channel at YouTube.com/ImaniBrammer and be sure to follow her on Instagram.com/ImaniBrammer

Imani Brammer is a writer, on-air talent and YouTuber, where she produces videos on how to navigate the nuances of adulthood. Subscribe to her channel at YouTube.com/ImaniBrammer and be sure to follow her on Instagram.com/ImaniBrammer

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5 Different Types Of Meditation To Try If You Suck At Sitting Still - Elite Daily