Executive Summary

Whether you are trying to reconcile conflicting stakeholder priorities, finding a solution to a customers issue, or launching a new product line, your solution probably wont come out of a textbook. But its hard to keep having great ideas day after day. What do you do when you run out of good ideas? How do you get your mojo back?One increasingly popular solution is mindfulness meditation.Google, Goldman Sachs, and Medtronicare among the many leading firms that have introduced meditation and other mindfulness practices to their employees. Executives at these and other companies say meditation is not only useful as a stress-reduction tool but can also enhance creativity, opening doors where once there seemed to be only a wall.To gain a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of short meditation sessions in boosting creativity, the authorslooked first at the literature and then conducted their own experiments.They found thatmindfulness mediation works to enhance creativity and innovation, and 10 to 12 minutes of itare enough to boost creativity.

In more and more occupations, creativity is part of the job description. Whether you are trying to reconcile conflicting stakeholder priorities, finding a solution to a customers issue, or launching a new product line, your solution probably wont come out of a textbook. But its hard to keep having great ideas day after day. What do you do when you run out of good ideas? How do you get your mojo back?

One increasingly popular solution is mindfulness meditation. Google, Goldman Sachs, and Medtronic are among the many leading firms that have introduced meditation and other mindfulness practices to their employees. Executives at these and other companies say meditation is not only useful as a stress-reduction tool but can also enhance creativity, opening doors where once there seemed to be only a wall.

To gain a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of short meditation sessions in boosting creativity, we looked first at the literature and then conducted our own experiments. Heres what we found.

Mindfulness mediation works to enhance creativity and innovation.Many executives have taken up meditation because they find it helps themswitch gears when stress piles up. Research shows that mindfulness meditation can have many positive effects on workplace outcomes. Regularly doing it boosts your resilience, enabling you to mitigate stress, regulate emotions, and have a more positive outlook so that you can bounce back from setbacks. It helps you develop the ability to switch off reactive fight-or-flight responses and engage in a more thoughtful mode thats crucial for making balanced decisions.

In hisbookMindfulness for Creativity, Danny Penman argues that mindfulness meditation and other mindfulness practices enhance three essential skills necessary for creative problem solving. First, mindfulness switches on divergent thinking. In other words, meditation opens your mind to new ideas. Second, mindfulness practice improves attention and makes it easier to register the novelty and usefulness of ideas. And finally, mindfulness nurtures courage and resilience in the face of skepticism and setbacks, which is important because failure and setbacks are inextricably linked with any innovation process.

Ten to 12 minutes are enough to boost creativity.To further verify that creativity is among the early benefits of mindfulness meditation, and to test how earlier findings could be applied to benefit idea generation in organizations, we set up an experiment at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Unlike the objectives of earlier research, we were interested in whether a few minutes of mindfulness mediation would be enough to boost creativity. One hundred twenty-nine participants (all of them students) were divided into three groups and assigned a creative task: Generate as many business ideas as possible for using drones.

Before the individual brainstorming began, one group participated in a 10-minute audio-guided mindfulness meditation, and a second group participated in a 10-minute fake meditation exercise (they were instructed to think freely by letting their minds wander). A third group started to brainstorm immediately.

Each of the three groups generated roughly the same number of ideas, and the length of the descriptions of the ideas was similar. The main difference was that meditators came up with a much wider range of ideas.The ideas of each participant in the two non-meditator groups were in at least two categories, versus four categories for the meditators. The ideas of eachindividual in the largest segment ofnon-meditators (20% of the two groups)fell into fivecategories (such as delivering and filming items). By comparison, the ideas of each person in the largest segment of meditators (21% of the group) were in ninecategories, which included gardening (cutting trees, watering flowers) and security (extinguishing fires) and ranged from the somewhat plausible (washing windows) to the downright silly (feeding giraffes).

We looked for other reasons besides meditation that could explain the differences. In our regression analyses, we controlled for several variables that could influence idea flexibility, such as whether participants enjoyed the brainstorming task. Even discounting the results ofthese other factors, the meditators demonstrated a 22% wider range of ideas than the two non-meditating groups.

We also found that a short meditation, similar to physical exercise, often put people in a more positive and relaxed frame of mind. Inthe group that had meditated, most people felt less negative. In particular, meditation decreased participants feeling of restlessness (by 23%), nervousness (by 17%), and irritation (by 24%).

To further corroborate our findings, we conducted a second experiment with a group of 24 senior innovation managers at a large Dutch research organization. Similar to the exercise with the students, these executives meditated for 12 minutes and then generated ideas individually on how to create a more inclusive culture in an organization. Subsequently, they worked in groups to develop their ideas further.

Most participants reported that meditation helped them clear their minds, focus more on the task at hand, and come up with original solutions. And they did: One idea was that managers or employees would swap departments for a week (and subsequently report in a company magazine and to their own departments about what they observed) in a way that was reminiscent of a Dutch reality program where teenagers swap families. Another idea was to give in-company TED talks to highlight cool ideas and scientists across various divisions.

Better ideas, better decision making, and a better mood all in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee? Our study suggests that its all true. As Mirabai Bush, Googles adviser forSearch Inside Yourself, the companys corporate mindfulness program, puts it, Mindfulness will make your life work better and your work life better. Its a win-win!

In the end, the only way to really see whether you like mindfulness meditation is to try it yourself. Download one of the many short mindfulness meditation courses available online (including meditation apps such as Headspace, Calm, or buddhify), or just follow the instructions below.

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Can 10 Minutes of Meditation Make You More Creative? - Harvard Business Review

11:18 AM ET

Aishwarya KumarESPN.com

SHELBURNE FALLS, Mass. -- Imagine arriving at a secluded, eerily quiet compound tucked into the woods, giving up your cell phone, laptop and other technology and taking what is essentially a vow of silence for the next week-and-a-half.

That's exactly what pro golfer Anirban Lahiri did not long after his runner-up finish at the Memorial Tournament in June. He checked into the Vipassana Meditation Center in rural northwest Massachusetts for a 10-day regimen of inhaling, exhaling and clearing his head.

"Over the course of meditation, different thoughts and tensions come up, and your continuous effort to go back to focusing on your breath will get you to go deeper into your concentration," said Craig Miller, Lahiri's trainer at the center. "This, I am sure, helps him a lot when he is out on the golf course."

For the 30-year-old Lahiri, the first player from India to earn a top-five finish in a major (2015 PGA Championship), the benefits of Vipassana go beyond his sporting endeavors.

"I went in there thinking it was just going to be good for my golf, it will help me with my concentration, and I came out feeling this is great for life," Lahiri said. "Golf's just a part of our lives. We do have a life off the course, and it helped me be a better person, made it easy for me to make decisions."

AN ALMOST-FORGOTTEN, 2,500-year-old Buddhist practice that was revived by Burmese-Indian meditation expert S.N. Goenka in the 1970s, Vipassana has gained popularity in India in the past decade, with nonprofit centers being established in Hyderabad, Bangalore and Mumbai. Before his death in 2013, Goenka launched 200 centers across the globe.

In 1982, the Shelburne Falls compound was the first Vipassana center opened in North America. The facility, which started in a two-story house and barn, has grown to include several connected, nondescript buildings spread over 108 acres. The compound is hidden among trees and red tulips and sunflower patches approximately 90 miles west of Boston. Although it's only 10 minutes off Interstate 91, the first thing that strikes you when you go inside is the silence.

Hanging on the wall next to the registration desk are white signs displaying the day's schedule, the center's motto and the rules in bold, black letters. Like any powerful tool is accompanied by a set of instructions, Vipassana comes with five ethics to be followed during the course: do not kill, steal, commit sexual misconduct, lie or become intoxicated.

"When people come here, first thing they say is, 'My vow is to be ethically pure. I am being especially ethical for these 10 days to help myself,'" Miller said.

The facility is designed to eliminate all distractions. There are octagon-shaped individual rooms for meditation, a large rectangular hall -- with flat, square cushions spread throughout for students to sit on during group meditation sessions -- dining areas with long tables and basic folding plastic chairs, and single bedrooms that contain nothing more than a basic cot and a wooden chair.

The corridor leading to the individual meditation rooms opens into a courtyard, wherein sits the facility's only hint of luster: a majestic, gold, dome-shaped pagoda. A portion of the center is under construction, with more bedrooms and meditation halls being added (the current capacity is 114 students in the winter months and more when the weather permits the use of tents and cabins).

There is no set fee for the 10-day course, but students usually make donations -- anything from $10 to $10,000 -- to the nonprofit organization when they finish their stays. One- and three-day sessions are also offered, as well as longer courses of up to 60 days for more experienced Vipassana practitioners. The staffers, including cooks, trainers and assistants, are all volunteers.

Lahiri was part of a course that included 140 other students who woke up to a bell at 4 a.m. and went to bed at 9 p.m. In between, there were scheduled individual and joint meditation sessions, food breaks and short, one-on-one sessions with instructors. Those sessions were the only times attendees were permitted to speak. A group lecture session was held at 7 p.m. daily, at which students listened to Goenka's recorded talks -- in English or in other languages, such as Spanish, Hindi, French and Chinese.

Meals consisted of simple vegetarian food such as kale, salad and rice for lunch and fruits and tea for dinner. Continued meditation slows the metabolism, decreasing appetite. Lahiri and the other students broke their silence on the 10th day, symbolizing a return to their usual schedule.

4 a.m. - Wake up4:30-6:30 - Individual meditation6:30-8:00 - Breakfast break (attendees can also sleep, go for walks or meditate during meal breaks)8:00-9:00 - Group meditation9:15-11:00 - Individual meditation11 a.m.-1 p.m.: Lunch break1:00-2:30: Individual meditation2:30-3:30 - Group meditation3:45-4:00 - Instructions for meditation4:00-5:00 - Individual meditation5:00-6:00 - Dinner break6:00-7:00 - Group meditation7:00-8:00 - Evening discourse (recordings by Vipassana centers founder S.N.Goenka)8:00-8:30 - Instructions for the next day8:30-9:00 - Individual meditation9:00 - End of the day; individual conversation between instructor and student, and then sleep

VIPASSANA -- also known as insight meditation -- is about overcoming bad habits and establishing good habits, and the trainers help students through this difficult process. Miller used a sporting analogy to describe it: If you're learning a bad golf swing, you are reinforcing a bad habit; if you're learning a good swing from an expert, you're reinforcing a good habit. Vipassana trains your mind to take good swings.

Miller explained that everything a person does at the physical level is affected by the health of his mind, and everything a person does at the mental level is affected by the health of his body. Focusing energy on one point -- breathing -- neutralizes the fight between the physical and mental being. Lahiri is drawn to this, Miller said, because a golfer uses the same technique on the course.

This was not Lahiri's first time at a Vipassana center. He took his first course at age 17. His parents had completed the course, and he wanted to find out if it would help him concentrate better on the golf course.

Lahiri said as a teenager he had a tendency to be self-destructive during close competitions, and he didn't know how to handle his intense energy. Vipassana helped him deal with that.

"[After my first retreat] when I went out and played and felt the nerves, I would just channelize it into something positive, and that really helped me," Lahiri said.

The meditation practice also helped Lahiri attain "equanimity" with his emotions -- happiness, anger or sadness -- both on and off the course. The process is extremely difficult, he said, because it goes against the human nature.

"We don't want things we don't like, and we want things we like, and Vipassana basically helps you to bridge that gap and react the same to either situation and not get too angry or too happy and be 'equanimous,'" Lahiri said.

His recent session was his fourth Vipassana course and first outside India. Classes at the Massachusetts facility can fill up several months in advance, with waiting lists numbering in the hundreds, and the one Lahiri signed up for happened to overlap with the U.S. Open.

There was almost a tough decision to make after his second-place performance at the Memorial (it was his best finish on the PGA Tour, though he has 18 international victories) increased his world ranking to just short of U.S. Open qualifying. When his wife asked what he would do if he qualified for the major -- Vipassana or golf -- he did not have an answer. But he said it worked out well in the end.

"Funny I say it worked out in the sense of me not getting in, but that's what I wanted to do at that point in time," Lahiri said.

In his first tournament after the course, Lahiri tied for 17th at the Travelers Championship with a performance that included a career-best 63 in the second round. Then came The Open Championship, in which he missed the cut by a single stroke after hitting into a bunker on and bogeying his final hole at Royal Birkdale.

Still, Lahiri, who is ranked No. 75 in the world and has earned more than $1.6 million on the PGA Tour this year, credits his success to Vipassana.

"I am happy with the way I am playing ... and I am looking forward to the next few events," he said.

Read more:

How ancient practice of Vipassana meditation breathes life into ... - ESPN

Meditation, its been said, is self-medication. But are our modern-day forms of accessing this ancient practice for its proven health benefits doing us more harm than good?

As the collective of meditation businesses has grown to a billion-dollar industry, theres been an influx of quick-hit meditation products and services popping up on every device and city corner near you.

There are now hundreds of apps, such as Headspace and buddhify, devoted to guided and customized meditation. There are also pricey drop-in classes available at increasingly omnipresent calming centers from New York to Los Angeles.

Inscape, a 5,000-square-foot studio in New Yorks Chelsea neighborhood, offers sessions like Deep Rest, where you can pay $22 to sleep, profoundly, followed by curated drinks and bites, if youre so inclined. Just-opened The Lotus in Denver has 18 different classes with titles like Dont Worry, Be Happy and Lighten Up.

So should we feel happy that we can stop by a studio for some quick relief after a stressful day at work or bliss out with our favorite meditation app while were waiting for a red-eye?

Are we really tuning into ourselves and getting the benefits of meditation in single doses, or are we just distracting ourselves with another feel-good health one-hitter with limited lasting impacts?

Is dropping in with other like-minded people, no matter how we do it, more powerful in the long run than dropping out on our bedroom zafu?

The answers are nuanced, according to Andra Brill, a Denver-based meditation instructor, retreat leader and founder of Happy Mindful Families. Im all for planting the seed and offering people a taste of what the experience is like, she tells GrindTV.

Shes not too worried about the format, whether its an app, drop-in studio or committed practice through private instruction.

We could all do yoga in our house for free, but we value what we pay for, says Brill, who finds that many of her clients request paid private instruction even when they know they can do it for nothing. I see it as a continuum. If I try a meditation app and it helps me sleep a little better and yell a little less, thats a positive.

Its also possible that drop-in meditation centers and apps are just a contemporary version of building community.

Theyre all different flavors of the same thing. I see them as entry points, Brill says. For all the ways we self-soothe in modern society excessive work, food, alcohol, TV, exercise to deal with our frantic lives, I see meditation as one of the least destructive ways to do it.

Its better to do 10 minutes of meditation a day than an hour and a half once a week, offers Brill. So perhaps dropping in for breath doesnt really undermine meditation after all.

Maybe one big hit of breath however you get it is more than OK.

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Is one-hit meditation a healthy trend? - GrindTV

Dear Doctors: Ive had back pain since my 20s and have gotten to the point where I cant use aspirin or other pain relievers because they tear up my stomach. My sister-in-law wants me to try meditation, which sounds a little nutty. Do you think it can help?

Dear Reader: The power of the mind over the body is a concept that has been explored, questioned, promoted and ridiculed for centuries, if not millennia. However, the latest studies on the subject offer intriguing insights. Researchers are uncovering evidence that techniques such as meditation and mindfulness can be an effective means of dealing with pain. This is good news for the estimated 11 percent of Americans who live with chronic pain.

Several recent studies have focused on meditation and mindfulness techniques to alleviate lower back pain, with some surprising results. Not only did researchers add to the growing body of evidence that mind-based techniques can be effective, but they also discovered that the relief from pain comes via unexpected pathways.

One study involved 342 adults between the ages of 20 and 70 who had lower back pain for three or more months, a length of time for it to be considered chronic. None of the individuals could attribute the onset of their pain to a particular cause, such as injury, overuse or disease.

The participants were divided into three treatment groups one that followed the traditional medical approach of rest, activity modification, heat or ice, and over-the-counter pain relievers. A second group learned a technique called cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, which addresses thought and behavior. The third group was taught something the researchers called mindfulness-based stress reduction, which included several types of meditation as well as gentle yoga practice.

Six months later, 61 percent of each mind-based treatment group reported improved physical function. About 45 percent of them said they had less back pain. That was measurably better than the group assigned to traditional medical practices. In that group, 44 percent reported improved function, and 27 percent said they had less pain.

While the results may not be extraordinary, they are significant. And as acceptance of this novel pain relief pathway grows, the hope is that continued research will lead to greater understanding and to new techniques that are even more effective.

Speaking of understanding, the results of a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience last year also offered a few surprises.

When you hurt yourself stub your toe or scrape your knee your body responds with a flood of natural opioid compounds that make the resulting pain more bearable. But for the participants in this study, researchers blocked that pain relief pathway. Yet patients involved in meditation still reported feeling less pain in response to unpleasant stimuli than those who did not meditate. This led researchers to conclude the pain relief mechanism of meditation occurs independent of the opioid receptors in the brain.

Bottom line: Your sister-in-law has a point regarding meditation. With a bit of research, you can find a class or program in your area. And if you do follow through, please let us know how it goes.

Eve Glazier, M.D., MBA, is an internist and assistant professor of medicine at UCLA Health. Elizabeth Ko, M.D., is an internist and primary care physician at UCLA Health.

Send your questions to askthedoctors@mednet.ucla.edu, or write: Ask the Doctors, c/o Media Relations, UCLA Health, 924 Westwood Blvd., Suite 350, Los Angeles, CA, 90095. Owing to the volume of mail, personal replies cannot be provided.

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Ask the Doctors: Meditation might alleviate back pain for some ... - Indiana Gazette

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 bestselling 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.

Daniel Goleman, also the author of the bestselling book Emotional Intelligence, will talk about Altered Traits at Miami Dade College.

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

Goleman, who appears at Miami Dade Colleges Wolfson Campus on Sept. 7, 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.

Scott Rogers of the University of Miami, here leading a group meditation at the Lowe Art Museum, will be in conversation with Daniel Goleman at Miami Dade College.

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.

Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body. Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson. Avery. 330 pages. $27.

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.

Who: Daniel Goleman

When: 7 p.m. Sept. 7

Where: Chapman Conference Center, Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus, 300 NE Second Ave., Miami

Cost: Free

Info: 305-442-4408; http://booksandbooks.com/

More here:

What are the health benefits of meditation and mindfulness? | Miami ... - Miami Herald

For the data-driven runner: Simple Habit

Not only does this app boasts a massive library of more than 1,000 meditations from 60-plus teachers, it automatically tracks your progress, tallying your mindful minutes each day, week, and month and rewarding you with badges for streaks. You can sort the programs by guide, goal (boost energy, sleep better), or context (morning, walking, commute, or big event). Searching for athlete, I found a centering exercise designed to psychologically prep for a competition. In six minutes, I was guided through a process of quieting negative thoughts and harnessing the power of adrenaline, rather than letting it derail me. Its a track I can definitely see myself cuing it up on race morning this September.

Subscription options include $19.99/2 months, $99/year, or $299 lifetime; iOS, Android

Holding yoga poses for minutes at a time releases tension in the body and the mind.

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Get Your Head in the Game: These 5 Meditation Apps Can Help - Runner's World

The daily practice of meditation has been shown to have a multitude of benefits, but for some people, the idea of setting aside some mindful time can present challenges. For many, just keeping up with a meditation practice is difficult, but some find reasons to not even give meditation a try.

n I don't have time. The most common reason people find it hard to meditate is lack of time. Sure, the longer we meditate, the more we notice the benefits of mindfulness, but even short meditations count. Shoot for 10 minutes, but even just taking a minute to focus on our breath can be very beneficial. Over time, you may find yourself naturally increasing the length of your meditation.

n I can't stop my mind. The most common misconception about meditation is that you have to stop your thoughts. Not true. We can't stop our thoughts, but we can watch them. Over time, we can switch our awareness away from thoughts, toward other sensations happening in the body. If we get pulled back to our thoughts, that is OK. Just notice it and bring your awareness back to the breath or other object of meditation.

n I am not Buddhist. The first thing that usually comes to mind when we think about meditation is a robed monk in a temple, but anyone of any faith can meditate. Sure, it can seem like a religious experience from the outside, but meditation is really just a brain-training exercise. Many religions have their own versions of meditative practices like Christian contemplation and Jewish Hisbonenus.

n I can't sit like that. No need to sit a certain way. Grab a chair or sit on the couch. The main reason for sitting in lotus position is to not fall asleep, so sit any way that you want as long as it doesn't make you feel sleepy. If you do get sleepy, try practicing standing or walking meditation to wake you up.

A daily meditation practice can be a great way to reduce stress, promote focus and experience many other benefits, so don't let these excuses talk you out of giving it a try.

Travis Lemon is a certified herbalist at Healthy Life Market natural health and wellness industry for more than 12 years. He can be contacted at travislemonmh@gmail.com .

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Travis Lemon: Common meditation excuses and how to work through them - Huntington Herald Dispatch

Just 11 minutes of mindfulness training may help heavy drinkers cut back on alcohol, according to new research in the International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology. People in the study who listened to short audio recordings drank about three fewer beers than usual over the following week, while those in a control group didn't change their drinking habits.

The practice of mindfulness involves focusing on whats happening in the present moment. Unlike other strategies sometimes used to combat unhealthy behaviors or addictionswhich often strive to reduce cravings or teach people to ignore themmindfulness encourages practitioners to acknowledge such cravings and respond with intention.

The downside is that mindfulness-based treatments usually involve many hours of training over several sessions and arent readily available to everyone who might benefit from them. Researchers at University College London wanted to see how a very brief interventionjust one informal session lasting a few minutesmight benefit people at risk for problems with alcohol.

They recruited 68 adults who admitted to drinking heavily, but not to the point of having an alcohol-use disorder. Half of them listened to an 11-minute audio recording that taught basic mindfulness strategies, like thinking consciously about ones feelings and bodily sensations. The recordings told them that by acknowledging these sensationslike cravings, for instancethey could tolerate them as temporary events, without needing to act on them.

The other half participated in relaxation training specifically designed to reduce cravings. After the session, both groups were encouraged to continue practicing the techniques throughout the week.

The study was double-blinded, which means that people did not know which intervention they were receiving. The word mindfulness wasnt used in any recruitment or experimental materials, so peoples assumptions about the technique would not influence their results.

MORE: How Meditation Helps You Handle Stress Better

Because the two training sessions were so similar and so brief, the researchers expected to see only a subtle change in drinking reduction and only small differences between the groups.

But the results surprised them. During the following week, the mindfulness group drank 9.3 fewer units of alcohol (equal to about three pints of beer) than they had the week before the study. There was no significant change among people who were taught to relax.

Lead author Sunjeev Kamboj, a reader and deputy director in UCLs Clinical Psychopharmacology Unit, says that practicing mindfulness can make a person more aware of their tendency to respond reflexively to urges. By being more aware of their cravings, we think the study participants were able to bring intention back into the equation, instead of automatically reaching for the drink when they feel a craving," he says.

MORE: Can You Lose Weight On The Mindfulness Diet?

Kamboj and his coauthors hope that heavy drinkersa group at risk for alcohol addiction and abuse, as well as other unpleasant side effects and chronic health issuescan use mindfulness to reduce their consumption levels before they develop serious problems. They are also exploring whether mindfulness can help people who have other types of substance-use problems. Its yet not clear whether people have to really want to cut back on drinking or other unhealthy behaviors in order to benefit, he adds.

He also believes that mindfulness can be effective even when practiced informally without committing a lot of time, effort or money. There are many self-help books, CDs, websites and apps that dont involve formal face-to-face mindfulness training, he says, which our results suggest might be helpful for hazardousbut probably not for more severely affecteddrinkers.

Read more from the original source:

How a Short Meditation Can Help People Drink Less - TIME

By Nick Romeo By Nick Romeo August 25

Nick Romeo is a critic and journalist based in Palo Alto, Calif.

Nick Romeois a critic and journalist based in Palo Alto, Calif.

Robert Wrights Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment promises to show not just that meditation helps people live happier lives but that it promotes a vision of the world that is fundamentally true. He believes that the truth of Buddhism will set you free and that this freedom will let you perceive the truth.

Wright has written lucid popular books on evolutionary psychology and the history of religion, so he is well-poised to consider Buddhism from a scientific perspective. And while he does not make a fully convincing case for some of his more grandiose claims about truth and freedom, his argument contains many interesting and illuminating points. Most serious meditators and Buddhists probably dont feel an urgent need for scientific validation of their practices: The benefits they experience are their own justification. But for casual meditators and scientific skeptics of religion, a clear explanation of the evolutionary reasons our brains might benefit from meditation could inspire a more serious engagement with the practice.

Wrights basic argument goes something like this: Natural selection has made humans anxious and delusional creatures prone to overestimate the pleasure we will derive from things like sex and food and status. Were also given to petty tribalism and over-hasty judgments of others, and we chronically exaggerate our own importance and efficacy. This bundle of unfortunate traits made our ancestors more likely to transmit their genes, but unfortunately suffering and survival are perfectly compatible. As long as we remain locked in the delusions that natural selection engineered, suffering will define the human experience. We will continue to chase fleeting pleasures that leave us unsatisfied, follow the unwise promptings of surging emotions, demonize strangers without cause and pillage the environment to gratify our appetites.

[Review: The Evolution of God by Robert Wright]

In case the human plight does not seem sufficiently dire, Wright even compares our predicament to the state of enslaved delusion dramatized in the movie The Matrix, with natural selection playing the role of robotic overlords. The best form of resistance is not dodging bullets and engaging in balletic aerial fistfights, but sitting on a cushion each day and concentrating on the rise and fall of your breath. In a sentence that shows just how thoroughly secularized and mainstream meditation has become, Wright claims: If you want to escape from the Matrix, Buddhist practice and philosophy offer powerful hope.

And what exactly can we hope for? Wright devotes a decent share of the book to chronicling his own experience with meditation. After cultivating the practice for more than a decade and doing multiple intensive meditation retreats, he reports some modest but meaningful transformations. Lower-back pain bothers him less than before, he feels less intense animosity toward a despised former colleague, and he is not annoyed by the humming of a refrigerator or the whining of a buzzsaw.

Perhaps his most striking evidence of altered perception is his experience of an acutely painful toothache. He knew that drinking a glass of water caused extreme pain in the tooth, and he was curious to see if meditation could shift his perspective on the sensation. After meditating for half an hour, he took an enormous sip of water and swished it around the tooth. The result was dramatic and strange, he reports. I felt a throbbing so powerful that I got absorbed in its waves, but the throbbing didnt consistently feel bad; it was right on the cusp between bitter and sweet and just teetered between the two. At times it was even awesome in the old-fashioned sense of actually inspiring awe breathtaking in its power and, you might even say, its grandeur and its beauty.

Seeing grandeur and beauty in the throb of an aching tooth is no small achievement, and Wrights enthusiasm for meditation is understandable. But his claims that meditation can help avert global catastrophes stemming from ethnic, religious, national and ideological conflict are less persuasive. I think the salvation of the world can be secured via the cultivation of calm, clear minds and the wisdom they allow, he writes. But the spontaneous adoption of meditation by hundreds of millions of people is vanishingly improbable. A vision of future salvation that depends on the wholesale transformation of human nature is a delusion, and one from which meditation has not rescued Wright.

Some of his claims about the truth of Buddhism are also debatable. One of his major points is that despite the human proclivity to notice essential qualities in people and things, essences are in fact merely useful figments of the mind, convenient heuristics that are often disastrously wrong. While its safe to say that seeing essence-of-jerk in someone who cuts you off in traffic is probably a delusion, this does not justify a wholesale condemnation of the intellectual act of seeking essences. Great swaths of scientific inquiry and daily life would be impossible without positing essences, and there are good philosophical reasons to believe that some of these perceived essences actually correspond to the nature of things. The very title of Wrights book asserting the truth of Buddhism also presupposes the existence of essential natures.

[Mindfulness would be good for you. If it werent all just hype.]

Perhaps the most basic problem with his argument is what it lacks: a vision of how to live a good and meaningful life. Quieting the raging clamor of perception, sensation and emotion may be a necessary condition for living a good life, but is it also sufficient? In short, once weve achieved some degree of tranquility through meditation or otherwise, how are we to live?

By neglecting this question, Wright fails to consider the seductions of a dangerously permissive relativism and narcissism. Would it be possible to spend a lifetime mindfully enjoying pornography and violent video games? What about a life spent in the mindful pursuit of wealth and status? What are the ethics of retreating to a state of unruffled tranquility as the public sphere implodes and the environment is ravaged? Wright alludes to the moral teachings of Buddhism, but he does not show how these precepts resolve the sorts of ethical and social questions that confront humans as political animals endowed with reason. For this terrain, philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle are much better guides.

That meditation is a useful and powerful technique for alleviating human suffering is clear. But to what ultimate end is it such an effective means? Seekers after truth will need to keep searching.

why buddHism is true

The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

By Robert Wright

Simon & Schuster. 336 pp. $27

Read more:

Meditation can make us happy, but can it also make us good? - The ... - Washington Post

So many people want to meditate but they either dont know where to start or cant find the time. Fitting meditation into your life doesnt need to be complicated or elaborate. Start small and be realistic about what will work for you. Here are five tips to get you started.

Find a spot where you can sit comfortably with plenty of back support. Ideally you want to sit with a straight back when you meditate. This allows you to breathe deeply and lets your breath easily fill your lungs while you inhale and exhale. Since your meditation might last five to 15 minutes (or longer) you definitely want to be comfortable. There are no shoulds when it comes to where or how you sit. If sitting cross-legged on the floor isnt physically comfortable use a chair or sit on the couch. Just be comfortable.

Choose a space in your home where you can focus or block out any distractions. Most people dont live in complete quiet which means they wont meditate in complete quiet either. Thats okay. Ambient noise is to be expected whether its birds chirping, the sound of traffic or a television on in another room. As long as you can let the sounds around you fade into the background while you focus on your breath, youre good to go.

Sometimes a bit of ritual can help establish the habit or practice of meditation. This can be as simple as lighting a candle before you start meditating and blowing it out when youre done. Anything that signals to your body and mind that its time to meditate works. It can be anything from lighting incense to softly playing meditative musicwhatever works for you. Create a ritual action before and after you meditate to formally signal to yourself that its time to focus on your breath.

If youre just starting out use a guided meditation. You can find free ones online or in apps like Calm, Insight Timer or Buddhify. Pick a meditation ahead of time so that when youre ready to meditate the decision is already made.

It can be fun and motivating to know that people around the world are meditating with you. Many meditation apps show the location and number of people across the globe simultaneously meditating. There are also a lot of different meditation groups available to join via apps or meditation centers in your area.

Meditating for even five minutes can help you feel calmer and more focused. The most important thing you can do when it comes to meditation is to get started and stick with it.

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5 Things To Know Before You Try Meditation - HuffPost