Mindfulness
I found this article on mindfulness.
Mindfulness: New age craze or science-backed solution?
It can be either, depending on who's doing what with it. Most science stops being very scientific when you add money or politics to it -- and that's most science nowadays. Some mind sciences are thousands of years old; those are pretty solid.
Research has shown the benefits of mindfulness, but the current mindfulness craze cannot deliver on its overhyped promises.
That's because not many people actually understand how it works, and very few people are willing to put in the time and effort necessary to make it work. Also, advertising hard work doesn't make many sales. This is a science of the mind and the soul. It's not something you can bottle. It is literally made of sustained mental effort. It's do-it-yourself brain surgery. If you concentrate hard enough, long enough, you can change the structure of your brain. Most people don't have that kind of patience.
Research shows mindfulness can be an effective wellness practice, yet the effect sizes found in studies tend to be moderate.
That's because most of them are short. However, if you study monks who have devoted decades to this, the results are dramatic. Like wrapped in a wet sheet in the snow, drying it with body heat instead of dying from hypothermia dramatic. Do lots of people want to sit in the snow, meditating? I doubt it. So they get effects in proportion to their investment, which tends to be "moderate."
Mindfulness may be worthwhile, but only if we approach it with understanding and realistic expectations.
Well, first you might want to study what the techniques are, as many as you can find. Then think about which of those do things you consider useful.
Next, consider how long it takes to achieve those effects. A simple thing like learning to calm yourself from everyday stress may only take a few weeks. Calming yourself during extreme stress typically takes months to a few years to get consistent results. Changing your whole brain takes decades.
But you know that "intensive training" that supernaries like Batman sometimes mention? This is one version of it. Olympic training is another. Mindfulness is cheaper and safer.
Unless you’ve recently returned from a hermitage atop the sacred mountain, you’ve probably noticed that mindfulness has become a big deal. As measured by Google searches, interest in the East Asian tradition has risen significantly in the last two decades, and more Americans are practicing either yoga or meditation. CEOs and celebrities plug it as key to their health, success, and happiness, while companies have adopted it to bolster innovation and productivity.
This is not actually new. They went nuts over it in the 1960s-70s too. Same thing happened: a lot of people wanted to monetize it, thousands played around with it, and a handful went far enough to achieve marvels. If you think that's something, you should've seen the British freaking out when they overran India.
With that groundswell of attention has come a deluge of influencers, self-help gurus, and wellness experts—all hawking their wares and claims in hopes of slicing off a portion of a soon-to-be $9 billion industry.
Does it advertise a work-free solution to all your problems? It's bunk.
Does it include terms like "hard work," "months," or "years" ...? It may be worthwhile.
Some of the more breathless promises allege mindfulness can unlock your full potential, make your memory foolproof, make you better than ordinary, and even bend reality to your desires.
Sure it can. After several decades of work.
And if that seems like too much work, you can fast track your way to higher consciousness with some chakra tea or a slathering of mindful mayo on your banh mi sandwich.
LOL no. All a mindful diet does is reduce the amount of crap you eat and make sure your body has the necessary building blocks for things like neurochemicals. It's important. It's not going to solve everything.
Then again, I tried the big cup of adaptogens once and immediately made it a regular. If you find something that works, use it.
It all has an air of chic diets and insane exercise routines, and the noise of the marketplace makes it difficult to separate the fad from the function—a necessary step for anyone hoping to incorporate mindfulness into their lives safely and sustainably.
Here's a simple test: Does it require money, especially a lot of money? If so, it's marketing schlock. If not, it may be the real thing. Remember the real thing is largely developed, and almost exclusively practiced at the high end, by religious ascetics of various traditions.
You don't need to spend a dime to practice mindfulness, or indeed, to get quite excellent results. There are some tools that can make certain parts easier, but none of them are essential and most of them have cheap versions.
Actually the best tool I've found -- by an enormous margin -- never appears on anyone else's list of mindfulness tools at all. It's the card game We Didn't Playtest This At All. It's completely ridiculous, and at first it seems pointless chaos, then suddenly becomes quite challenging. But there are a couple of features that make it ideal for practicing mindfulness.
1) Among the most famous of mindfulness exercises is the infamous Door Exercise. It's simple; you just have remember to pause momentarily before passing through each door you approach. This is tedious and maddening, so most people hate it, although it does work. The game takes that do-first principle and turns it into something hilarious, like remembering to say, "Aaaaa! Zombies!" before your turn. It is no easier, but it is fun instead of tiresome. That means people are likely to do it more, and thus, get more results.
2) There are a bunch of random mechanics where you need to answer yes/no or pick a number, and this often determines whether or not you stay in the game. At higher levels of mindfulness, some people develop intuition, telepathy, precognition, or other abilities that allow them to guess correctly more often than idle chance would explain.
This game typically goes for $12-15 depending on where you buy it. So it's much cheaper, and if you play it for a while, more effective than an expensive weekend workshop.
See now, this is the good part of people screwing around with mindfulness every few decades: occasionally they come up with something brilliant. I doubt this was deliberate, just an effect of ideas sloshing around a culture, but it works great anyway.
Kabat-Zinn’s studies signed up participants for an intensive eight-week MBSR program. The workshop included formal instruction in mindfulness techniques, group meetings, and homework between sessions. It aimed to help participants develop a non-judgmental awareness of the present moment, while Kabat-Zinn analyzed how that affected their mental and physical wellness. And this pilot program showed promise.
That's about what you can expect from 8 weeks: promise. More particularly, it's enough time to give you a pretty good idea whether a given technique or angle of approach will work for you. If you're starting to see results, it's worth continuing long-term; if not, it probably isn't. Bear in mind that there are many different methods, most or all of them work for some people, few if any work for everyone, and if the first thing you try doesn't work, ditch it and try something else. Whatever works for you, though, you have to keep doing it to enjoy continuing benefits. Mindfulness is a lifestyle choice, not something you do once and quit.
Kabat-Zinn’s research (and later studies) found that mindfulness practitioners enjoyed less stress,
That's among the easiest things to learn.
anxiety, and depression.
These are harder, depending on severity; but as they are afflictions of the mind, they can typically be influenced by mental techniques. The worse the problem, the harder you have to work to affect it. Not everyone can do this, but it can be done.
Further studies have since identified mindfulness as a potential tool for reducing chronic pain, lowering blood pressure,
These are among the more straightforward physical effects. They're not easy, but they are attainable by a fairly large portion of people. They take time, though, and you have to keep at it.
aiding insomnia,
This is another of the easier ones, especially for mild to moderate insomnia. Bad insomnia is a lot harder to fix. Ultimately, anything born of the mind is susceptible to mental efforts; physically caused insomnia is considerably more difficult to affect, but not impossible.
and lessening the body’s inflammatory response to stressors.
If nonphysical (like emotional strain), it's only moderately hard; if physical (like allergies) then it's harder but some people have done it.
Preliminary research has even suggested that mindfulness can make us less racially biased
Anything based on changing beliefs is toward the quicker and easier end, because they only exist in the mind. You can beat them to death by simple dogged repetition. By "dogged" consider that meditators have a tendency to chant things dozens, hundreds, or thousands of times per session. Removing bad tape is just like debugging code: you take it out the same way it went in, one line at a time. Shave that yak!
and lengthen our telomeres, a chromosomal region that stands as a biomarker of human aging.
Sure, if you want to spend your whole life meditating on that. Monks are known to live a long time. Being calm and focused certainly cuts down on wear and tear.
“I don’t want to overstate the evidence because the entire field is in its infancy, but the vast majority of studies are suggesting that when you do something as simple as what looks from the outside like nothing, this is having profound effects,” Kabat-Zinn added.
ROTFLMAO!!!
No, studying it with conventional science tools is some several decades old. Studying with computers, what, a decade or two. The sciences of the mind are thousands of years old.
But given promises of extraordinary bliss and god minds,
Extraordinary bliss isn't that difficult to achieve. Most people can do it. The hard part there is remembering to work on anything when you are in that state. Almost nobody can do that. So in trancework, the advice is to set an intention before you go down that far, which makes it happen without you having to direct it while blissed. This is also why being hypnotized by someone else is easier than doing it yourself, although most decent trance subjects can learn to do it themselves. You can also use guided meditation scripts, which are very popular. These are particularly good for hearing-dominant or audio-learning folks. There are meditation methods for all the other sensory and learning modes too.
God mind tends to be more challenging, and has various levels. These include but are not necessarily limited to:
* Awareness of and interaction with the Divine. Most people can learn to do this. The Society of Friends (aka Quakers) is all about listening to God in Silence. Not many are that good, but they can get impressive results.
* Dissolution of the sense of self. Most people can learn to do this, but it takes longer. Using psychotropic drugs is a popular shortcut. However, you can do it a lot safer simply by paying attention to the process of falling asleep each night, as your thoughts naturally float apart. Also great practice for dying.
* Association with a specific aspect of the Divine. Afro-Caribbean traditions specialize in this as each practitioner has a "head" lwa, and upon death, they join that lwa, which is why there are scads of different ones clustered in families, like the Ghedes.
* Assumption of the responsibilities of Divinity. This is easy. You just decide to do it. You can talk to a deity and make a deal to do their work in the world -- each deity has some sphere(s) of influence -- or you can just pick something that needs done and start doing it. This can be small or large, as deities can be localized or quite vast. You can work on saving a single species or stopping climate change, saving lives one at a time or eradicating hunger. Nothing is stopping you from this aspect of god mind but your own thoughts and choices. Few people really want to take on divine-type responsibilties. They're only interested in power. It doesn't work that way. The power comes from the responsibilities. You do the thing and you get better at it.
Now, that doesn't make these things a good idea to peddle in weekend workshops. That's a reliable way of getting people hurt. Big ideas don't fit in small minds. You need to stretch slowly and gently to make room for them safely. Otherwise you are liable to rip something in a place that modern medicine really is not equipped to fix. In the drug culture, this is called a "bad trip" (although some skilled users can handle even that) but it is just as possible to hurt yourself with ideas, and those don't wear off as fast.
others obviously lack Kabat-Zinn’s restraint for overstatement and over-selling. And here’s where the science bumps against the commercialized woo.
Story of human history.
While mindfulness effects are present in the data, they aren’t incredibly robust.
That depends on the study. There is some spectacular evidence of what can be done with various mindfulness techniques. It's just that studying them with modern science is challenging because few of the best practitioners want to do science, it takes a long time to get the really big effects, and some of the stuff continues to baffle science no matter how many instruments they point at it. They can see it happening, but they can't explain it. We are lucky that some mental experts have volunteered, which is how we know that months of meditation make modest changes in brain scans while decades of meditation make quite dramatic changes.
A systematic review and meta-analysis published in JAMA Internal Medicine looked at 47 randomized clinical trials with active controls (totaling 3,515 participants). It found moderate evidence of mindfulness easing anxiety, depression, and pain;
That fits.
low evidence for assuaged stress;
I have no idea how they cocked that up, because that is among the fastest and easiest effects to achieve. It was always one of our most popular topics in trancework, the others being studying and sleep, which also worked.
insufficient evidence of reduced substance abuse and poor eating habits;
Substance abuse is challenging to fix no matter what you try, and different things work for different people. At least, you are unlikely to hurt yourself with mindfulness, which is more than can be said of some other treatments.
Poor eating habits are straightforward to fix. Anything in the mind can be affected by the mind. You decide to change it, you pick some specific improvements, you meditate on it, and things change. I will say that small, incremental changes are much easier to perm than large ones and that enjoyable changes are much easier than miserable ones. I've gotten good results simply from browsing cookbooks for healthy recipes that make me go, "I want that in my mouth."
Disordered eating, and eating disorders, in order of increasing severity, are harder to fix. But if they are not caused by physical issues (e.g. mineral shortage causing pica) or other people (abuse is a leading cause of eating disorders), then they are of the mind and can be influenced by mental efforts. That doesn't mean everyone can do it, any more than everyone can do gymnastics; but it can be done.
and no evidence that mindfulness was better than other treatment options.
Guess I've seen some different studies. I've also seen the tendency toward scattered results. Which is to say, not everything will work equally well for all people, and that is just as true of pills as it is of meditation. The listed complaints are in fact particularly difficult to treat with conventional methods (which is why people seek alternatives) and some official treatments are marginally effective or no better than placebo.
Where mindfulness really stands out is harmlessness. A useless drug often has unpleasant side effects. Bad counseling can be life-wrecking; there are some ugly observations about Alcoholics Anonymous. The parts of mindfulness used to treat complaints are quite safe. It's the high-end stuff, like trying for god mind, that gets risky if you are not careful. That makes this a very good technique to try before attempting others with a higher risk level. If it doesn't work for you, then you can always try something else.
As for individual studies, these can be limited in their predictive value. That study showing mindfulness reduced racial bias, for example, had only 72 participants—all of them midwest college students.
That problem affects the whole of science and medicine. Mindfulness studies are no more susceptible than most others -- and 72 is a lot higher than the 10-12 typical of many brain studies because those are so hard to do.
“It’s important we understand the risks and don’t overstate the potential benefits until they’re robustly substantiated,” writes Jason Linder, PsyD, at Psychology Today. “Practicing mindfulness when you’re not mentally ready, or when you actually need a nap, to eat, a massage, to work, or an important conversation with a loved one can clearly create more difficulties than it’s meant to mitigate.”
Well, it's important to take care of practicalities. Here is a good checklist.
Mentally ready? Anyone can be. Just start at a level comfortable for your current experience, as you would with any new practice.
Emboldened by stories of “I did it and so can you,”
Just because one person can do it, doesn't necessarily mean other can. Some can, some can't. Similarly, most conventional therapies work on some people but not others. Like say, how redheads often don't respond to painkillers nearly as well as average.
some may forgo traditional therapies and medicines in favor of mindfulness—a kind of mental self-medication.
Considering the astronomical expense of American "health care" and the fact that mindfulness can be done for free, it's no wonder. There's something to be said for trying the free thing first. But even if people make a wrong choice, it is still their choice to make, and trying to steal it from them or bully them out of it is not okay. Doctors become enraged if people make their own decisions. Well, fuck that. It's your mind, your body; do with it as you please. The gains or losses are your responsibility.
This can be harmful. In some people, mindfulness practices have been shown to amplify certain psychiatric problems associated with worry and depression.
So can "antidepressants" that lead to suicide.
Those who go it alone, without the supervision of a qualified psychiatrist or teacher, may blame themselves for their failures.
And let's not forget caregivers who abuse their clients, verbally, sexually, or otherwise. A video or book about mindfulness isn't going to molest you.
But if you go into mindfulness thinking you’ll become a mental Superman—that life’s difficulties will bounce harmlessly off your chest like bullets every which way—you’re in for a disappointment.
Oh, it's achievable -- after some decades of work. Monks can be as unflappable as a hurricane door.
“If you can get past the cultural baggage, though, what you’ll find is that meditation is simply exercise for your brain. It’s a proven technique for preventing the voice in your head from leading you around by the nose,”
That's a good way to put it.
Some videos on mindfulness and meditation:
Understanding the Monkey Mind
Meditation with Monkey Mind
Meditation Channels on YouTube
Free Mindfulness Videos
Other free resources:
What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness in Positive Psychology
18 Mindfulness Activities for Kids
23 Mindfulness Exercises for Adults
71 Mindfulness Exercises for Living in the Present Moment
Wikihow Mindfulness
What is meditation?
23 Types of Meditation
Meditation Techniques
Meditation Tips
Wikihow Meditation
Mindfulness is an important life skill that everyone needs. If you don't pay attention to what you are doing, you will fuck up something. You don't need anyone's permission or approval to learn it. A teacher may or may not be useful. You don't require any tools, although some tools can be helpful. You don't need to pay money, you just need to pay attention. It's that last bit that raises the real barrier. Most people don't have the time, energy, or patience to make this work well.
"You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes every day –- unless you’re too busy; then you should sit for an hour."
-– Zen Proverb
Mindfulness: New age craze or science-backed solution?
It can be either, depending on who's doing what with it. Most science stops being very scientific when you add money or politics to it -- and that's most science nowadays. Some mind sciences are thousands of years old; those are pretty solid.
Research has shown the benefits of mindfulness, but the current mindfulness craze cannot deliver on its overhyped promises.
That's because not many people actually understand how it works, and very few people are willing to put in the time and effort necessary to make it work. Also, advertising hard work doesn't make many sales. This is a science of the mind and the soul. It's not something you can bottle. It is literally made of sustained mental effort. It's do-it-yourself brain surgery. If you concentrate hard enough, long enough, you can change the structure of your brain. Most people don't have that kind of patience.
Research shows mindfulness can be an effective wellness practice, yet the effect sizes found in studies tend to be moderate.
That's because most of them are short. However, if you study monks who have devoted decades to this, the results are dramatic. Like wrapped in a wet sheet in the snow, drying it with body heat instead of dying from hypothermia dramatic. Do lots of people want to sit in the snow, meditating? I doubt it. So they get effects in proportion to their investment, which tends to be "moderate."
Mindfulness may be worthwhile, but only if we approach it with understanding and realistic expectations.
Well, first you might want to study what the techniques are, as many as you can find. Then think about which of those do things you consider useful.
Next, consider how long it takes to achieve those effects. A simple thing like learning to calm yourself from everyday stress may only take a few weeks. Calming yourself during extreme stress typically takes months to a few years to get consistent results. Changing your whole brain takes decades.
But you know that "intensive training" that supernaries like Batman sometimes mention? This is one version of it. Olympic training is another. Mindfulness is cheaper and safer.
Unless you’ve recently returned from a hermitage atop the sacred mountain, you’ve probably noticed that mindfulness has become a big deal. As measured by Google searches, interest in the East Asian tradition has risen significantly in the last two decades, and more Americans are practicing either yoga or meditation. CEOs and celebrities plug it as key to their health, success, and happiness, while companies have adopted it to bolster innovation and productivity.
This is not actually new. They went nuts over it in the 1960s-70s too. Same thing happened: a lot of people wanted to monetize it, thousands played around with it, and a handful went far enough to achieve marvels. If you think that's something, you should've seen the British freaking out when they overran India.
With that groundswell of attention has come a deluge of influencers, self-help gurus, and wellness experts—all hawking their wares and claims in hopes of slicing off a portion of a soon-to-be $9 billion industry.
Does it advertise a work-free solution to all your problems? It's bunk.
Does it include terms like "hard work," "months," or "years" ...? It may be worthwhile.
Some of the more breathless promises allege mindfulness can unlock your full potential, make your memory foolproof, make you better than ordinary, and even bend reality to your desires.
Sure it can. After several decades of work.
And if that seems like too much work, you can fast track your way to higher consciousness with some chakra tea or a slathering of mindful mayo on your banh mi sandwich.
LOL no. All a mindful diet does is reduce the amount of crap you eat and make sure your body has the necessary building blocks for things like neurochemicals. It's important. It's not going to solve everything.
Then again, I tried the big cup of adaptogens once and immediately made it a regular. If you find something that works, use it.
It all has an air of chic diets and insane exercise routines, and the noise of the marketplace makes it difficult to separate the fad from the function—a necessary step for anyone hoping to incorporate mindfulness into their lives safely and sustainably.
Here's a simple test: Does it require money, especially a lot of money? If so, it's marketing schlock. If not, it may be the real thing. Remember the real thing is largely developed, and almost exclusively practiced at the high end, by religious ascetics of various traditions.
You don't need to spend a dime to practice mindfulness, or indeed, to get quite excellent results. There are some tools that can make certain parts easier, but none of them are essential and most of them have cheap versions.
Actually the best tool I've found -- by an enormous margin -- never appears on anyone else's list of mindfulness tools at all. It's the card game We Didn't Playtest This At All. It's completely ridiculous, and at first it seems pointless chaos, then suddenly becomes quite challenging. But there are a couple of features that make it ideal for practicing mindfulness.
1) Among the most famous of mindfulness exercises is the infamous Door Exercise. It's simple; you just have remember to pause momentarily before passing through each door you approach. This is tedious and maddening, so most people hate it, although it does work. The game takes that do-first principle and turns it into something hilarious, like remembering to say, "Aaaaa! Zombies!" before your turn. It is no easier, but it is fun instead of tiresome. That means people are likely to do it more, and thus, get more results.
2) There are a bunch of random mechanics where you need to answer yes/no or pick a number, and this often determines whether or not you stay in the game. At higher levels of mindfulness, some people develop intuition, telepathy, precognition, or other abilities that allow them to guess correctly more often than idle chance would explain.
This game typically goes for $12-15 depending on where you buy it. So it's much cheaper, and if you play it for a while, more effective than an expensive weekend workshop.
See now, this is the good part of people screwing around with mindfulness every few decades: occasionally they come up with something brilliant. I doubt this was deliberate, just an effect of ideas sloshing around a culture, but it works great anyway.
Kabat-Zinn’s studies signed up participants for an intensive eight-week MBSR program. The workshop included formal instruction in mindfulness techniques, group meetings, and homework between sessions. It aimed to help participants develop a non-judgmental awareness of the present moment, while Kabat-Zinn analyzed how that affected their mental and physical wellness. And this pilot program showed promise.
That's about what you can expect from 8 weeks: promise. More particularly, it's enough time to give you a pretty good idea whether a given technique or angle of approach will work for you. If you're starting to see results, it's worth continuing long-term; if not, it probably isn't. Bear in mind that there are many different methods, most or all of them work for some people, few if any work for everyone, and if the first thing you try doesn't work, ditch it and try something else. Whatever works for you, though, you have to keep doing it to enjoy continuing benefits. Mindfulness is a lifestyle choice, not something you do once and quit.
Kabat-Zinn’s research (and later studies) found that mindfulness practitioners enjoyed less stress,
That's among the easiest things to learn.
anxiety, and depression.
These are harder, depending on severity; but as they are afflictions of the mind, they can typically be influenced by mental techniques. The worse the problem, the harder you have to work to affect it. Not everyone can do this, but it can be done.
Further studies have since identified mindfulness as a potential tool for reducing chronic pain, lowering blood pressure,
These are among the more straightforward physical effects. They're not easy, but they are attainable by a fairly large portion of people. They take time, though, and you have to keep at it.
aiding insomnia,
This is another of the easier ones, especially for mild to moderate insomnia. Bad insomnia is a lot harder to fix. Ultimately, anything born of the mind is susceptible to mental efforts; physically caused insomnia is considerably more difficult to affect, but not impossible.
and lessening the body’s inflammatory response to stressors.
If nonphysical (like emotional strain), it's only moderately hard; if physical (like allergies) then it's harder but some people have done it.
Preliminary research has even suggested that mindfulness can make us less racially biased
Anything based on changing beliefs is toward the quicker and easier end, because they only exist in the mind. You can beat them to death by simple dogged repetition. By "dogged" consider that meditators have a tendency to chant things dozens, hundreds, or thousands of times per session. Removing bad tape is just like debugging code: you take it out the same way it went in, one line at a time. Shave that yak!
and lengthen our telomeres, a chromosomal region that stands as a biomarker of human aging.
Sure, if you want to spend your whole life meditating on that. Monks are known to live a long time. Being calm and focused certainly cuts down on wear and tear.
“I don’t want to overstate the evidence because the entire field is in its infancy, but the vast majority of studies are suggesting that when you do something as simple as what looks from the outside like nothing, this is having profound effects,” Kabat-Zinn added.
ROTFLMAO!!!
No, studying it with conventional science tools is some several decades old. Studying with computers, what, a decade or two. The sciences of the mind are thousands of years old.
But given promises of extraordinary bliss and god minds,
Extraordinary bliss isn't that difficult to achieve. Most people can do it. The hard part there is remembering to work on anything when you are in that state. Almost nobody can do that. So in trancework, the advice is to set an intention before you go down that far, which makes it happen without you having to direct it while blissed. This is also why being hypnotized by someone else is easier than doing it yourself, although most decent trance subjects can learn to do it themselves. You can also use guided meditation scripts, which are very popular. These are particularly good for hearing-dominant or audio-learning folks. There are meditation methods for all the other sensory and learning modes too.
God mind tends to be more challenging, and has various levels. These include but are not necessarily limited to:
* Awareness of and interaction with the Divine. Most people can learn to do this. The Society of Friends (aka Quakers) is all about listening to God in Silence. Not many are that good, but they can get impressive results.
* Dissolution of the sense of self. Most people can learn to do this, but it takes longer. Using psychotropic drugs is a popular shortcut. However, you can do it a lot safer simply by paying attention to the process of falling asleep each night, as your thoughts naturally float apart. Also great practice for dying.
* Association with a specific aspect of the Divine. Afro-Caribbean traditions specialize in this as each practitioner has a "head" lwa, and upon death, they join that lwa, which is why there are scads of different ones clustered in families, like the Ghedes.
* Assumption of the responsibilities of Divinity. This is easy. You just decide to do it. You can talk to a deity and make a deal to do their work in the world -- each deity has some sphere(s) of influence -- or you can just pick something that needs done and start doing it. This can be small or large, as deities can be localized or quite vast. You can work on saving a single species or stopping climate change, saving lives one at a time or eradicating hunger. Nothing is stopping you from this aspect of god mind but your own thoughts and choices. Few people really want to take on divine-type responsibilties. They're only interested in power. It doesn't work that way. The power comes from the responsibilities. You do the thing and you get better at it.
Now, that doesn't make these things a good idea to peddle in weekend workshops. That's a reliable way of getting people hurt. Big ideas don't fit in small minds. You need to stretch slowly and gently to make room for them safely. Otherwise you are liable to rip something in a place that modern medicine really is not equipped to fix. In the drug culture, this is called a "bad trip" (although some skilled users can handle even that) but it is just as possible to hurt yourself with ideas, and those don't wear off as fast.
others obviously lack Kabat-Zinn’s restraint for overstatement and over-selling. And here’s where the science bumps against the commercialized woo.
Story of human history.
While mindfulness effects are present in the data, they aren’t incredibly robust.
That depends on the study. There is some spectacular evidence of what can be done with various mindfulness techniques. It's just that studying them with modern science is challenging because few of the best practitioners want to do science, it takes a long time to get the really big effects, and some of the stuff continues to baffle science no matter how many instruments they point at it. They can see it happening, but they can't explain it. We are lucky that some mental experts have volunteered, which is how we know that months of meditation make modest changes in brain scans while decades of meditation make quite dramatic changes.
A systematic review and meta-analysis published in JAMA Internal Medicine looked at 47 randomized clinical trials with active controls (totaling 3,515 participants). It found moderate evidence of mindfulness easing anxiety, depression, and pain;
That fits.
low evidence for assuaged stress;
I have no idea how they cocked that up, because that is among the fastest and easiest effects to achieve. It was always one of our most popular topics in trancework, the others being studying and sleep, which also worked.
insufficient evidence of reduced substance abuse and poor eating habits;
Substance abuse is challenging to fix no matter what you try, and different things work for different people. At least, you are unlikely to hurt yourself with mindfulness, which is more than can be said of some other treatments.
Poor eating habits are straightforward to fix. Anything in the mind can be affected by the mind. You decide to change it, you pick some specific improvements, you meditate on it, and things change. I will say that small, incremental changes are much easier to perm than large ones and that enjoyable changes are much easier than miserable ones. I've gotten good results simply from browsing cookbooks for healthy recipes that make me go, "I want that in my mouth."
Disordered eating, and eating disorders, in order of increasing severity, are harder to fix. But if they are not caused by physical issues (e.g. mineral shortage causing pica) or other people (abuse is a leading cause of eating disorders), then they are of the mind and can be influenced by mental efforts. That doesn't mean everyone can do it, any more than everyone can do gymnastics; but it can be done.
and no evidence that mindfulness was better than other treatment options.
Guess I've seen some different studies. I've also seen the tendency toward scattered results. Which is to say, not everything will work equally well for all people, and that is just as true of pills as it is of meditation. The listed complaints are in fact particularly difficult to treat with conventional methods (which is why people seek alternatives) and some official treatments are marginally effective or no better than placebo.
Where mindfulness really stands out is harmlessness. A useless drug often has unpleasant side effects. Bad counseling can be life-wrecking; there are some ugly observations about Alcoholics Anonymous. The parts of mindfulness used to treat complaints are quite safe. It's the high-end stuff, like trying for god mind, that gets risky if you are not careful. That makes this a very good technique to try before attempting others with a higher risk level. If it doesn't work for you, then you can always try something else.
As for individual studies, these can be limited in their predictive value. That study showing mindfulness reduced racial bias, for example, had only 72 participants—all of them midwest college students.
That problem affects the whole of science and medicine. Mindfulness studies are no more susceptible than most others -- and 72 is a lot higher than the 10-12 typical of many brain studies because those are so hard to do.
“It’s important we understand the risks and don’t overstate the potential benefits until they’re robustly substantiated,” writes Jason Linder, PsyD, at Psychology Today. “Practicing mindfulness when you’re not mentally ready, or when you actually need a nap, to eat, a massage, to work, or an important conversation with a loved one can clearly create more difficulties than it’s meant to mitigate.”
Well, it's important to take care of practicalities. Here is a good checklist.
Mentally ready? Anyone can be. Just start at a level comfortable for your current experience, as you would with any new practice.
Emboldened by stories of “I did it and so can you,”
Just because one person can do it, doesn't necessarily mean other can. Some can, some can't. Similarly, most conventional therapies work on some people but not others. Like say, how redheads often don't respond to painkillers nearly as well as average.
some may forgo traditional therapies and medicines in favor of mindfulness—a kind of mental self-medication.
Considering the astronomical expense of American "health care" and the fact that mindfulness can be done for free, it's no wonder. There's something to be said for trying the free thing first. But even if people make a wrong choice, it is still their choice to make, and trying to steal it from them or bully them out of it is not okay. Doctors become enraged if people make their own decisions. Well, fuck that. It's your mind, your body; do with it as you please. The gains or losses are your responsibility.
This can be harmful. In some people, mindfulness practices have been shown to amplify certain psychiatric problems associated with worry and depression.
So can "antidepressants" that lead to suicide.
Those who go it alone, without the supervision of a qualified psychiatrist or teacher, may blame themselves for their failures.
And let's not forget caregivers who abuse their clients, verbally, sexually, or otherwise. A video or book about mindfulness isn't going to molest you.
But if you go into mindfulness thinking you’ll become a mental Superman—that life’s difficulties will bounce harmlessly off your chest like bullets every which way—you’re in for a disappointment.
Oh, it's achievable -- after some decades of work. Monks can be as unflappable as a hurricane door.
“If you can get past the cultural baggage, though, what you’ll find is that meditation is simply exercise for your brain. It’s a proven technique for preventing the voice in your head from leading you around by the nose,”
That's a good way to put it.
Some videos on mindfulness and meditation:
Understanding the Monkey Mind
Meditation with Monkey Mind
Meditation Channels on YouTube
Free Mindfulness Videos
Other free resources:
What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness in Positive Psychology
18 Mindfulness Activities for Kids
23 Mindfulness Exercises for Adults
71 Mindfulness Exercises for Living in the Present Moment
Wikihow Mindfulness
What is meditation?
23 Types of Meditation
Meditation Techniques
Meditation Tips
Wikihow Meditation
Mindfulness is an important life skill that everyone needs. If you don't pay attention to what you are doing, you will fuck up something. You don't need anyone's permission or approval to learn it. A teacher may or may not be useful. You don't require any tools, although some tools can be helpful. You don't need to pay money, you just need to pay attention. It's that last bit that raises the real barrier. Most people don't have the time, energy, or patience to make this work well.
"You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes every day –- unless you’re too busy; then you should sit for an hour."
-– Zen Proverb