Mindfulness resources

Here, a friend passes on:

I've pulled together some recent resources for mindfulness—most of them published within the last 3 years—in clinical contexts.

The resources below fall into 5 groups:

Meta-analyses
The Mindful Clinician: Training, Development, Self-Care
Articles on Mindfulness as an Intervention for Psychological and Medical Disorders
Books on Mindfulness in Therapy, Recovery, & Self-Help
Audio Resources for Mindfulness

Mindfulness means acting as if your mind exists.

You are what you eat? Yes but, in the same sense, you are also what you think.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose    

Non-materialist neuroscience: Mindfulness is catching on?

I am told that Goldie Hawn is developing a mindfulness curriculum.:

Equipping children with the social and emotional skills they need to lead smarter, healthier, and happier lives.

One can hope. It beats mindless movies and TV, right?

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Mindfulness-based wellness program at Avila University

Delany Dean, who practised law for 14 years before becoming a psychologist, wrote me in July to say that there is a mindfulness-based wellness program at Avila University (My Healthy Space), in Kansas City, Missouri.

Mindfulness is a non-materialist neuroscience concept: You program your brain by the subjects that you choose to pay attention to. If you want to live in a healthy space, then pay attention to what makes you healthy.

Look, it is NOT magic. It's just that the more attention you pay to what makes you healthy, the more resources you are likely to devote to it. And slowly your mind shapes your brain, like a sculptor.

Mindfulness meditation catches on in the workplace: Beaded hippies nowhere in sight

In Toronto’s Globe and Mail, Patrick White offers a look at the use of mindfulness meditation by executives, to get control of job stress:

cities across Canada, mindfulness classes are overbooked with stressed professionals searching for a path to increased focus and decreased stress.

The trend has caught the interest of academics. Researchers have found that prolonged mindfulness meditation eases stress, aggressive behaviour, cardiovascular problems, pain and depression.

About time they noticed. Meditation is way better for you than another cup of ruddy awful coffee.

In one study, neurologists at Massachusetts General Hospital found that meditation actually alters the construction of the brain. Comparing the brains scans of meditators with a control group, they found thickened cortical walls surrounding the regions of the brain responsible for attention and sensory processing.

Last year, University of Toronto scientist Tony Toneatto found that nursing students who were able to maintain a state of mindfulness had fewer symptoms of stress and anxiety.

Excellent article, despite the continual need to stress that the beaded hippies are nowhere in sight. (Can’t remember when I last saw one, anyway. )

Mindfulness explored as aid in struggle against depression

Here's an interesting conference on Buddhist mindfulness and the treatment of depression. Mario and I devoted a fair amount of space in Chapter 6 of The Spiritual Brain to treatments for a number of mental disorders that depend on getting the mind to change the brain. Apparently,

... the Dalai Lama will meet in dialogue with neuroscientists, academic leaders and mental health professionals at a day-long conference at Emory University on October 20, 2007. Mind and Life XV: Mindfulness, Compassion and the Treatment of Depression is jointly presented by the Mind and Life Institute and Emory University at the Woodruff Physical Education Center on the Emory campus in Atlanta, Georgia.

This event is the fifteenth Mind and Life conference and the first to focus on depression. In the last two decades, these unique gatherings both in the United States and India with the Dalai Lama, neuroscientists, Buddhist scholars, and advanced meditation practitioners, have become the genesis of a new field of scientific research that investigates the effectiveness of techniques to enhance human development and alleviate mental suffering.