Meditation Techniques, Benifits, and a Beginner's How-to

By Perspecty Tube

Life feels a little more intense these days: at home, work, out in the world. When life begins to feel more intense than normal, it’s important to remember to slow down, turn toward these bigger feelings, and see the bigger picture. Take each day at a time. Life is always in flux. Every thought, feeling, and moment is quickly changing into the next. In the moment, when something feels difficult, it seems like it will never pass. The practice is learning how to stay with and turn toward the difficulty. We never really know what is coming next and sometimes the best we can do is put one foot in front of the other and keep breathing through all of it. I often remind myself that conflict is growth trying to happen. The power of learning how to live a mindful life is to embrace this truth as much as you possibly can and live for the moment with some future planning that you hold loosely.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Perspecty Tube
• Release date: Jul 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370495023

Perspecty Tube

Library · California City, California

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Meditation and Neuroscience

Legs in tights, extending from leotards and terminating in pointe shoes, briskly cut through the air. Instructions are called out as the dancers, faces aglow, carry their arms in delicate arcs and place their feet in deliberate motions. Leading the ballet class at a dance studio in Tokyo is a 27-year-old woman whom we will call Murano Kozue. The students would never imagine that their petite teacher was once quite the juvenile delinquent or that she used to suffer from bulimia stemming from emotional imbalance.

That all began to change when she attended a 10-day meditation retreat in Kyoto on the advice of her mother’s friend. Meditation in Japan is generally performed as a Buddhist discipline in pursuit of enlightenment, but this retreat was conducted in a secular setting. The core of the program was silence: Not only were smartphones banned, but participants were also forbidden to talk with one another or even make eye contact. They arose at 4 am and had nothing to eat from noon onward. Until 9 pm each day, they would spend about 10 hours seated on the floor with their legs crossed.

To Murano, this regime felt like torture. Even so, she says, since the training was conducted in the company of other people, it was emotionally easier than being detained one of the solitary rooms at the juvenile classification home. During the 10-day program, she began to take part as a volunteer, doing things like cleaning and cooking for the participants. At first I assumed the people around me were all just acting nice for show, so I was surprised to find that they were genuinely good people. And before she knew it, she had gone for months without binge eating.

Meditation’s Role in Suppressing Stress Hormones

It is only in recent years that the effects of meditation, including Zen, on depression and other mental illnesses have been substantiated. Much of the credit goes to molecular biologist Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. A serious practitioner of meditation, Kabat-Zinn developed an eight-week program called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction by isolating the techniques of meditation from the context of Buddhism. The program opened its doors in 1979 to patients with chronic pain and stress. As of 2011 more than 19,000 participants had completed the program, proving MBSR effective. The worldwide interest that the program generated has contributed to an exponential increase in studies on meditation in the mainstream of neuroscience research over the past decade.

When mindfulness techniques or Zen meditation heighten one’s focus and activate the brain, the functions of the brain’s dorsolateral prefrontal area are amplified. This strengthens the psyche and boosts the immune system, as well as enhancing one’s memory and work efficiency. Those suffering from depression exhibit diminished functions in this area of the brain. Activity in the amygdala—the brain’s center of emotion—increases instead, making patients more prone to secrete the stress hormone, cortisol. Meditation has been shown to shrink the amygdala.

In Japan, the heartland of Zen, a rising generation of researchers is endeavoring to unravel the correlation between meditation and the brain, primarily at Kyoto and Waseda Universities.

I visited with Fujino Masahiro, a postdoctoral fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, currently enrolled at Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Education. He is