In the early 1970′s, I worked as a research assistant at the UCSF Medical Center, Langley Porter Institute, in the laboratory of David Galin, MD, who worked with Robert Ornstein, PhD. … The focus of their research was brain lateralization – the early left brain/right brain stuff.

But they also did some work with Dr. Joe Kamiya, looking at brain activity in meditation.

Continued in post Cognitive Filtering, Meditation, Creativity.

The article continues, “It may sound a bit squishy and New Agey to some, but.. experts say mindfulness has something that discredited theories of the past never had: solid evidence that it can help.

Stefan Hofmann, a professor of psychology at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders said, “I was skeptical at first. I wondered, ‘Why on Earth should this work?’ But it seems to work quite well.”

“Hofmann and colleagues burnished the scientific credentials of mindfulness therapy with a review article in the April issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.

“After combining results of 39 previous studies involving 1,140 patients, the researchers concluded that mindfulness therapy was effective for relieving anxiety and improving mood.

“The treatment seemed to help ease the mental stress of people recovering from cancer and other serious illnesses, but it had the strongest benefits for people diagnosed with mood disorders, including generalized anxiety disorder and recurring depression.”

Continued in article: Mindfulness therapy is no fad, experts say, By Chris Woolston, Los Angeles Times January 8, 2011.

The image is from the cover of a CD program: Mindful Solutions for Stress, Anxiety, and Depression by Elisha Goldstein, PhD, who explains how mindfulness can help us get control of anxious thinking :

“With things like depression or anxiety oftentimes people have certain styles of thinking, like catastrophizing, which is this idea that we are always expecting disasters, something terrible is going to happen from some little event that happens.

“We really blow it up and magnify it and this tends to amplify our anxiety.

“But people can become more aware of their habitual style of thinking. Not judge it as good or bad, but just almost with a sense of curiosity, almost like they are noticing it for the very first time and say, “Oh, catastrophizing is happening right now.”

“As soon as they notice that, they step outside of it. It’s no longer controlling them.. they can in essence learn to again control their mind instead of their mind controlling them so that they can make a choice what they want to do at that moment.”

From the Anxiety Relief Solutions site page: Mindful Solutions for Stress, Anxiety, and Depression – CD program.

Also see multiple articles by Morty Lefkoe on changing self-limiting beliefs – such as Is It Possible to Get Rid of Your Stress?

You can try his program free at ReCreateYourLife.

I’ve always thought of meditation as something I have to do on the floor with my legs crossed, which is just too darn uncomfortable. In fact, I’ve experienced meditative states all my life and didn’t know it.

Orna Ross writes in her ebook Inspiration Meditation:

Towards the end of my first novel, Lovers Hollow, the narrator Jo Devereux has an unexpected meditative experience.

By this stage in the story, Jo has been through a lot: the death of her mother and her best friend, a rekindled love affair with a married old flame; a reluctant return to the small Irish village she fled twenty years before. She is full of misery and confusion, so much so that another part of her mind interjects.

“Stop it, I order myself. Stop thinking. Pull yourself out of your head down into your body, the body that can’t be in tomorrow or yesterday but only here, where it is. Feel the sun on your eyes and the breeze on your skin.”

We give the same word – meditation – to both the meditative state (“I am melting into the water and all the world”; “Deep joy surges in me” ) and the practices that take us there (“Stop thinking”; “Feel the sun on your eyes and the breeze on your skin”; “Pull yourself out of your head down into your body”).

Even if you’ve never formally practiced meditation, you are likely to have experienced the meditative state – perhaps, like Jo, when walking in nature, or during sex. Perhaps when relaxing in the bath or when looking into the eyes of a child. Perhaps even in the midst of a busy crowd.

Moments when the thought traffic that ordinarily stomps through your head ceases and your mind falls into stillness, into mindful being.

Those whose lives are most creative, in most spheres, are those who are courageous enough to bring their conscious awareness to the challenging, miraculous, moment-by-moment art of living.

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For more on how to develop conscious awareness, get the free ebook Inspiration Meditation: A Guide For Writers, Artists & Everyone, by Orna Ross, available from her site www.ornaross.com

For more on how to ‘do’ meditation and its value for thinkers and creators, see Meditation and mindfulness articles and Meditation products

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Orna Ross, meditation, meditation and creativity, creativity and meditation

He writes in his new book The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance about finding at a young age that “there is something profoundly hollow about the nature of fame. I had spent my life devoted to artistic growth and was used to the sweaty-palmed sense of contentment one gets after many hours of intense reflection. This peaceful feeling had nothing to do with external adulation, and I yearned for a return to that innocent, fertile time.”

At eighteen, he discovered the Tao Te Ching, began intense training in Tai Chi, and is now a martial arts champion.

“My fascination with consciousness, study of chess and Tai Chi, love for literature and the ocean, for meditation and philosophy, all coalesced around the theme of tapping into the mind’s potential via complete immersion into one and all activities. My growth became defined by barrierlessness.”

Continued in article The Art of Learning: In Pursuit of Excellence, which includes an ABC News video interview with Waitzkin.
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Josh Waitzkin, mind’s potential, art of learning, consciousness

You find that essentially in the mystical schools of religion and spirituality around the world. You don’t find that, for example, in virtually any forms of psychiatry or psychotherapy in the West.

So, what we’re looking at, the West has come up with other forms of help for individuals and what an integral approach wants to do, of course, is combine the best of both of those so that you’re working with shadow material, which the West has specialized in — shadow material being unconscious, dissociated, repressed material that was once part of yourself, but that you split off and is causing symptoms, causing pain, causing suffering, causing uncomfortableness and there are some fairly simple techniques for reintegrating the shadow.

From article: Bill Harris Interviews Ken Wilber on Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now.
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consciousness book, Buddhist psychology, mindfulness book, Ken Wilbur

Bill Harris, Director of the Centerpointe Research Institute, writes about the development of the Holosync technology for providing the “benefits of meditation.” Here is an excerpt from an article of his:

Brain wave patterns during meditation

In the early 1970s the Menninger Foundation studied some Indian yogis who were in the United States. They hooked these yogis to different machines in order to measure the yogis’ control over supposedly unconscious mental and physical functions.

These studies gave researchers the first peek at the electrical brain wave patterns of meditation.

At about the same time, but completely independently, a researcher named Dr. Gerald Oster of Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York published a paper in Scientific American about research he had been conducting since the 1950s into the effects of sound waves on brain wave patterns.

Oster had discovered a method, using sound, to create any desired electrical pattern in the brain, including those of meditation.

A small field sprang up around this technology and a related technology that uses flickering lights to alter brain wave patterns.

The essence of the experience

This field has always focused (mistakenly, in my opinion) on what I would describe as the symptoms of exposure to these brain-altering technologies.

You will hear people say, for instance, “we will put you in an alpha brain wave pattern and such-and-such will be your experience” or “we will put you in a theta state and you will have an out-of-body experience” (or whatever).

This, to me, is like a runner thinking the important thing about running is that you breathe hard, you get sweaty, and your legs get tired.

These are symptoms of running, but the real essence of the experience is that the cardiovascular system and the muscles are reorganizing at higher levels of functioning.

Continued in How Holosync Works.
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holosync, mental health enhancing, Buddhist psychology, neuroscience book