A collection of postings on a range of issues is available on our website (www.mjacksongroup.ca).  This month’s post is from Ken Pope’s listserv.

The article is as follows.U.S. News & World Report includes an article: “The Benefits of ‘Being in the Present’” by Maura Hohman, HealthDay Reporter.

Here are some excerpts:

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When you have a full schedule, multitasking might seem like the best way to finish your endless to-do list.

But the brain actually benefits from focusing on one activity at a time.

When you commit to training your attention and exerting control over your mind, you’re practicing mindfulness. 

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The idea of mindfulness is that life should be lived in the present moment. In addition to improving your focus, the practice can bring stress and insomnia relief, and pain reduction.

How?

One explanation comes from a study published in the journal Psychiatry Research. The study found that mindfulness can change the concentration of gray matter in areas of the brain involved in learning, memory, regulating emotion and more.

Yoga and tai chi are two mind-body practices that help increase mindfulness along with their physical and relaxation benefits.

There’s also mindfulness meditation, a very focused approach developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn. He is creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

However, you don’t need a formal program to incorporate mindfulness into your day.  Here are some ideas:

• When you start a task, imagine you’re doing it for the first time. Be curious. Feel sensations like you’ve never experienced them before. 
  
• Focus on your breathing. Take notice as you breathe in and as you breathe out. Follow your breath. It’s a reminder that you’re alive. 
  
• When you’re overcome with emotion, take a step back and trace the emotion’s origin and duration. Mindfulness teaches recognition that emotions are fleeting, which helps to reduce fear and anxiety. 
  
• Embrace imperfection. Once you understand that the world is filled with it, it becomes less upsetting. 
  
• Always try to immerse yourself in your surroundings; this helps you be present and connect with the world around you.

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The article is online at:

http://bit.ly/KenPopeBeingInThePresent

Ken Pope

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“The real meditation practice is how we live our lives from moment to moment.  The challenges we face, the choices we make, the places we go, and the work that we do all become occasions for opening to the life we are actually living and the life that is ours to live if we show up fully and pay attention.  You could say life itself is the meditation teacher, curriculum, and the gift that comes to us through showing up for life in its fullness and meeting it with our fulness….  The risk is that we will sleepwalk through large swaths of our lives on autopilot, unwittingly practicing mindlessness and getting better and better at it, and more and more remote from ourselves and the world: ‘The great escape’….  It is life itself that is the meditation practice, the real arena of mindfulness.  In that spirit, everything and every moment becomes practice and an occasion for waking up….  Wakefulness, as best we can muster it, brought face to face with the human condition itself, this is the challenge of a life lived, and lived fully in the only time we ever get to live or learn or love: This moment, this now.”

—Jon Kabat-Zinn, passage I transcribed from a workshop