Baer's review (2003; this issue) suggests that mindf ulness‐based interventions are clinically efficacious, but that better designed studies are now needed to substantiate the field and place it on a ...firm foundation for future growth. Her review, coupled with other lines of evidence, suggests that interest in incorporating mindfulness into clinical interventions in medicine and psychology is growing. It is thus important that professionals coming to this field understand some of the unique factors associated with the delivery of mindfulness‐based interventions and the potential conceptual and practical pitfalls of not recognizing the features of this broadly unfamiliar landscape. This commentary highlights and contextualizes (1) what exactly mindfulness is, (2) where it came from, (3) how it came to be introduced into medicine and health care, (4) issues of cross‐cultural sensitivity and understanding in the study of meditative practices stemming from other cultures and in applications of them in novel settings, (5) why it is important for people who are teaching mind‐fulness to practice themselves, (6) results from 3 recent studies from the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society not reviewed by Baer but which raise a number of key questions about clinical applicability, study design, and mechanism of action, and (7) current opportunities for professional training and development in mindfulness and its clinical applications.
Becoming conscious: the science of mindfulness Paulson, Steve; Davidson, Richard; Jha, Amishi ...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences,
November 2013, Letnik:
1303, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Many of us go through our daily lives on autopilot, not fully aware of our conscious experiences. In a discussion moderated by Steve Paulson, executive producer and host of To the Best of Our ...Knowledge, neuroscientists Richard Davidson and Amishi Jha and clinical mindfulness expert Jon Kabat‐Zinn explore the role of consciousness in mental and physical health, how we can train our minds to be more flexible and adaptable, and cutting‐edge neuroscience findings about the transformation of consciousness through mindfulness and contemplative practice. The following is an edited transcript of the discussion that occurred February 6, 2013, 7:00–8:15 PM, at the New York Academy of Sciences in New York City.
According to the Buddhist scholar and monk Nyanaponika Thera, mindfulness is “the unfailing master key for knowing the mind and is thus the starting point; the perfect tool for shaping the mind, and ...is thus the focal point; and the lofty manifestation of the achieved freedom of the mind, and is thus the culminating point.” In any moment, their ability to do that well could spell the difference between survival of an individual or even a whole community, and extinction. ...every person now on Earth is the progeny exclusively of generations of survivors. In this way, there was definite selective advantage to clear mirrors that could instantly recognize and reflect accurately in any matter impinging on survival all the messages coming through the sense doors. Over the centuries, the universal inborn capacity we all have for exquisitely fine-tuned awareness and insight has been explored, mapped, preserved, developed, and refined—not so much anymore by prehistory’s hunting-and-gathering societies, which sadly, along with everything they know of the world, are on the verge of extinction brought on by the “successes” of the flow of human history, such as agriculture and the division and specialization of labor and the rise of advanced technologies—but rather in monasteries. The Buddha, as we have seen, was a person who, for various karmic reasons, took it upon himself to sit down and direct his attention to the central question of suffering, to the investigation of the nature of the mind itself, and to the potential for liberation from sickness, old age, and death, and from what might be called the fundamental dis-ease of humanity, not by denying any of these or attempting to circumvent them, but by looking directly into the nature of human experience itself, using as his instrument the capacity we all share
The author recounts some of the early history of what is now known as MBSR, and its relationship to mainstream medicine and the science of the mind/body connection and health. He stresses the ...importance that MBSR and other mindfulness-based interventions be grounded in a universal dharma understanding that is congruent with Buddhadharma but not constrained by its historical, cultural and religious manifestations associated with its counties of origin and their unique traditions. He locates these developments within an historic confluence of two very different epistemologies encountering each other for the first time, that of science and that of the meditative traditions. The author addresses the ethical ground of MBSR, as well as questions of lineage and of skillful 'languaging' and other means for maximizing the possibility that the value of cultivating mindfulness in the largest sense can be heard and embraced and cultivated in commonsensical and universal ways in secular settings. He directly addresses mindfulness-based instructors on the subject of embodying and drawing forth the essence of the dharma without depending on the vocabulary, texts, and teaching forms of traditional Buddhist environments, even though they are important to know to one degree or another as part of one's own development. The author's perspective is grounded in what the Zen tradition refers to as the one thousand year view. Although it is not stated explicitly in this text, he sees the current interest in mindfulness and its applications as signaling a multi-dimensional emergence of great transformative and liberative promise, one which, if cared for and tended, may give rise to a flourishing on this planet akin to a second, and this time global, Renaissance, for the benefit of all sentient beings and our world.
...perhaps at this moment in time, it is way too early to tell what the likely fate of humankind will be, given our self-destructive, aggressive, violent, tribal, dualistic, and delusional tendencies ...as a species, in spite of all the civilizations, diverse cultural flowerings, beauty, understanding, wisdom, and compassion and basic human goodness that humanity has also brought to the planet in the very short arc of human history—say, to be generous, perhaps 400 generations since the last ice age. Parenthetically, MBSR was also designed from the beginning as a vehicle of right livelihood for the people who would be drawn to become MBSR instructors.6 Now that mindfulness already has a multidecade track record in the mainstream of medicine, health care, as well as increasingly in other societal avenues, however, nascent at this particular time, from the law to education to government, to criminal justice, to sports, perhaps the major challenge for all of us who practice the dharma in one form or another and care deeply about suffering and the end of suffering and the root causes of suffering is to contribute optimally and skillfully to the ongoing development, refinement, articulation, and embodied authenticity of dharma wisdom in all the various domains within which it is taking root, whether within the mainstream or within more Buddhist-oriented streams. See PDF. Number of publications on mindfulness by year What I intend to do in this paper is offer a non-exhaustive perspective on the original core aspirations, as I experienced them, behind introducing mindfulness as a practice and as a way of being into the mainstream world, initially through medicine and health care in the form of MBSR, and then—as the meme and practice took root and interest spread with increasing evidence of its multifaceted efficacy—to varying degrees into education, business, social justice, politics, and the more global domain of acknowledging a moral and exceedingly practical responsibility for the planet on the part of our species as a whole. When these intrinsic human values are ignored, their absence tends to undermine our speech, our actions, our choices and sources of livelihood, and thus, potentially, our ethical stance and moral core as human beings.
...even within science, looking at the edges, it is not so clear that we comprehend underlying reality, which seems disturbingly statistical, unpredictable, and mysterious, as per the causes and ...timing of a particular radioactive decay event in the nucleus of a radioactive atom; or whether the universe is finite or not; or whether time even exists; or what happens in the heart of a black hole; or why the vacuum has so much energy; or the question of whether space is nothing or something. All the while, we are immersed in a stream of thoughts whose origins and content are frequently unclear to us and which can be obsessive, repetitive, inaccurate, disturbingly unrelenting and toxic, all of which both color the present moment and screen it from us. ...we are frequently hijacked by emotions we cannot control and that can cause great harm to ourselves and to others, or are the result of earlier harm or perceived harm. ...of this lifelong conditioning, we are not really as “free” as we think, when we think we are free to do whatever we want, which may mean that we are totally at the mercy of our mind’s habitual grasping and pushing away. Because we forget or do not know that we do not have to be perpetually caught up in reactions to events, in our often unconscious decisions to do this or that, relate in this or that way, see things this way or that way, avoid this or that, forget this or that, including that all this conditioning adds up to the appearance of a life, but often one that remains disturbingly superficial and unsatisfying, with a lingering sense that there must be something more, some deeper meaning, some possibility for being comfortable in one’s own skin, independent of conditions, whether things are momentarily “good” or “bad,” “pleasant” or “unpleasant.”
The Evolutionary Import of Meditative Awareness If it is part of the evolutionary glide path of us humans to progressively know ourselves better, thereby inhabiting a bit more the name we gave our ...species1; if it is also part of the evolutionary glide path of us humans not to destroy ourselves or create nightmare dystopias beyond those we have already managed to perpetrate, we will need to take on a whole new level of responsibility for ourselves, for our own minds, for our societies, and for our planet. When 21 Lessons for the twenty-first Century was reviewed on the front page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review on September 9, 2018, by Bill Gates, under the title, “Thinking Big,”2 because Harari is nothing if not a deep and creative thinker and synthesizer as an historian, Gates asks rhetorically: Apparently, he understands the power of mindfulness from the inside. * The way I would put the basic message of this book is that before we give up being human in the face of what is very likely on the horizon, i.e. artificial intelligence, intelligent robots, and the prospect of digitally if not also biologically “enhanced” humans, and much more, as Harari describes in great detail, we might do well to explore in depth what being fully human, and thus, more embodied and more awake might really mean and feel like. ...it is inviting a very personal engagement on your part, in the sense that each one of us has a responsibility, not only to ourself but to the world, to do our own inner and outer work through the regular cultivation of mindfulness—as a meditation practice and as a way of being—and thereby come to recognize and inhabit the full dimensionality of our being and its repertoire of potentials right here and right now, as best we can. Since elements of the universal mindfulness meditation-based dharma perspective I am referring to run through wisdom streams within every human culture, mindfulness is intrinsically inclusive, capable of dissolving barriers to communication and finding common purpose rather than promoting divisiveness.
From the start, he met the challenge of articulating and implementing an inclusive vision large enough and rigorous enough for both catalyzing and curating a new field as it was emerging into the ...world of science and medicine. ...equally important for a field that brings together two up-to-now orthogonal ways of investigating the nature of the mind and mind–body interactions and their potential impacts on well-being and human flourishing, his instinct to invite Buddhist scholars and monastic practitioners to contribute articles that could inform the general scientific readership of the origins and high-resolution topography of the classical teachings of mindfulness. See PDF. Number of articles and reviews on mindfulness by year of publication (from Baminiwatta & Solangaarachchi, 2021) Equally illuminating of the germinal potential of what was emerging at the time are the recent plots of (a) global collaborative networks and (b) keyword co-occurrence clusters in the mindfulness literature (Baminiwatta & Solangaarachchi, 2021) that have developed in parallel with the increase in mindfulness as a major subject of scientific study, and of the various collaborations that arose as a consequence (Fig. 2). Figures were published in a bibliometric study by Baminiwatta and Solangaarachchi (2021) In a parallel role, Nirb also served over the years as Series Editor of a collection of Springer Handbooks on Mindfulness in Behavioral Health.
The underlying changes in biological processes that are associated with reported changes in mental and physical health in response to meditation have not been systematically explored. We performed a ...randomized, controlled study on the effects on brain and immune function of a well-known and widely used 8-week clinical training program in mindfulness meditation applied in a work environment with healthy employees.
We measured brain electrical activity before and immediately after, and then 4 months after an 8-week training program in mindfulness meditation. Twenty-five subjects were tested in the meditation group. A wait-list control group (N = 16) was tested at the same points in time as the meditators. At the end of the 8-week period, subjects in both groups were vaccinated with influenza vaccine.
We report for the first time significant increases in left-sided anterior activation, a pattern previously associated with positive affect, in the meditators compared with the nonmeditators. We also found significant increases in antibody titers to influenza vaccine among subjects in the meditation compared with those in the wait-list control group. Finally, the magnitude of increase in left-sided activation predicted the magnitude of antibody titer rise to the vaccine.
These findings demonstrate that a short program in mindfulness meditation produces demonstrable effects on brain and immune function. These findings suggest that meditation may change brain and immune function in positive ways and underscore the need for additional research.
If mindfulness is both a formal meditation practice of cultivating greater discernment and presence and, equally, a way of being in wise relationship to experience, how are we to understand its ...moment-to-moment embodiment in the face of life unfolding? Extended periods of stress have been shown to have toxic effects on brain growth and development in children, especially in particular windows of vulnerability (Lupien et al., 2009). Yet in a sense, all of childhood is a time of heightened vulnerability while also being a time of astonishing and mysterious growth and development, language acquisition being one among many of the most obvious and profound examples. ...while there is no one right way to practice mindfulness, either formally or informally, there are “wrong” or deluded ways to practice, so some degree of guidance and alignment with well-established meditative frameworks and disciplines can be important to support the entire enterprise over years and decades in an ever-changing environment. Almost every parent will recognize that there is an element of truth in there being some degree of wounding braided into all the blossoming and the profound blessings we receive from our children. ...there is pain and potential suffering, and more so if we do not learn to recognize it and respond appropriately.
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