Thursday, May 22, 2025

Thursday, May 22, 2025

By now you know that there are variety of meditations. Different meditations train different kinds of mental habits. We practice loving kindness meditation; full body scan; and guided meditations. I strongly suggest that at home you either practice Analytical Meditation (as we discussed in the Mindful Creators Class) or Focus on the Breath Meditation to monitor thoughts without getting swept away by them. Whatever you practice, will improve. 

Mindfulness as you know is awareness or attention, becoming conscious of our consciousness. When we pay attention to the in-flow and the out-flow of our breathing, it connects us to the present moment. Mindfulness unfolds. The brain’s executive center, prefrontal cortex, located behind the forehead, gives us ability to anticipate the future, and recall the past. Neither past nor future events have power to upset us until we think about them and judge them. By judging and evaluating even small events we let the stress hormones such as cortisol rise.  

Jon Kabat-Zinn describes a ten-day Vipassana meditation retreat that he attended as a young man at Insight Meditation Center in Massachusetts. Run by Jack Kornfield the center uses S.N. Goenka’s method that is followed by many American teachers. Goenka was one of the foremost meditation teachers who led retreats in Burma and India. 

Jon Kabat-Zinn writes that the retreat participants spent the first three days to focus on the breath to build concentration. The next seven days were spent to systematically scan the body sensations, from head to toe, over and over again. In body scan meditations they focused on bare physical sensations. In addition, they practiced several two-hour sittings as part of the curriculum in which not a single voluntary movement was allowed. They were expected to sit still. 

For Jon, one of those immobile sessions produced a level of pain that he had never experienced in his life. As he sat with that unbearable pain and scanned his body to focus on his sensations, he realized that the pain dissolved into pure sensations. There and then he had this insight: maybe sitting in a posture and not move even an iota was the way that could benefit the medical patients who experience chronic pain that won’t go away. 

So the same year, i.e. 1979 he began his MBSR program now known around the world. However, most of his patients couldn’t sit still for long periods of time so Jon adapted a method from his yoga training called Lying-Down Body Scan Meditation. The key point this meditation demonstrates is that it is possible to register and then investigate and transform our relationship to whatever we are sensing at a given place in the body, even if it is highly unpleasant.

Jon explains why: Pain is in the brain. It unifies the pure sensation of pain + our dislike of that pain. But when we investigate mindfully, our aversion to pain falls away and breaks down into subtler sensations such as throbbing, heat, intensity. With mindfulness we feel the pain, but our thoughts and emotions do not react to the pain. This attitude reduces it to several degrees.

 Constant stress sculpts the brain for the worse. People experiencing pain or stress reveal enlarged amygdalae and weak connections in the prefrontal cortex. Meditation calms the amygdala and strengthens the prefrontal cortex. With mindfulness we have better emotional control and mental clarity. With undisturbed mind we are more resilient. 

 Brain imaging studies show that functional connectivity between prefrontal cortex and amygdala increases with regular meditation. Over time this rewires our brain to respond more calmly and thoughtfully to emotional triggers, whether physical or emotional.