Mindfulness - Your Present Moment

The question I raised back in the early 1980′s was: Why Do Runners Heel Strike? I had purchased a Sanyo recorder in 1979 that did slow motion recording in a 20 minute cassette format. It was the beginning of teaching runners about running what I called; Ball/Heel/Ball. If you march in place the ball of the foot touches, then the heel, and as the foot lifts back up the ball is the last to leave the ground. Marching in place ball/heel/ball there is no sound and one can lightly touch the ground quietly.

In a previous blog post, Joyce Wycoff wrote an article in May 1996 entitled: Today’s Certainties and Tomorrow’s Absurdities and quoted me:

Running shoes will continue to advance in design and technology. They will continue to neglect a major component: Man, the thinking body.

An atavistic paradigm shift will take place. Runners and walkers will realize it’s not the shoe, it’s an innovative thinking body. A new line of shoe will be created that allows proprioceptive feedback to the thinking body. All of the thick running and walking shoes will be replaced by thinsoled foot covers which allow the human animal to take control of their youthful movement once again.

Traditional Tai Chi, Yoga, Stretching for the Thinking Body, etc. will grow. Companies like Nike, Addidas, Reebok and their approach to shoes will be tomorrow’s absurdities.

Tim Brennan back in 2003 sent me a pair of his prototype shoes that were to become today”s VivoBarefoot. I wore them for a few weeks but since they size 12 and I wear a 13, I gave them to my Rolfer, Victor Geberin, who wore them for years.

As you watch Ruthie in the video, notice how she lands as she walks and runs.

As you walk over the next few weeks, think elliptical trainer. All I ask you to do is as your foot lands, lift it a quarter of an inch and as it swings through place it down sooner so that you land on the heel of your shoe NOT the back-of-the-heel-of-the-shoe. If you hit on the back-of-the-heel-of-the-shoe, your stride is too long and you’re stopping yourself with each step. That lifting a quarter of an inch and thinking elliptical will smooth out your walking. And if it smooths out our walking, it may just make a difference in your running – if you are a back-of-the-heel-of-the-shoe striker.

Check out The Natural Running Centerr.

Ryan Rivera shares some techniques to deal with stress.

Like the Running of the Squirrels, it is not the big things that get me. It is all the little things that overwhelm and take me in the direction of mindless rather than move me toward mindfulness..

Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way:
on purpose,in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.

Stress and anxiety reduction should be one of life’s main priorities. Stress affects every component of our being. It makes fun things less enjoyable. It makes bad things linger longer. It hurts health, motivation, and the ultimate goal of achieving happiness in life’s adventures.

Mindfulness is one of the key strategies to reducing stress. Often one of the key issues that affects those dealing with stress is that many try to fight it. They either try to feel as though they’re not dealing with stress, or they allow the stress to overcome them while focusing on the problems causing stress, rather than simply controlling the stress itself.

Mindfulness helps people learn to control their stress and anxiety symptoms. A trained expert is the best way to learn mindfulness and relaxation techniques, but there are some quick and easy ways to integrate mindfulness-based practices into your life.

• Stress Embracing
Normally people fight their stress, because stress is a negative emotion. But generally if you try to fight your emotions, you experience more stress, so this technique doesn’t necessarily work.
A better strategy is to embrace stress. Once you’ve learned to recognize the symptoms of stress, you wait for them and use them as a trigger to go about your life. For example, if you’re often stressed at work, don’t worry about working too hard when you’re feeling relaxed (within reason, of course). Then, when you notice you’re feeling stress, be happy and use that stress as energy to complete your projects.
By embracing stress rather than fighting it, you still experience some stress, but you also learn to control it because it is no longer the enemy of your day.

• Game Making
Similarly, you can turn the experience of stress into some type of game. Using the same work example, chances are if you’re stressed at work there are a variety of causes. Normally, you try your best to avoid these situations, and when the stress hits you feel it deep within, and it essentially ruins your day.

Turning stress into some type of game can make stress something that you appreciate, rather than fight. For example, see if you can come up with 24 different causes of stress at work. If so, turn these different stresses into a bingo game. Any time you notice that one of those issues is causing stress, mark it out on the sheet. If you get a Bingo, go out and do something you enjoy (or buy something you like).
Harnessing stress in this way makes it advantageous and fun will ensure that it is not something that overwhelms you, and may even be something you start to appreciate.

• Writing Out Persistent Thoughts
An issue that often arises with stress is the way that it can overtake your thoughts. Stressful thoughts are extremely difficult to ignore, as your brain tries hard to focus on them, and takes away from focusing on life or sleep.

Generally, when someone is stressed with persistent thoughts, they do their best to think of something else. But this seldom works, and usually leads to further anxiety and stress. Instead, when a thought can’t seem to get out of your head, write it down in a journal. It’s been found that writing things down relaxes your mind, because it tells your brain that it’s in a safe and permanent place. Pay attention to your thoughts, and if there is one that you can’t seem to shake, write it down and you should feel better.

Maintaining a Stress Free World

These are a few simple techniques anyone can implement to take advantage of recognizing stress in the moment. They give you a way to recognize your stress as a thought or a feeling. You will find over time your stress diminishes as you observe it. Letting go of that stressful thought or feeling is often just a breath away.,

About the Author: Ryan Rivera’s life with anxiety was troublesome. Since it took him a long time to successfully get help, he writes and shares his lessons learned dealing with stress and axniety at http://www.calmclinic.com.

MINDFULNESS AS A FOUNDATION FOR HEALTH
This presentation was at Google in 2011. It was part of a half day program for Google employees at he Googleplex.

To reach the next generation, Thay and his followers have reached out through their website: WAKE UP There is a schedule of the WAKE UP tours in the US and the UK on the site.

IF YOU ARE GOING TO LIVE YOUR DREAM

———————–W A K E U P !———————–

The spirit of Buddha travels through the minds and hearts of those who hear his words and practice.

Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (known as Thay in his circles) made a rare visit to the Googleplex to lead a half-day Health@Google workshop in the fundamentals of mindfulness. The exercises and rituals of mindfulness lay the path to optimal health and happiness.

Thay may be the second most famous Buddhist monk in the world, right after the Dalai Lama. He is certainly one of the best known and most respected Zen Masters in the world. Thay is a best-selling author, poet, and peace activist who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr. He is a key pioneer in actively applying insights from meditation to solving real-world social, political and environmental problems. Thay most recently published Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life, with Harvard School of Public Health nutritionist Dr. Lilian Cheung. At 85, he’s touring North America before retiring to his monastery in France.

Life at Google is fast, furious and fun, yet it can take a toll on ourselves and our loved ones. Through Thay’s specially crafted workshop, you’ll learn how to reduce stress, eat for health, sleep better, find emotional stability, improve concentration and sustain optimal performance.

–Chade-Meng Tan

Breathe and Enjoy the Present Moment

We are conditioned by our beliefs. And our thoughts condition us to what we believe. I have enjoyed sharing the saying Marvette Saucer shared with me. She quietly said: “If you want to live your dream; and jolted me as she shouted: “WAKE UP.”

Karen Sothers guides many on the journey to calm one’s restless heart. Through yoga, through Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) she has helped people wake up and calm the emotional wake they have left in their own lives and the lives of their families, friends and fellow workers.

Here is a short meditation to help.

LOVING-KINDNESS MEDITATION
by Karen Sothers

Have you ever felt annoyed by traffic, frustrated by people at work or disappointed by a friend or family member? If you are having a lot of stressful experiences, you are probably doing a lot of judging and not a lot of loving. It is human nature to focus on the negative and judge others, which can lead to discontentment.

Loving-kindness meditations can help cultivate less judgment and more love and happiness.

During the next two weeks, spend 5 to 10 minutes each day reciting this loving-kindness meditation and notice if it starts to expand your awareness to include more love for yourself and others.

Begin by placing your hands on your heart and repeat the following phrases for yourself

• May I be peaceful and live with ease.
• May I be happy and contribute to the happiness of others.
• May I be free to live and love fully.

Continue by thinking of a loved one for whom you would like to offer a blessing:
• May you be peaceful and live with ease.
• May you be happy and contribute to the happiness if others.
• May you be free to live and love fully.

Now offer a blessing to everyone:
• May all beings everywhere be filled with everlasting peace, happiness and love.”

She has a wonderful CD available: Sacred Pause A series of guided meditations for renewing mind, body and soul.

Karen Sothers has 20 years of experience teaching stress management, yoga and meditation.
She teaches the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Program at Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine founded by author and cardiologist Dr. Mimi Guarneri and Rauni Prittinen King, founder and president of Holistic & Integrative Medicine Resources Inc.

Having watched Captain Jack, the story of lobbyist, Jack Abrahamoff, played by Kevin Spacey, I am appreciative of the work that Tim Ryan champions in his work: A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit.

It is an amazing journey that we are on in this election year. It will take a lot of mindful citizens speaking out and asking the questions that need to be asked. What do we stand for? And if we know what our leaders stand for and what we stand for; we should also be able to see by their/our actions what they/we don’t or won’t stand for.

I GET WHAT I TOLERATE

.

I have much to do to educate myself. As I looked up some background on Captain Jack, I became more aware of my own mindlessness regarding my political system and my country.

Here is a list of Federal Political Scandals that is a reminder of Lord Acton’s comment: All power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The list looks at scandals in the Executive, Legislative and Judicial Branches. One might say that it is not about one party or the other as they both tend to be equal opportunity offenders.

…not included in this article are pervasive systemic scandals, such as the role of money in “normal” politics which purchases access and influence. Neither are ‘revolving door’ stories, which is the practice of hiring government officials to promote or lobby for companies they were recently paid to regulate. Though some rules now apply, to a great extent this is legal in the United States.

Politicians are those who make their living primarily in politics, their staffs and appointees. By definition, political scandals should involve politicians and not private citizens. Private citizens should be included only when they are closely linked to elected or appointed politicians such as party officials. Kenneth Lay of Enron, is a good example of such a citizen. This list also does not include crimes which occur outside the politician’s tenure unless they specifically stem from acts while they were in office.

Scope To keep the article a manageable size, Senators and Congressmen who are rebuked, admonished, condemned, suspended, found in contempt, found to have acted improperly, used poor judgement or were reprimanded by Congress are not included unless the scandal is exceptional or leads to expulsion.

The Mindfulness Revolution may be something I read to put Mindfulness in perspective while educating myself about the difficulties our political leaders face today. The difficulties I and my family faces in a nation divided and polarized.

A question I am asking myself is: What am I voting for? Rather than who am I voting for?

Move towards and practice Mindfulness. Remember or re-member:

I GET WHAT I TOLERATE

.

When I point a finger and blame what I am pointing at; three of my fingers are always pointing back at me.

I GET WHAT I TOLERATE

.

This was shared in the Science Blog. As always it is about the practice.

Don’t Worry, Be Happy – Understanding Mindfulness Meditation
November 1, 2011

In times of stress, we’re often encouraged to pause for a moment and simply be in the ‘now.’ This kind of mindfulness, an essential part of Buddhist and Indian Yoga traditions, has entered the mainstream as people try to find ways to combat stress and improve their quality of life. And research suggests that mindfulness meditation can have benefits for health and performance, including improved immune function, reduced blood pressure, and enhanced cognitive function.

But how is it that a single practice can have such wide-ranging effects on well-being? A new article published in the latest issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, draws on the existing scientific literature to build a framework that can explain these positive effects.

The goal of this work, according to author Britta Hölzel, of Justus Liebig University and Harvard Medical School, is to “unveil the conceptual and mechanistic complexity of mindfulness, providing the ‘big picture’ by arranging many findings like the pieces of a mosaic.” By using a framework approach to understand the mechanisms of mindfulness, Hölzel and her co-authors point out that what we think of as mindfulness is not actually a single skill. Rather, it is a multi-faceted mental practice that encompasses several mechanisms.

The authors specifically identify four key components of mindfulness that may account for its effects: attention regulation, body awareness, emotion regulation, and sense of self. Together, these components help us attend to and deal with the mental and physiological effects of stress in ways that are non-judgmental.

Although these components are theoretically distinct, they are closely intertwined. Improvement in attention regulation, for example, may directly facilitate our awareness of our physiological state. Body awareness, in turn, helps us to recognize the emotions we are experiencing. Understanding the relationships between these components, and the brain mechanisms that underlie them, will allow clinicians to better tailor mindfulness interventions for their patients, says Hölzel.

On the most fundamental level, this framework underscores the point that mindfulness is not a vague cure-all. Effective mindfulness meditation requires training and practice and it has distinct measurable effects on our subjective experiences, our behavior, and our brain function. The authors hope that further research on this topic will “enable a much broader spectrum of individuals to utilize mindfulness meditation as a versatile tool to facilitate change – both in psychotherapy and in everyday life.

For more information about this study, please contact: Britta K. Hölzel at britta@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu.

Perspectives on Psychological Science is ranked among the top 10 general psychology journals for impact by the Institute for Scientific Information. It publishes an eclectic mix of thought-provoking articles on the latest important advances in psychology. For a copy of the article “How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective” and access to other Perspectives on Psychological Science research findings, please contact Anna Mikulak at 202-293-9300 or amikulak@psychologicalscience.org.

I have carried Goethe’s comment with me for many years:

Life is the childhood of our immortality

Here is an interesting fact: “Beginning January 1st, 2011 every single day more than 10,000 Baby Boomers will reach the age of 65. That is going to keep happening every single day for the next 19 years.”

When asked about retirement, I have always wondered if that mean one was “tired” the first time. It is also a statistic based on actuarial data that if one has not prepared to carry on with their life and have a passion or interest in the next part of their life there is a highly likelihood of them dying prematurely in 3 or 4 years.

More than 10,000 people turn 50 every day in the U.S.; how do they handle this shift? Claiming Your Place at the Fire invites this group of “new elders” to ask four key questions: Who am I? New elders synthesize and transfer the wisdom of the past into the present. Where do I belong? They have a powerful sense of where they have come from, where they are, and where they are going. How do I bring my passions alive? They rejoice in rediscovering their life’s work, their calling, their vocation. What is my life’s purpose? Freed from imposed schedules and demands, new elders now find the freedom to create their lives anew. This timely book describes how new older adults can rekindle the good life, relight the fire within, and share that warmth and light with others.

Here are some readings you may want to reflect on:

The Promotion of Successful Aging Through Mindfulness Skills Training
The Art of Presence: An Exploration of Mindful Practices and Aging
The Anti-Aging Health Benefits of Mindfulness Meditation
Mindfulness – The Call To Inner Work
Mindfulness of the Aging Body

Elisha Goldstein reminds us: I need to practice mindfulness as part of my work day and for the rest of my life. For it truly is about creating the rest of my life even if it is only a few minutes at a time. Present moment, beautiful moment.

Every Friday morning between 6 am and 8 am a coach works out with his stable of runners. Usually its overcast on the tartan track by Scripps Integrative Medicine. When it’s not foggy the westward glance as you round the track is the panorama of the rolling greens of the Torrey Pines South and beyond the majesty of the deep blue green Pacific. When the groundbreaking for the Integrative Medicine center took place, the medicine woman from one of San Diego’s indigenous tribes gave a blessing acknowledging the healing winds that blow over this sacred spot.

Warmups. Banter. Laughter. Work out briefing. Timed distances and speeds. Labored breathing. Grimaces. And continual adjustments.This coach is a little different. He is not only their coach, he is also their prosthetist. Any week there are 6 to 10 runners mostly single amputees with 2 or 3 double amputees working on their aerobic fitness and working on the fit of their new running leg or legs.

If you want to know the future; create it. And the human spirit is alive never to be held down. For some it will be about limitations. For others, it is the gratitude and appreciation of being alive and whatever confronts one is something to be overcome and is just a challenge for the human spirit mindful about what it means to “Be awake, fully present and living my life intentionally.”

A dear friend Karen Dietz shared this piece from a blogger on Mental Floss, Miss Cellania:

In the beginning of the blog she reminds us:

Some people live their lives by making the best of what they have. And then there are people who even make the best of what they don’t have. After all, you just don’t tell some people, “You can’t do that.” Because they will prove you wrong.

Read Miss Cellenia blog on Challenge Accepted about 8 inspiring stories that resonate with the Wounded Warriors. You’ll resonate with being mindful as you sit or move.

Present moment, beautiful moment.

The poem below from e.e. cummings truly speaks from the heart. With Valentine’s Day a day away, it shares a moment of reflection of the love of another. And at the same time a deeper love that many of us find difficult to do and to live: A deep love of ourselves: “I deeply and profoundly love and accept myself with all my heart and from the depths of my being.” It resonates with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s: You are enough just by sitting there breathing.

Many years ago a dear friend Marilyn Deak, psychologist and mentor in Energy Psychology, was working with me on learning the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT by founder Gary Craig) shared at emofree.com. I found it interesting that I had trouble remembering the statement: “I deeply and profoundly accept myself.” What made those words so difficult to remember? Maybe some of you have experienced the same thing. Especially when living out the archtype of caregiver, servant, servant-leader when coming from what James Hollis calls the “Not enough” category of humanity.

I Carry Your Heart With Me

i carry your heart with me
i carry it in my heart
i am never without it
anywhere i go you go, my dear;
and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling
i fear no fate
for you are my fate, my sweet
i want no world
for beautiful you are my world, my true
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
here is the root of the root
and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;
which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart
i carry it in my heart
—-E. E. Cummings

A song I heard many years ago by the Incredible String Band has remained one that I have treasured. And from my heart to yours:

May the longtime sun shine upon you
All love surround you.

And the pure light within you
Guide your way on

Close your eyes. For the next few minutes let Snatam Kaur sing to yourself from your heart. For so many of us it is difficult to be compassionate and caring to the God that lives within us. Namaste.

If you are interested, rest your pointed over the heart picture above and go to the website of artist Sandy Levin. Click on Glass Gallery and view her Heart Series

When looking for the poem, I came across the website of the Randomguru and in his My Mind’s Zen Garden shared Cummings poem back in 2006. Also come to find that Carlos is a San Diegan.

Johan Bergstad is a licensed psychologist in Sweden, mindfulness teacher, writer/poet and photographer. The movie he recently released: This Will Also Pass” is a wonderful interview he did with, retired surgeon and Mindfulness teacher, Andries J Kroese.

For those interested in learning more about Mindfulness a good starting place is Mindful.org, that is hosted by Shambhala Sun Foundation.

Shambhala Sun or their website truly is a starting point for all things Mindful.