Moment of Mind September 2019

In mindfulness we’re using our attention as a tool to notice our moment to moment lived experience. When we practice using it this way, instead of only to get work done, we learn how to develop a relationship with our changing thinking and emotional states rather than being yanked around by them or avoiding them.
Through training different forms of attention in mindfulness and other reflective practices, we learn to recognize the sensations, feeling states, and stream of thinking that shows up in our brain-bodies. In my experience, first you learn to notice this as information and then you realize that it’s a form of wisdom. 

We are are learning to be friends with, and honor what our brain-bodies go through, as we support ourselves. I don’t mean this in an escaping reality, or a diminishing what happens, or attempting to control it way.
The metaphor that works best for me is applying how we learned to support people we love to support ourselves. You may have noticed that when you listen to your friends the deeper you listen to them, the more you hear and learn about  their experience. You trust your friend to figure things out – they don’t need you to make decisions for them. You know that diminishing their experience or running away from how they’re feeling weakens your connection. When you simply listen, without judging them, or attempting to fix them, or make their problem/stress your identity, you form a stronger connection with them. You’re giving them support. 

This is what happens over time when you turn toward your life experience and seek to understand it, rather than force it or fix it or make it all of who you are. You are much more than these changing states. 
I consider self awareness a hidden superpower because when you give this gift of compassionate attention to yourself you create space to make new choices from that self-knowledge.

This week as life brings what it brings and if things get challenging, I invite you to ask yourself (you can reflect through writing, take a question in your mind and let it sit, or have a conversation with someone you trust): is there something new to see about myself here? Notice what you notice and take the action that makes sense. That action might be asking someone for support, even if it feels difficult. You got this. 

Last month we visited a study on outdoor mindfulness walks and respondents reporting stress reduction after walking twice a week for 8 weeks. This month we explore a study showing that mindfulness training can, just like training a muscle, cause the brain to grow new connections, change size and shape, and change your body’s stress responses.

“Neuroplasticity” refers to the brain’s ability to change, adapt, and grow throughout life. Your neural networks are how different parts of your brain talk to each other and send/receive signals through nerves into, and back from, your body. These networks are responsible for generating what you perceive as thought, sensations, and feelings. This happens on demand, when you need it, based on prior experience and current sensory inputs.  This is also how your brain selectively tunes your awareness out from unconscious stuff that would be so loud you would have trouble focusing – like your heart beat.

In a German study published in 2017, researchers enrolled  about 300 people into a 9 month mental training program called ReSource (the neuroplasticity link above takes you to a video by the lead ReSource researcher about compassion findings). In what is called a “crossover-controlled” experiment, people (aged 20-55) who had neither meditated nor had a spiritual practice, had not been in therapy, and did not have active mental health diagnoses in the last two years, were assigned to take a series of three different 3-month trainings or to not receive any training as a “control”. These three trainings included the Presence/Empathy training (being mindful to your breathing and body sensations), an Affect/Compassion training (being mindful of your heart and feelings of compassion) and a Perspective/Cognitive training (observing your thoughts). 

A few of the cool things they found are described here (there’s too much to cover in this newsletter!). They found that when people trained daily on specific attention skills their neural networks grew in specific, measurable ways. The Affect/Compassion training gave people the biggest gains in pro-social behavior – or caring about other people (the others didn’t affect this skill much). The Presence/Empathy training by itself reduced people’s perception of stress when giving a speech to an audience dressed in white coats who were asked not to change their facial expressions while each participant presented (this is a near universal social stressor for westerners).

In addition to reducing perception of stress, the Affect/Compassion and the Perspective/Cognitive training both significantly reduced cortisol in the body. Cortisol is one of your stress hormones. This means training the mind also resulted in changes to the brain-body’s social-stress response system. My interpretation of this is that the brain changed, the people perceived the situation as less stressful…and then at least one component of the body’s level of stress declined based on what the brain had learned. 

If you want to start on a self compassion practice, I recommend checking out Dr. Kristin Neff’s online exercises as her work was one of the components used in the Affect/Compassion training. We don’t know if different populations in different countries/cultures/ethnicities/races/ages/abilities, people with active mental health challenges, or those with physical health conditions would experience the same results. This was a well-designed study that shows promise about how different forms of mindfulness training can help the brain-body learn new responses.

Get Your Park Groove On

If you haven’t yet visited Mt. Talbert Park in Clackamas County, Oregon, not far off the I5 freeway, I recommend it (with caveats) for a way to visit multiple habitats including oak savannah, mixed fir forest, and riparian zones along a creek. One thing that really struck me was how quickly I walked into a space of forested quiet when I knew that we were physically close to the freeway. We entered on the Sunnyside road entrance which gave us quick access to Mt. Scott Creek and so many birds!!! 

The caveats are accessibility and parking. I don’t include it in my rotation where I lead nature-based mindfulness walks for the general public because the accessibility  for folks who use mobility aids is limited. However, if people plan ahead and have time to go slowly, it’s worth it. Another caveat is limited parking so if you have a larger group go earlier in the morning. There are two primary parking lots, one on the north side near Sunnyside Rd and one on the south side off SE Mather road. 

 

Practice idea: if there’s a guided mindfulness practice you really like but you don’t like something about the way a specific teacher delivers it, consider recording yourself on your phone speaking the same exercise! [image is of a lotus in a pool of water in Chiang Mai, Thailand] 

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