Sobre harmony
Become fully alive to the present moment using the sensations of body and breathing as a method of cultivating mindful awareness.
The body is a wonderful touchstone for meditation. Use it to help guide your attention inward and to train it to notice what’s right happening in the moment.
Mindfulness fosters compassion and altruism: Research suggests mindfulness training makes us more likely to help someone in need and increases activity in neural networks involved in understanding the suffering of others and regulating emotions. Evidence suggests it might boost self-compassion as well.
As the authors note, this doesn’t mean meditation can’t help teenagers—it could well be the case that we need to develop and test interventions aimed at younger people. The upshot? Meditation is generally good for your well-being, yes, but so far it doesn’t appear to be actually better than many other steps you can take to stay healthy and happy. It should definitely be considered an adjunct to, not a replacement for, other kinds of treatment for mental conditions like bipolar disorder.
We might feel sleepy. If we doze off, don’t worry. The mind’s getting used to figuring out the difference between slowing down and shutting off.
Overall, these findings suggest that mindfulness meditation can have disease-fighting powers through our immune response. Mindfulness may reduce cell aging
In this age of constant distractions and long hours, it’s difficult to find even a few minutes of time to reflect. Yet finding that time and space can help ease the stresses of your demanding working life.
The researchers found that these different dimensions of mindfulness were linked to different benefits. First, present-moment attention was the strongest predictor for increased positive emotions—the more attentive people said they were, the better they felt overall. Second, nonjudgmental acceptance was the strongest predictor for decreased negative emotions—the more people reported nonjudgmental acceptance in their lives, the less negative emotion they reported experiencing. For participants who had encountered a hassle in their day, adopting a nonjudgmental stance also seemed to protect their positive feelings (which took a bigger hit when people were less accepting of their hassles). Acting with awareness did not predict people’s positive or negative feelings beyond the other two skills.
However, social bias isn’t the only kind of mental bias mindfulness appears to reduce. For example, several studies convincingly show that mindfulness probably reduces sunk-cost bias, which is our tendency to stay invested in a losing proposition. Mindfulness also seems to reduce our conterraneo tendency to focus on the negative things in life. In one study, participants reported on their general mindfulness levels, then briefly viewed photos that induced strong positive emotion (like photos of babies), strong negative emotion (like photos of people in pain), or neither, while having their brains scanned. More mindful participants were less reactive to negative photos and showed higher indications of positive feeling when seeing the positive photos. According to the authors, this supports healing music the contention that mindfulness decreases the negativity bias, something other studies support, too.
Mindfulness changes our brains: Research has found that it increases density of gray matter in brain regions linked to learning, memory, emotion regulation, and empathy.
If you’re someone who needs help winding down before bed, then try meditation in the evening. The main thing is to set yourself up for success: Don’t schedule meditation for a time when you’re likely to be interrupted, distracted by your to-do list, or feel sleepy.
Mindful working means applying focus and awareness to everything you do from the moment you enter the office. Focus on the task at hand and recognize and release internal and external distractions as they arise. In this way, mindfulness helps increase effectiveness, decrease mistakes, and even enhance creativity.
Awareness gave them more choice in how to respond, instead of becoming swept up in escalating negative emotion.
A short meditation can be five minutes or less. If we feel like that’s not enough, a 10-minute meditation is great for beginners. Once we have a consistent practice, we can slowly increase our time.