Tabla de contenidos para June 2018 en Mindful

barry@mindful.org Our must-read story this issue: In our Get Real piece, “Look on the Bright Side…?” therapist Elaine Smookler explores how easily cynicism takes over our minds, despite the fact that optimism and openness are the healthier way to go. On page 62. A thousand years ago, when I was in grade 12, I had a physics teacher, Mr. Weeks, who was legendary for the powerful experiences that took place in his classroom. Until Mr. Weeks’s class, I found science tedious and boring, but he changed everything. His class was focused not on the answers, but on the questions. He injected awe and wonder into our mutual explorations of how the world worked. I hope we have all had a teacher like that. When I disputed one of the core…

Sometimes opportunities to act with mindful intention fall into your lap: the politeness jam at the four-way intersection, when everyone wants to let the other guy go first; the earnest admission from someone that moves you to respond in kind. But, let’s face it, barring an emergency, mostly our days and weeks churn by without mindful awareness of any particular moment. The funny thing is, any ol’ Wednesday is packed with choice points to notice the present and to engage. Once you start doing it, you’ll be amazed by how many opportunities there are to connect, to appreciate, and to experience—everywhere, all the time. The best part? It’s super easy to do. Just a small, simple action can help you wake up and plug in to the life pulsing all…

While the study of thought and thinking has been dominated by neuroscience in recent decades, in a talk at TED2017, Anil Seth, professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, talked about how the study of human experience crosses many disciplines, including “neuroscience, physics, virtual reality, mathematics, psychology, psychiatry, neurology, cognitive science, and philosophy,” to name a few. When we range beyond the pure study of “the brain,” we enter the realm of the mind and consciousness. While the brain and the nervous system are part of anatomy, the mind cannot be found. How it is that we are conscious—that we experience and know—is not something we will ever find in a brain scan. Also, as Anil Seth points out in his TED Talk, we are not…

What is your strongest sense perception? THE MOST ACUTE SENSE AMONG respondents was hearing, with 34%. Sight is the runner-up (28%), followed by the mysterious sixth sense, at 17%. Smell and touch were tied with 10% each, and only 1% chose taste. What is your favorite exercise to do mindfully? • Walking • Weight lifting • Hiking • Kayaking • Mindful aikido • Karate • Dancing • Cleaning the house • Barre classes • Reiki • Biking Body and mind: What’s their relationship? 55% THE MIND MANAGES THE BODY 43% WHO CAN TELL WHICH IS IN CHARGE? 2% THE BODY CONTROLS THE MIND “The more present and mindful I am, the more synchronized the body–mind connection is.” When do you feel most centered? IT DEPENDS ON THE SITUATION 64% DURING BODY…

Eight parents in Texas painted empowering messages—like “Kindness changes everything”—on bathroom stalls at their kids’ school. A marine biologist was at first frightened when a humpback whale kept bumping into her. Then she realized it was heroically shielding her from a nearby shark. A young single dad in Little Rock, AR, never complained about walking 11 miles to work and back every day. When his coworkers found out, however, they pooled their money and bought him a car.…

NUTRITION INFO Asparagus is an impressive source of many nutrients: vitamins K and C, folate, copper, and most B vitamins, to name a few. It’s also high in flavonoids that offer heart-protective benefits. source: whfoods.com It starts with a crunch and finishes buttery and smooth, like a cross between a snap pea and an artichoke. A perfect complement to rich sauces and light dressings alike, asparagus is available year-round in the US as an import from warmer climates. But during spring and early summer, the freshly picked, locally grown varieties burst with a delicately sweet, earthy flavor unmatched by the long-distance travelers of autumn and winter. No comparison. TRY THIS Savor asparagus season with a simple salad of raw, thinly shaved spears. Grab a bunch of the thicker spears (go…

One of the anti-aging schemes sprouting up in Silicon Valley harvests the blood of teenagers, extracts the plasma, and injects it into older clients. The Monterey, California, start-up Ambrosia charges $8,000 for plasma transfusions, 1.5 liters at a time, over the course of two days. Founder Jesse Karmazin, MD, is conducting trials on his patients and claims to have demonstrated improved sleep and reductions in proteins associated with cancer and Alzheimer’s disease—although mainstream scientists have criticized the trials for lacking a control group and drawing its cohort only from those who can afford the steep fee.…

Have you ever made a negative assumption about someone, only to later find out that you had the person pegged all wrong? Snap judgments can reveal a lot about our deeper biases and fears. When you unpack them, you create new opportunities to better know your own mind—and more freedom to choose how you want to move through life. TRY THIS Take a moment and recall someone you may have had a strong cynical opinion about: your best friend’s new boyfriend, your good-looking neighbor, the new sales manager at work. Then, get curious: What was it that you percieved that provoked your cynical line of thinking? Was it their name? Their role in society? Their accent? The way they looked? Did they remind you of someone? When you were proven…

In order to support an optimistic view, it’s helpful to recognize that the more attention you give something, the more of it you’ll notice. This works both ways. The more you expect the worst—from people, from life—the more of it you’ll witness. The more things you recognize as positives in your life, and in the world, the easier it becomes to recognize them in the future. Science supports this. Writing in a gratitude journal, for example, has been shown to help fine-tune your ability to notice the good things in your life. As you sharpen your vision to see the good, it can help loosen your grip in expectation of something going wrong. You begin to see that, in spite of difficulty or uncertainty, there’s actually a lot to feel…

HOW WE WORK Live Your Purpose, Reclaim Your Sanity, and Embrace the Daily Grind Leah Weiss • Harper Wave Let’s face it: Work is broken. Despite numerous attempts to rejigger and modernize and open up the workplace, in the opinion of Leah Weiss—who teaches “Leading with Mindfulness and Compassion” at the Stanford Graduate School of Business—most people work in a toxic environment. She’s not talking about sick building syndrome, though plenty of people still work in buildings cut off from the natural world with bad air, bad lighting, and bad building materials. She’s talking about working hours that stretch out of all recognition, the added ability to field communications at any place or time, and few if any doses of serious downtime to recharge. Weiss cites a study that shows that,…

Companies like Modern Meadow and Bolt are pioneering fabrics that are kinder to animals and the environment. So far, they’ve created a “bioleather” made from yeast-based collagen and a faux silk spun from sugar. A new facet to mindful eating, or just introvert heaven? Renowned Japanese ramen café Ichiran has opened a location in New York City, offering “flavor concentration booths” where customers eat solo, focusing only on their bowl of noodles. On a flight from Dubai to Amsterdam, one gassy passenger led to major hassles: His uncontrolled flatulence agitated some passengers so much that a fight broke out. The aircraft had to make an emergency landing to remove the olfactorily offended from the plane. UK author Bridget Lawless felt that relying on the trope of abused or murdered women…

Q I meditate for 15 minutes every morning, and I’ve become pretty comfortable with that routine. Should I increase the length of my sessions? A If you’ve developed a solid routine like this, of sitting for any amount of meditation every day, the first thing you should do is to pause and take that in. That is an important and noteworthy accomplishment that many people only dream of. Great work! There is some emerging evidence that more benefits may result from spending more time in mindfulness practice, but I would suggest letting your experience be your guide. What feels right to you? Do you notice the impact of your practice on the rest of your life? Would you appreciate more of whatever it is that you notice? That could be…

At 15, Dubliner and self-described tomboy ALISON CANAVAN was entered into a modeling competition by her mother. It marked the start of a whirlwind career that found her traveling the globe, featured in the pages of international fashion magazines, walking runways for leading designers, and living the high life in cultural hubs like New York City, Paris, and London. But there was a shadow of sadness following her, which had emerged in her teens and haunted her throughout her twenties. And it was made worse by the nonstop partying lifestyle she threw herself into, with alcohol her drug of choice. When she drank, she says, “I felt free, I felt good, I had confidence, and I had no worries.” Drinking soon became her obsession: when she could drink, how much…

We often hear people say that one sub-organ of the brain is responsible for x function and another for y. However, observations of brain activity have shown that this idea that different parts of the brain work independently to perform a given function—the modular paradigm—is inaccurate. The story we frequently hear that the amygdala is the emotion center and the prefrontal cortex performs executive functions unfairly depicts the brain almost as a collection of machine parts. It may have some usefulness as a metaphor for how different types of brain function might interrelate, but it presents a very limited mechanical view of the brain—which misses the dynamic quality of brain activity and is not good science education. A metaphor that’s more prevalent among neuroscientists today is the network view of…

Sometimes as meditators, the last thing we’re inclined to pay attention to is how we’re sitting. It can be tempting to ignore the physical side of practice and focus only on the workings of our mind. Isn’t the body just tagging along for the ride? Not so. We meditate with the body and mind as one unit. When we try to ignore our body, or to literally bend it to our will in meditation (cramping our legs under a too-short cushion, straining to keep the hips above the knees), we find our body and our state of mind aren’t easily compartmentalized. If our body is uncomfortable, it has a way of nagging at us, holding our attention and causing us to tense up—thus making the discomfort even worse. We’re able…

One of the strongest predictors of developing age-related dementia is the presence of a specific gene variant called APOE ε4. Carriers are 47% more likely to develop the age-related disease than non-carriers. But there might be an even bigger predictor of dementia: how you feel about aging. Researchers at Yale University recently discovered that people who carry the gene variant yet who hold positive beliefs about aging are almost 50% less likely to develop dementia than those with negative age beliefs. How is this possible? What does a positive outlook have to do with whether a gene gets expressed or not? Add this question and this exciting new finding to the growing mound of evidence that positive outlook, i.e., optimism, has demonstrable impact on our physical, mental, and emotional health.…

Kindness and caring for others doesn’t only arise from good wishes. It can also emerge naturally from noticing fixed viewpoints and letting them go, however briefly. After all, when they arise again—as they will—we can simply repeat the process. 1 Notice Irritation When you find you’re getting edgy and irritable with what someone else is up to, see if you can take a break in the action and explore underneath the irritation, going to its roots. Don’t waste time beating yourself up about it. Just take a moment to see what your curious, investigating mind is revealing. 2 Examine the Story You’re Telling Yourself Underneath the irritation is likely to be a story line. And the story is where the bias is held. “These people…”; “When someone does that, they’re…”;…

INVISIBILIA Episode: Pt.I: Emotions / Pt.II: High Voltage This wonderful if offbeat podcast (its title is Latin for “invisible things”) fuses science with narrative storytelling. These episodes investigate psychologist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s case that how we conceptualize (and deal with) emotions is totally backward: “Emotions aren’t a reaction to the world; they actually construct the world.” This is weighed against some true, truly weird stories: Traumatized by a car crash, a man sues who he crashed into—the parents of the child he killed (!). An anthropologist discovers a “new” emotion among a head-hunting tribe in the Philippines. And a woman struggles to find love, due to a seemingly involuntary reflex. QUIRKS & QUARKS Episode: Friends share more than interests. Their brains are similar, too Dr. Carolyn Parkinson, a psychological…