COMPARTIR MINDFULNESS CON ESTUDANTES

ELEMENTOS:
ATENCIÓN (MENTE)
NA  RESPIRACIÓN
NA CONSCIENCIA
EVENTOS MENTAIS (PENSAMENTOS, SENSACIÓNS, EMOCIÓNS)
NO CORPO (AS PARTES E O TODO)
PROMOVER SENTIMENTOS DE COMPAIXÓN (...)

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Tratar coa ansiedade (Mindfulness of Anger )

MAGAZINE MEDITATION PRACTICES TOP STORY

Mindfulness of Anger 

Take three minutes and try this mindfulness practice for dealing with one of our strongest emotions. 

By Margaret Cullen, Gonzalo Brito Pons and Mindful Staff  | January 25, 2016

Illustration by Michael Woloschinow

Anger—it has an awesome power. Just think back to the last time you really felt it. What words come to mind? Hot? Addictive? Adrenaline rush?

We’re not destined to respond to anger the same way every time we feel it. By tapping into the experience of anger, and bringing compassion to it, we can learn how to approach this dangerous, often explosive emotion in a healthier way.

Take about three minutes with each response. You may also lengthen that time if you want to try more intensity.

1. Sit in a comfortable yet alert position with your hands resting comfortably and your eyes gently closed. Check in with your body, and feel the places where it makes contact with the chair or cushion.

2. Take some deep breaths, completely filling the torso with air, then completely release the breath.

3. Think back to a time when you experienced anger, relatively recently. You don’t need to choose your worst episode. In fact, it’s wise to start with something smaller. Envision and experience what happened, allowing yourself to feel the anger again, right now. Allow the feeling to get as strong as possible within a zone of safety (e.g., not getting to the point where you want to get up and scream and jump around!).

4. Other emotions, such as sadness or fear, may arise as you remember the episode. For now, see if you can stay with the feeling of anger.

5. Where in your body do you experience it? Explore this feeling. You may be tempted to try to push it away. Instead, investigate how it feels, noticing gross and subtle sensations. As you notice a sensation, inquire whether it increases or decreases in intensity. Does it change or move? Is it warm or cool?

6. Practice bringing compassion to the anger. The feeling of anger is normal, part of being human. We all experience it at times. See if you can cradle your own anger like a mother cradling a newborn. What happens if you hold it in this way, with tenderness and care?

7. Say goodbye to the feeling. Slowly bring your attention back to the breath and stay with it for a while, letting your emotions settle into the spaciousness of your breath and awareness.

8. After you finish, reflect. Which sensations did you notice in your body? Did they change as you observed them? Were you able to bring compassion to the anger? How did you do that? What happened to the anger at that point?

The Mindfulness-Based Emotional Balance Workbook: An Eight-Week Program for ...

Por Margaret Cullen,Gonzalo Brito Pons

fomentar la amabilidad y generosidad

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1. Para en la señal de stop

Every time you come to a stop sign or a red light, take a full breath, notice how you are feeling and then wish yourself or another well. “May I be happy and safe. May I live with ease.” Continue saying the words or phrases internally until you are ready to move on or the light changes. When you come to the next stop sign or red light, repeat the practice. With sufficient repetition the stop sign and the red light become cues for cultivating kindness and help establish a habit of kindness.

2. Contacta con el empleado de la carnicería

When you shop at a grocery store, stand in line for a movie ticket, or get a tank of gas at a full-service station, engage with other people. Internally, extend wishes of goodwill to them. Listen when they talk and gently smile. Such small gestures make people feel more open and kind. By engaging with them, you engage with your best self.

3. Extiendete a tus compañeros de viaje

If you use the bus, train, or airplane on a regular basis, let the act of taking your seat be a cue to practice kindness or compassion toward your traveling companions. Bring all those traveling with you into your awareness and reflect on how they, like you, have their share of joys and sorrows and want to be happy, peaceful, and free from suffering. Express your wish for their happiness. “May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be free from harm. May you live with ease.”

4. Escucha el pitido

We get tons of emails and calendar alerts every day. Use them as reminders to be mindful. On many computers, you can even set the sound to be that of a meditation chime. Every time you hear the alert or see the reminder, pause, take a breath or two, and send yourself thoughts of kindness. You can do the same in the shower. Simply feel the water on your body, pause, take a deep breath, and send yourself and others thoughts of kindness.

5. Conecta con alguien necesitado

Establish the intention in your mind to respond with kindness and generosity whenever you meet someone on the street who asks for support. Pause to make contact with him or her and ask how they’re doing and give some money if you like. Or if you believe it is more helpful to give funds to a group that supports the homeless, commit to writing a check at the end of the week or month.

This article also appeared in the February 2015 issue of Mindful magazine.

NYTimes How Meditation may change the Brain

De cómo la meditación puede cambiar el cerebro.

How Meditation May Change the Brain

By 

SINDYA N. BHANOO

 JANUARY 28, 2011 10:29 AMJanuary 28, 2011 10:29 am

Getty Images From our archives.

Over the December holidays, my husband went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Not my idea of fun, but he came back rejuvenated and energetic.
He said the experience was so transformational that he has committed to meditating for two hours daily, one hour in the morning and one in the evening, until the end of March. He’s running an experiment to determine whether and how meditation actually improves the quality of his life.
I’ll admit I’m a skeptic.
But now, scientists say that meditators like my husband may be benefiting from changes in their brains. The researchers report that those who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. The findings will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.
M.R.I. brain scans taken before and after the participants’ meditation regimen found increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region connected to anxiety and stress. A control group that did not practice meditation showed no such changes.
But how exactly did these study volunteers, all seeking stress reduction in their lives but new to the practice, meditate? So many people talk about meditating these days. Within four miles of our Bay Area home, there are at least six centers that offer some type of meditation class, and I often hear phrases like, “So how was your sit today?”
Britta Hölzel, a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and the study’s lead author, said the participants practiced mindfulness meditation, a form of meditation that was introduced in the United States in the late 1970s. It traces its roots to the same ancient Buddhist techniques that my husband follows.
“The main idea is to use different objects to focus one’s attention, and it could be a focus on sensations of breathing, or emotions or thoughts, or observing any type of body sensations,” she said. “But it’s about bringing the mind back to the here and now, as opposed to letting the mind drift.”
Generally the meditators are seated upright on a chair or the floor and in silence, although sometimes there might be a guide leading a session, Dr. Hölzel said.
Of course, it’s important to remember that the human brain is complicated. Understanding what the increased density of gray matter really means is still, well, a gray area.
“The field is very, very young, and we don’t really know enough about it yet,” Dr. Hölzel said. “I would say these are still quite preliminary findings. We see that there is something there, but we have to replicate these findings and find out what they really mean.”
It has been hard to pinpoint the benefits of meditation, but a 2009 study suggests that meditation may reduce blood pressure in patients with coronary heart disease. And a 2007 study found that meditators have longer attention spans.
Previous studies have also shown that there are structural differences between the brains of meditators and those who don’t meditate, although this new study is the first to document changes in gray matter over time through meditation.
Ultimately, Dr. Hölzel said she and her colleagues would like to demonstrate how meditation results in definitive improvements in people’s lives.
“A lot of studies find that it increases well-being, improves quality of life, but it’s always hard to determine how you can objectively test that,” she said. “Relatively little is known about the brain and the psychological mechanisms about how this is being done.”
In a 2008 study published in the journal PloS One, researchers found that when meditators heard the sounds of people suffering, they had stronger activation levels in their temporal parietal junctures, a part of the brain tied to empathy, than people who did not meditate.
“They may be more willing to help when someone suffers, and act more compassionately,” Dr. Hölzel said.
Further study is needed, but that bodes well for me.
For now, I’m more than happy to support my husband’s little experiment, despite the fact that he now rises at 5 a.m. and is exhausted by 10 at night.
An empathetic husband who takes out the trash and puts gas in the car because he knows I don’t like to — I’ll take that.

Musicas

Dominik Eulberg

Usar mindfulness para alimentar la creatividad en el trabajo

LEADERSHIP WORK

Usar Mindfulness para  arrancar con la creatividad en el trabajo.

Research suggests people are more open to original ideas after just a brief meditation practice.

By Ellen Keithline Byrne | October 6, 2016Racing to never-ending deadlines, work piling up, doing more with less. Employees are asked for higher quality, faster turnaround time, greater efficiency and more innovative output….but is creativity possible with today’s workplace mindset where “busyness” is the modus operandi?

There is a fundamental problem with organizations trying to be both efficient and generate innovate ideas. The corporate culture is biased toward rewarding an accelerated pace and greater cost-consciousness. However, more often than not, companies fall back on their fine-tuned “autopilot,” habitual ways of dealing with day-to-day issues. When asked for something new and creative, employees tend to tweak what has already been done. There is little time to germinate, to think of novel and clever ideas. In other words, the current focus on efficiencies is the antithesis to cultivating a creative environment. And yet, the global IBM CEO’s report (2010) warns us that in order to remain relevant within the complexities in the 21st century, we need to think creatively. It cites a survey in which only half of the leaders polled thought their firms were prepared to face the “highly volatile, increasingly complex business environment.”

More often than not, companies fall back on their fine-tuned “autopilot,” habitual ways of dealing with day-to-day issues. When asked for something new and creative, employees tend to tweak what has already been done.

So how do we develop this creative and agile workplace? We start with a shift in mindset. A purposeful slowing down, a re-calibrating of our minds by stepping out of the fray. Slowing down can actually help us speed up.

“When you slow things down, you stop the autopilot”

—Bill Duane, Superintendent of Well-Being and Sustainable Performance Learning at Google.

As a leadership consultant and social scientist, I have been investigating mindfulness and its impact on the creative process in the workplace. One good definition of mindfulness comes from the Greater Good Science Center: “Mindfulness means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment.” With mindfulness, practitioners purposefully focus their attention on the present moment, either in a formal daily meditation or informal mindful moments.

Over the last few decades, mindfulness research has suggested that people who establish a mindfulness practice not only support their health and well-being by decreasing stress and re-balancing physical and emotional systems (Dane & Brummel, 2013), but also help shift their mindsets in order to see novel ways of working. Most importantly, perhaps, it doesn’t cost anything—or at least not much!

Reduce la Velocidad para Acelerar: Cómo Mindfulness Fomenta Creatividad

Mind training can nurture key areas within the creative process. The burgeoning research suggests that people who practice mindfulness have more cognitive flexibility (Moore & Malinowski, 2009), are able to see beyond what they’ve already done before, and are better at solving problems requiring insight (Ostafin & Kassman 2012). This facilitates what creativity experts refer to as the incubation and insight stages within the creative process (Csikszentmihaly, 1996). Mindfulness requires time and attention, or conscious non-attention, to the problem at hand to help turn off the “autopilot” driving our thoughts and actions. When a mindful person is working on a creative task, they are able to focus their attention fully on the problem, then step away to focus fully on something unrelated. This shift of attention allows for ideas to incubate and a creative insight to develop. If that person’s attention is scattered,  past ruminations have a tendency to mix with expected ways of seeing the problem and possible novel ways of solving problem. Research suggests people are more open to original ideas after just a brief meditation practice (Moore & Malinowski, 2009), (Ostafin & Kassman, 2012).

Mind training can nurture key areas within the creative process. Research suggests that people who practice mindfulness have more cognitive flexibility, are able to see beyond what they’ve already done before, and are better at solving problems requiring insight.

With many approaches to mindfulness, certain methods appear to nurture different skills. To enhance creativity, the technique of open awareness meditation is recommended and has been found to promote divergent thinking, a style of thinking that generates many new ideas (Colzato, Ozturk & Hommel, 2012). Open awareness meditation is a process of perceiving and observing sensations without focusing on a fixed concept like your breath. Although the person may start with attention to the breath, they soon move to monitoring awareness without judgment or getting caught in the story behind the sensation….allowing sensations to just come and go. When solving problems that require creative thinking, open awareness meditation helps to release “autopilot” ways of thinking so the person can see with “fresh eyes.”

When solving problems that require creative thinking, open awareness meditation helps to release “autopilot” ways of thinking so the person can see with “fresh eyes.”

To better understand this connection between mindfulness practice and increased creativity, this spring, I studied two workgroups in a mid-sized Connecticut real estate firm as they brainstormed critical work issues. Remarkably the workgroup who received five weeks (one hour each) of open awareness mindfulness training found a significant increase in attention and awareness and higher levels of creative ideas. These promising findings (to be published early in 2017) encourages organizations to take this phenomenon seriously.

The research suggests that to foster a culture of innovation, leaders need to give greater attention to the mindset of their employees and consider introducing mindful practice throughout their organizations. By cultivating opportunities where employees are encouraged to think outside the box, they move past a mere focus on organizational efficiencies and develop new ways of working together to foster creative thinking, decision-making, and so on. It could be that an unexpected mix of employees to solve a problem or unique working hours provides a better fit for a particular project, for instance.

Companies like Google and Aetna offer corporate-based mindfulness programs to strengthen their employee’s emotional intelligence and well-being. Other firms are jumping on the bandwagon and following suit to either develop their own mindfulness program or hiring a consulting firm to support integrating mindfulness and related practices into their culture.

5 Ways Companies Can Create a Mindful Culture

Here are key areas where organizations can influence the shift in mindset:

1. Conectar mindfulness a los valores de la empresa. Demonstrate deliberate intention to develop a mindful culture by linking mindfulness to the organization’s stated values. For example, if “Embrace and Drive Change” (Zappos) is a value, highlight how mindfulness practice facilitates greater awareness of a person’s thoughts and feelings. Through this awareness employees can begin to recognize their fear of the unknown, see more objectively, and react less habitually to create greater opportunity for change.

2. Programas de Mindfulness basados en la empresa. Train employees in open awareness mindfulness practices and how to apply the benefits to daily life. For instance:

• What habits support efficiency and what habits get in our way of considering something new.

• How the creative process works and methods to integrate that process in the workplace.

3. Complementar con programas de desarrollo de liderazgo en casa. Offer a condensed version of the corporate-based mindfulness program during routine leadership training.

4. Permitir  momentos para mindful. Opportunities for employees to slow down, to incubate, to “see with fresh eyes.” In meetings, kick off with a brief settling in. Offer the opportunity to become fully present to the agenda at hand. By taking a deep breath, invite the employees to leave past concerns and future worries aside until the meeting is over. This contributes to developing an attentive mindset.

• Wellness rooms: Provide quiet places to meditate.

5. Proveer acceso a las fuentes. Offer employees resources relating to developing their creativity and mindfulness practice: webinars, meditation resources, Lunch and Learns, speaker series, retreat offerings, etc.

Organizations have an opportunity here. Simple mindfulness practices like open awareness meditation can begin to shift an employee’s mind for the better and can be the necessary answer to today’s more complex workplace. Why not have a healthier, happier, more connected, and innovative work culture….when you can just pay attention to the present moment: the sounds, the environment, your feelings, your thoughts, and your physical sensations. Sometimes the most complex problems require the most basic response.

Resources:

Colzato, L. S., Ozturk, A., and Hommel, B. (2012). Meditate to create: the impact of focused-attention and open-monitoring training on convergent and divergent thinking. Front. Psychol. 3:116. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00116

Csikszentmihaley, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and innovation. New York: Harper/Collins.

Dane, E. & Brummel, B. J. (2013). Examining workplace mindfulness and its relations to job performance and turnover intention. Human Relations, 67 (1), 105-128.

Moore, A. & Malinowski, P. (2009). Meditation, mindfulness and cognitive flexibility. Consciousness and Cognition. 18, 176-186.

Ostafin, B.D. & Kassman, K.T. (2012). Stepping out of history: Mindfulness improves insight problem solving. Consciousness and Cognition, 21 (2), 1031- 1036.

Ellen Keithline Byrne

Ellen Keithline Byrne, PhD candidate, is the founder and managing partner of Elle Partners, a leadership consulting firm. She and her colleagues focus on cultivating innovative leaders and teams to develop mindful, courageous and vital work environments where the business and staff thrive together. Ellen is a PhD candidate in Human and Organizational Systems, Licensed Professional Counselor, and Certified Professional Coach. Prior to her focus on professional and personal development, she was in sales for Xerox Corporation. She lives in Connecticut with her husband, Steve, and has three children.