rayloke2009blogspot: Mindfulness Meditation Is Rediscovered

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Mindfulness Meditation Is Rediscovered - The Daily Beast

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RAYLOKEJanuary 14, 2012 at 2:10 AM
REPROGRAMMING MATTERS ; ...
Kabat-Zinn’s work has inspired a host of mindfulness-based therapies, with offshoots focusing on depression, addiction, eating and sleep disorders, and chronic pain. Mindfulness itself is being applied in psychotherapy—for treating cancer survivors, PTSD, sexual dysfunction—and is now so legit it’s taught around the world in medical centers, hospitals, schools (from primary school to medical school), prisons, and corporations. Teacher-training courses draw doctors, nurses, psychologists, psychotherapists, and the occasional odd duck devoted to meditation, which is where I came in.

Last winter I ended a course by asking the 23 participants to single out an idea or change of behavior they wanted to take away with them. One man said his staff was telling him he was being more patient. A woman noticed she was doing everyday things mindfully—walking to the bus, cutting an apple—and was surprised at how much pleasure these ordinary activities gave her. A woman who got angry when people littered on subway platforms, or when her boss showed up a few minutes late for meetings, now turned her attention to the anger itself and felt it dissipate.

Listening to them go around, I thought: I never teared up like this at a magazine award.

This meditation business is potent stuff. Mindfulness meditation has been around for more than 2,500 years, and I’m grateful to have stumbled on it. As a veteran magazine editor who spent 24/7 alert to trends, to the waves that move us, that make masses of us hunger for this and not that, I have no doubt that mindfulness meditation is an idea whose time has come—again.
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