Meditation study shows changes associated with awareness, stress (2011)

I have been practicing mindfulness meditation for the last 14 months - 30 minutes, everyday and I have to say that it has been virtually the most important skill that I have picked up. Because it's essentailly that - a skill. I was very stressed and the anxiety started to affect virtually every aspect of my life. My family wanted me to seek professional help (take pills), but I decided to try to take care of it myself so I started reading books... a lot of books about the brain, how it works, etc. and this is how I was introduced to mindfulness. Now, 14 months later the effects are so profound that I have hard time imagining what my mind looked like before. The biggest change I have noticed is the ability to not act on thoughts and easily let them go by accepting them. Things that used to trigger me before are just thoughts now: the thought comes, I notice it and it passes. The best word that comes to mind when trying to describe the feeling is ... grounded. I feel grounded, calm.

I know it sounds cliche, but now I realize that it's true that the moment you stop fighing your thoughts and urges, they lose their power. I remember reading things again and aain and could not wrap my head about this concept before.

- Does the anxiety go away? No, but my relationship with the anxiety and stress changed.

IMHO Self-reflection and emotional intelligence are the most important skills one can develop. Because if you develop them, you stop being in your own way and sabotaging yourself and it leads to generally happier life.

This is what I did i nthe last 14 months: - Lay down, close my eyes and observe the sensetion of breathing in my belly. - In the beginning my mind was immediately distracted with thoughts. It took me sometimes a few minutes until I was able to realize that I have been distracted all along. Then I had to force myself to ignore the distrating thought and pay attention to my breathing. It was really hard in the beginning and my sessions lasted usually 15 minutes max. - But as I got better it became easier...now I have no problems to let go of a thought ... even a very emotiaonally charged one. It's like I have a switch in my head.

I have recommended mindfulness to all my friends and relatives and virtually none of them have made more than a few sessions. That makes me sad, because I can see what effects it can have, but there's nothing more than recommending that I can do - it's really a personal commitment.

Is that book the same as this free one? http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html

Does your book contain exercises?

> The sensations are actually happening, right here, right now. Thoughts about the past or future are just mental constructs and have no reality beyond that.

Except, those sensations might not be 'actually happening'.

> The sensations feel like tiny extremely weak electric currents zapping through on the surface and disappearing. Or it could be a weak throbbing and itching sensation. Sometimes you get the feeling of the area under investigation being in a state of tension. It doesn't matter what the sensation is like. What matters is that you are aware of these sensations.

It doesn't surprise me at all that, after concentrating on a particular body area in silence for 8 hours a day for 3-4 days, people would associate various sensations with that area. For example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paresthesia

If meditation has helped you personally, that's great. However, I take issue with preaching dubious advice.

Not thinking about, as much as observing the current sensations.

> why is focusing on breathing the only way that meditation teaches?

It isn't. You can focus on whatever you like, and there are descriptions of using pretty much anything you can think of as meditation objects. What you focus on is not the most important part, but that you focus your attention and your ability to go of thoughts.

Breath is often recommended because it is always available (takes away the excuse of "oh, I can't mediate because I need X and I don't have it here"), it is simple yet it has many qualities for you to observe; it has distinct phases (in-out) that are cyclical, and that have distinct pauses (when you shift from breathing in to out). It also has the property that it calms as you get more relaxed and more concentrated, so that the more you focus, the more you have to focus to keep attention on the breath.

At the same time, as you get deep into concentration, the fact that the breath calms lets you (if that is your goal) more easily shift the breath into the background, to focus on other things (e.g. your emotional state; observing fleeting thoughts; other bodily sensations or whatever else).

For a lot of forms of meditation, focusing on the breath is considered an important part developing "access concentration", that is, your ability to easily and rapidly calm yourself and enter into sufficiently deep concentration to focus on your desired meditation object.

For vipassana / mindfulness meditation, for example, the goal is not to endlessly focus on the breath, but to observe various aspects of reality (including the breath, but not limited to it) in a "detached" state where you are not engaging or reacting to them but simply paying attention to them. E.g. notice a thought arising, notice how your body reacts to it, but don't "respond" to it with a new thought - just observe the qualities of it, until it fades, and wait for the next one.

Meditating on breath then is a method of getting into deep enough concentration to enable you to do that without constantly "waking up" to realise you got caught up in some strand of thinking and spent the last 10 minutes thinking about what to do about your taxes.

(You can certainly observe the breath as the focus of your mindfulness meditation, but if you limit yourself to the breath you are