Mindfulness Meditation And Its Psychological Effects Essay

This source discusses the basis of mindfulness and the general aspects of mindfulness itself. This source will be used extensively throughout the paper to provide any necessary information regarding mindfullness. This book is the basis for mindfulness and will be used as so.

Meditation is very difficult to describe and can only truly be explained once experienced. It is the practice of mental concentration leading ultimately through a sequence of stages to the final goal of spiritual freedom, nirvana. The purpose of Buddhist meditation is to free ourselves from the delusion and thereby put an end to both ignorance and craving. The Buddhists describe the culminating trance-like state as transient; final Nirvana requires the insight of wisdom. The exercises that are meant to develop wisdom involve meditation on the true nature of reality or the conditioned and unconditioned elements that make up all phenomena. The goal of meditation is to develop a concept in the mind.

Effective mindfulness meditation requires training and practice and it has distinct measurable effects on our subjective experiences, our behavior, and our brain

This paper is about my experience with mindfulness based meditation and scientific inquiry of these experiences. Mindfulness based meditation is describes as technique used to cultivate nonreactive, non-judgmental and stable awareness of the present moment (Garland and Gaylord, 2009). The end goal is to sustain this meta-cognitive state for a long period of time. I practiced non-denominational form of mindfulness based meditation for the first time in my psychology class, which was devoted towards intellectual and experiential examination of meditation. The practice was conducted in a group it was instructed by our own professor and it begun at the end of class. There was one sessions per week and each session was structured meaning it was

When you are guiding your team member or client through a mindfulness session, there are a few things you can provide which will enhance the experience and ensure both you and your client is well prepared mentally and physically.

"The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt."

Understanding mindfulness meditation, we learn how what passes through the mind is considered internal stimuli. What you're paying attention to can have a profound impact on your emotions. Through enough mindfulness meditation practice, you eventually cultivate some distance between the reactions and your negative thoughts. When this happens, they become a distinct object separate from yourself. You realize you are not your thoughts, and in fact, you have freedom from these things. Learning we have this freedom lets us cope with these things a little better. Meditation can have a strong impact on depression and anxiety, and it can be used as a supplementary treatment of

come to the conclusion that there is a limit to what they can do. A conscious

Williams et al (2014) compared MBCT with both cognitive psychological education, and treatment as usual, he compared the success rate of the therapy in preventing the relapse of MDD in people currently in remission phase following at least 3 previous episodes. It was consequently found that MBCT provided significant protection against the relapse, for participants with increased vulnerability due to adverse psychological history, but showed no significant advantage in comparison to an active control treatment and usual care over the whole group of patients with persistently recurring depression.

The Buddhist principles of mental training and well-being assert that cognitive flexibility can be nurtured by building on improved attentional abilities which are initially trained and cultivated (Wallace & Shapiro, 2006). Moore and Malinowski’s (2009) study did not asses the levels of well-being in the participants, however, the data collected sufficiently corroborated the mental balance model as a positive correlation was established between the practice of meditation, mindfulness, and cognitive flexibility. The data collected within the reviewed article, concluded that the practice of meditation improves mindfulness skills, having a positive effect on attention and cognition. The article supported previous research by corroborating that, to foster mindfulness, attention needs to work collectively with a non-judgmental attitude towards individual experiences. This paper has outlined the elements discerned within Moore and Malinowski’s (2009) article, ‘Meditation, mindfulness, and cognitive flexibility’, and discussed the study’s strengths and

Many people think that mindfulness meditation consists solely of sitting still and thinking about nothing for twenty or thirty minutes and are put off by the thought. In fact, mindfulness

The second transformational practice that I chose to participate in for this course was mindfulness. I decided to perform this in a meditative structure with similar goals to my first transformational practice, which was a different form of meditation, and see which provided more benefit or was simply a better fit for me. Decreasing my stress level and reducing work related anxiety were the two primary objectives I was hoping to transform by engaging in this twice a week.

Instead of seeing a "soul" or a "mind" as the seat of personal identity, in Buddhism, the self is to be found in processes. Meditation, then, has the therapeutic effect of disengaging the practitioner from self-consciousness, freeing the mind. The view of the world without the construct of a permanent essence enables one to "experience reality as it really is" (3). It is important to note that Buddhism does not distinguish mental processes from other senses. Just as seeing takes a visual object, the mind takes a mental object (1). Just as the eye is free to take in different visual objects, the mind is free, as well. While meditation aims to develop "single-pointedness of mind," it is ultimately to free it from external objects. The focus is on the process of breathing, in Zen, and, eventually, one can reach a state where one is not considering anything (2). Zen considers the "blank-mind" stage to be a higher form of consciousness because it is free from attachments.

In this paper, I will describe my initial thoughts about the practice of mindfulness and my development regarding practicing it. Furthermore, I will explore the idea of being a mindful therapist and how I am hoping to apply this with patients in the future.

Mindfulness is “a practice of learning to focus attention on moment-by-moment experience with an attitude of curiosity, openness, and acceptance” (Marchand, 2012). Although the origin of mindfulness resides in the principles and wisdoms of Buddhism, recent research has demonstrated the beneficial effects in a multiple of clinical settings, including major depressive disorder and episodes. Previous research has substantiated that MBCT has broad-spectrum antidepressant and antianxiety effects (Marchand, 2012), and mindfulness-based approaches have been efficaciously applied to manage a wide range of stress-related and health problems (Hofmann, Sawyer, Witt, & Oh, 2010). As mindfulness has rapidly gained attention by clinicians, doctors, and other