Zotero Collections:
Zotero Collections:
Zen meditation, a Buddhist practice centered on attentional and postural self-regulation, has been speculated to bring about beneficial long-term effects for the individual, ranging from stress reduction to improvement of cognitive function. In this study, we examined how the regular practice of meditation may affect the normal age-related decline of cerebral gray matter volume and attentional performance observed in healthy individuals. Voxel-based morphometry for MRI anatomical brain images and a computerized sustained attention task were employed in 13 regular practitioners of Zen meditation and 13 matched controls. While control subjects displayed the expected negative correlation of both gray matter volume and attentional performance with age, meditators did not show a significant correlation of either measure with age. The effect of meditation on gray matter volume was most prominent in the putamen, a structure strongly implicated in attentional processing. These findings suggest that the regular practice of meditation may have neuroprotective effects and reduce the cognitive decline associated with normal aging.
Zotero Collections:
- Practitioner Context,
- Buddhist Contemplation by Applied Subject,
- Zen Buddhism,
- Buddhist Contemplation by Tradition,
- Contemplation by Applied Subject,
- Contemplation by Tradition,
- Neuroscience and Buddhist Contemplation,
- Science and Buddhist Contemplation,
- Neuroscience and Contemplation,
- Science and Contemplation,
- Buddhist Contemplation
<p>Background/Aim: Children with autism exhibit significant deficits in imitation skills, which impede the acquisition of more complex behavior and socialization. Imitation is often targeted early in intervention plans and continues to be addressed throughout the child’s treatment. The use of integrated approach to yoga therapy (IAYT) as a complementary therapy for children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is rarely reported and little is known on the effectiveness of such therapies. This study investigated IAYT as a treatment method with children with ASD to increase imitative skills. Materials and Methods: Parents and six children with ASD participated in a 10-month program of 5-weekly sessions and regular practice at home. Pre, mid and post treatment assessments included observers and parent ratings of children’s imitation skills in tasks related to imitation skills such as gross motor actions, vocalization, complex imitation, oral facial movements and imitating breathing exercises. Results: Improvement in children’s imitation skills especially pointing to body, postural and oral facial movements. Parents reported change in the play pattern of these children with toys, peers and objects at home. Conclusions: This study indicates that IAYT may offer benefits as an effective tool to increase imitation, cognitive skills and social-communicative behaviors in children with ASD. In addition, children exhibited increased skills in eye contact, sitting tolerance, non-verbal communication and receptive skills to verbal commands related to spatial relationship.</p>
Zotero Collections:
Zotero Collections:
Zotero Collections:
<p>This article presents 4 studies (N = 1,413) describing the development and validation of the Child and Adolescent Mindfulness Measure (CAMM). In Study 1 (n = 428), the authors determined procedures for item development and examined comprehensibility of the initial 25 items. In Study 2 (n = 334), they reduced the initial item pool from 25 to 10 items through exploratory factor analysis. Study 3 (n = 332) evaluated the final 10-item measure in a cross-validation sample, and Study 4 (n = 319) determined validity coefficients for the CAMM using bivariate and partial correlations with relevant variables. Results suggest that the CAMM is a developmentally appropriate measure with adequate internal consistency. As expected, CAMM scores were positively correlated with quality of life, academic competence, and social skills and negatively correlated with somatic complaints, internalizing symptoms, and externalizing behavior problems. Correlations were reduced but generally still significant after controlling for the effects of 2 overlapping processes (thought suppression and psychological inflexibility). Overall, results suggest that the CAMM may be a useful measure of mindfulness skills for school-aged children and adolescents.</p>
Zotero Collections:
Zotero Collections:
Terror management theory posits that people tend to respond defensively to reminders of death, including worldview defense, self-esteem striving, and suppression of death thoughts. Seven experiments examined whether trait mindfulness--a disposition characterized by receptive attention to present experience--reduced defensive responses to mortality salience (MS). Under MS, less mindful individuals showed higher worldview defense (Studies 1-3) and self-esteem striving (Study 5), yet more mindful individuals did not defend a constellation of values theoretically associated with mindfulness (Study 4). To explain these findings through proximal defense processes, Study 6 showed that more mindful individuals wrote about their death for a longer period of time, which partially mediated the inverse association between trait mindfulness and worldview defense. Study 7 demonstrated that trait mindfulness predicted less suppression of death thoughts immediately following MS. The discussion highlights the relevance of mindfulness to theories that emphasize the nature of conscious processing in understanding responses to threat. Keywords: mindfulness, mortality salience, self-determination theory, terror management theory DOI: 10.1037/a0019388
Zotero Collections:
Zotero Collections:
Zotero Collections:
Zotero Collections:
Zotero Collections:
Buddhist meditation practice is perceived as non-relational. Yet a serious meditator develops an intimacy with herself that is an asset to being in a healthy relationship. In this essay, using composite profiles of patients, I pursue my interest in relationships and family life as a path to mental health and a home to enlightened experience. The intimacy of a relationship with oneself, with another and within family provides a container that may enable us to let go of our fixed sense of self.
Zotero Collections:
<p>Publisher's description: Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art documents the growing presence of Buddhist perspectives in contemporary culture. This shift began in the nineteenth century and is now pervasive in many aspects of everyday experience. In the arts especially, the increasing importance of process over product has promoted a profound change in the relationship between artist and audience. But while artists have been among the most perceptive interpreters of Buddhism in the West, art historians and critics have been slow to develop the intellectual tools to analyze the impact of Buddhist concepts. This timely, multi-faceted volume explores the relationships between Buddhist practice and the contemporary arts in lively essays by writers from a range of disciplines and in revealing interviews with some of the most influential artists of our time. Elucidating the common ground between the creative mind, the perceiving mind, and the meditative mind, the contributors tackle essential questions about the relationship of art and life. Among the writers are curators, art critics, educators, and Buddhist commentators in psychology, literature, and cognitive science. They consider the many Western artists today who recognize the Buddhist notion of emptiness, achieved through focused meditation, as a place of great creative potential for the making and experiencing of art. The artists featured in the interviews, all internationally recognized, include Maya Lin, Bill Viola, and Ann Hamilton. Extending earlier twentieth-century aesthetic interests in blurring the boundaries of art and life, the artists view art as a way of life, a daily practice, in ways parallel to that of the Buddhist practitioner. Their works, woven throughout the book, richly convey how Buddhism has been both a source for and a lens through which we now perceive art.</p>
Zotero Collections:
- Buddhist Contemplation by Applied Subject,
- Socially Engaged Buddhism,
- Buddhist Contemplation by Tradition,
- Contemplation by Applied Subject,
- Contemplation by Tradition,
- Art and Buddhist Contemplation,
- Photography and Buddhist Contemplation,
- Art and Contemplation,
- Visual art and Buddhist Contemplation,
- Buddhist Contemplation
Buddhism has made its way into American popular culture, particularly within the arena of death and dying. The growing influence of Buddhism on the American way of dying has been fostered through its connection with the American hospice movement. This paper describes the developing contact between Buddhism and hospice and documents the efforts of several prominent Buddhist organizations to revolutionize American death practices. The Buddhist approach to death has captured the interest of an American public attracted to its nonsectarian language of spirituality and pragmatic techniques for dealing with death.
Zotero Collections:
(RNS) The mindfulness movement has seeped into Silicon Valley, Capitol Hill, and even the United States Military Academy at West Point. Next stop: the voting booth. By Daniel Burke.
Zotero Collections:
<p>Environmentalists have been criticizing the ethics of business people concerning the natural environment. Citing Thomas Berry as an example, this paper attempts to bring his three abstract values (presence, subjectivity, and communion) closer to the understanding of the average business person through meditation. The introduction describes business ethics in terms of relationships to the individual, or the ethical ‘I’ to the natural environment, or the ethical ‘You’ and to interpersonal relationships, or the ethical ‘We.’ Meditation is also defined, according to Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1986), as a meditative experience together with a period of reflection and small-group discussion. More specifically, meditation takes on three forms. Part one describes nondiscursive meditation in the context of what Berry means by presence. The problem addressed here is how to meet and cultivate the ethical ‘I.’ Part two will deal with semidiscursive meditation in the context of what Berry means by subjectivity, or the ethical ‘I’ in relation to the earth. The earth then becomes the ethical ‘You.’ Part three will deal with Berry's definition of communion, or the ethical ‘We.’ The practice of discursive meditation gradually leads to what Thomas Berry calls a renewed ‘visionary experience.’ The article concludes with a redefinition of business ethics in terms of our relationships to ourselves, as human persons, to the earth as our living environment, and to each other as members of the human community. The redefinition of our relationships through meditation is ‘visionary,’ or a new ‘paradigm,’ that, hopefully, will lead to the renewed ethical practice that other environmentalists are also advocating, for example, Arnold Berleant.</p>
Zotero Collections:
<p>Business Ethics through philosophy includes threeelements: ethical thought, meaning meditation; ethicaldefinition, referring to philosophical readings;ethical values, in reference to case work in practicalethics. The purpose of this article is to show how businessethics can be conceived as an ethical vision,nourished and integrated around a philosophicalviewpoint.</p>
Zotero Collections:
This study reviews literature concerning any effects meditation may have upon the psychological health and practice of psychotherapists. A number of anecdotal accounts were explored in order to extract key claims made for meditation. These claims were found to include that meditation promotes attentive ability, a calm psychophysiological state, heightened awareness, and a reflexive self (an objective, observant sub-personality). It was suggested that these effects were personally therapeutic, and that this could facilitate therapists' practice. Of the experimental studies reviewed, most found that meditation had significant positive effects upon various measures of psychophysiological health. These included increases in measures of self-efficacy and attentional absorption, and decreases in indicators of anxiety, stress, and depression. However, many experimental studies were methodologically flawed. These problems were often related to characteristics of meditation that render it problematic to investigate. For example, it may take at least one year of daily practice to bring about effects, and researchers have found it difficult to complete experiments where randomly assigned participants all adhere to such a demanding regimen. In addition, current quantitative research techniques may not be sophisticated enough to allow the effects of meditation to be accurately gauged. It is suggested that qualitative techniques could be more successful in exploring the effects of meditation.
Zotero Collections:
Zotero Collections:
Pages |