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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.
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To date, there are no empirically validated treatments of good quality for adolescents showing suicidal ideation and behavior. Risk factors for suicide are impulsive and non-suicidal self-injurious behavior, depression, conduct disorders and child abuse. Behind this background, we tested the main hypothesis of our study: that Mode Deactivation Therapy (MDT) is an effective treatment for these patients. MDT has been developed by Jack Apsche especially for the individual or family-based residential or outpatient treatment of adolescents with problem behaviors and complex comorbid conditions. The efficacy of MDT was measured by a pre- and post-treatment comparison with the aid of standardized instruments (CBCL, STAXI-2, BDI-II, and SIQ) and compared to the results of a treatment-as-usual (TAU) control group. The comparative results confirmed that MDT is a consistent effective treatment for suicidal adolescents that appear to outperform other therapy approaches. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)
Buddhist roshi Joan Halifax works with people at the last stage of life (in hospice and on death row). She shares what she's learned about compassion in the face of death and dying, and a deep insight into the nature of empathy.
OBJECTIVE: Pulmonary rehabilitation improves exercise tolerance in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). However, many patients do not have access to pulmonary rehabilitation programs. We hypothesized that an alternative to pulmonary rehabilitation to improve exercise tolerance is the practice of pranayama, or yoga breathing, which could be done independently at home. We also sought to determine whether yoga nonprofessionals could adequately teach pranayama to patients.DESIGN: Proof-of-concept, randomized, double-blind, controlled pilot trial.
SETTINGS/LOCATION: Two academic pulmonary practices.
SUBJECTS: Forty-three patients with symptomatic, moderate-to-severe COPD.
INTERVENTIONS: Twelve weeks of pranayama plus education versus education alone. Two yoga professionals trained the research coordinators to conduct all pranayama teaching and monitored the quality of the teaching and the practice of pranayama by study participants.
OUTCOME MEASURES: The primary outcome was a change in the 6-min walk distance (6MWD). Secondary outcomes included changes in lung function, markers of oxidative stress and systemic inflammation, and measures of dyspnea and quality of life.
RESULTS: The 6MWD increased in the pranayama group (least square mean [95% confidence interval] = 28 m [-5 to 61]) and decreased in the control group (-15 m [-47 to 16]), with a nearly significant treatment effect (p = 0.06) in favor of pranayama. Pranayama also resulted in small improvements in inspiratory capacity and air trapping. Both groups had significant improvements in various measures of symptoms, but no overall differences in respiratory system impedance or markers of oxidative stress or systemic inflammation.
CONCLUSION: This pilot study successfully demonstrated that pranayama was associated with improved exercise tolerance in patients with COPD. Lay personnel were able to adequately teach patients to practice pranayama. These results suggest that pranayama may have significant clinical benefits for symptomatic patients with COPD, a concept that needs to be confirmed in future, larger clinical trials.
Objective: Pulmonary rehabilitation improves exercise tolerance in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). However, many patients do not have access to pulmonary rehabilitation programs. We hypothesized that an alternative to pulmonary rehabilitation to improve exercise tolerance is the practice of pranayama, or yoga breathing, which could be done independently at home. We also sought to determine whether yoga nonprofessionals could adequately teach pranayama to patients. Design: Proof-of-concept, randomized, double-blind, controlled pilot trial. Settings/Location: Two academic pulmonary practices. Subjects: Forty-three patients with symptomatic, moderate-to-severe COPD. Interventions: Twelve weeks of pranayama plus education versus education alone. Two yoga professionals trained the research coordinators to conduct all pranayama teaching and monitored the quality of the teaching and the practice of pranayama by study participants. Outcome measures: The primary outcome was a change in the 6-min walk distance (6MWD). Secondary outcomes included changes in lung function, markers of oxidative stress and systemic inflammation, and measures of dyspnea and quality of life.Results: The 6MWD increased in the pranayama group (least square mean [95% confidence interval] = 28 m [-5 to 61]) and decreased in the control group (-15 m [-47 to 16]), with a nearly significant treatment effect ( p = 0.06) in favor of pranayama. Pranayama also resulted in small improvements in inspiratory capacity and air trapping. Both groups had significant improvements in various measures of symptoms, but no overall differences in respiratory system impedance or markers of oxidative stress or systemic inflammation.
Conclusion: This pilot study successfully demonstrated that pranayama was associated with improved exercise tolerance in patients with COPD. Lay personnel were able to adequately teach patients to practice pranayama. These results suggest that pranayama may have significant clinical benefits for symptomatic patients with COPD, a concept that needs to be confirmed in future, larger clinical trials.
OBJECTIVES: Life-threatening diseases such as cancer represent unique traumas-compared with singular, time-limited traumatic events-given their multidimensional, uncertain, and continuing nature. However, few studies have examined the impact of cancer on patients as a persistent stressor. The aim of this qualitative study is to explore patients' ongoing experiences of living with cancer and the changes encountered in this experience over time.METHODS: Written reflections to three open-ended questions collected from 28 patients on their experience of cancer at two time points were analyzed to explore participants' experiences and perspectives over time. Content analysis using a framework approach was employed to code, categorize, and summarize data into a thematic framework.
RESULTS: Data analysis yielded the thematic framework-living with paradox, consisting of four interrelated themes: sources, experiences, resolution of paradox, and challenges with medical culture/treatment. The primary theme concerned moving through a dualistic and complex cancer experience of concurrently negative and positive emotional states across the course of cancer.
CONCLUSIONS: Respondents indicated that cycling through this contradictory trajectory was neither linear, nor singular, nor conclusive in nature, but reiterative across time. Recognition that patients' cancer experience may be paradoxical and tumultuous throughout the cancer trajectory can influence how practitioners provide patients with needed support during diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. This also has implications for interventions, treatment, and care plans, and adequately responding to the diversity of patient's psychosocial, physical, existential, and spiritual experience of illness.
In this “masterwork of an authentic spirit person” (Thomas Berry), Buddhist teacher and anthropologist Joan Halifax delves into “the fruitful darkness”—the shadow side of being, found in the root truths of Native religions, the fecundity of nature, and the stillness of meditation. In The Fruitful Darkness, a highly personal and insightful odyssey of the heart and mind, she encounters Tibetan Buddhist mediators, Mexican shamans, and Native American elders, among others. In rapt prose, she recounts her explorations—from Japanese Zen meditation to hallucinogenic plants, from the Dogon people of Mali to the Mayan rain forest, all the while creating “an adventure of the spirit and a feast of wisdom old and new” (Peter Matthiessen).
As an opening case, this chapter begins with the author’s personal exploration of spirituality and sustainability. It stems from a nature experience she had in the Himalayan Mountains in Nepal, which altered her worldview and her sense of self, sparking an existential inquiry and shaping her quest for learning. Ultimately, this experience led her to investigate the main worldviews as present in the contemporary West, as well as their distinct relations with our environmental challenges. Building forth on her body of work in this field, this chapter discusses the dynamic evolution of the traditional, modern, and postmodern worldviews, thereby offering a larger, cultural-historical context to the newly emerging integrative worldview. Some authors have argued that this latter worldview may have particular potential for addressing global challenges such as climate change. By discussing its context of emergence, this chapter highlights the potential role of this worldview in addressing our sustainability issues. More fundamentally, the chapter aims to inspire curiosity to learn more about one's own as well as others' worldviews, as reflexivity, compassionate understanding, skillful communication, and creative collaboration are essential skills for addressing our complex, global challenges.
Human activity has been fundamentally disturbing planetary systems of our Earth. To solve the problems that we have created so far needs a different level of consciousness. The potential range of human development includes higher states of consciousness in which human awareness is profoundly connected to the holistic functioning of nature. By functioning in higher states of consciousness, it is possible to not just overcome the challenges of sustainability, but to advance toward flourishing—an optimal quality of life individually and collectively. Ancient Vedic seers were awake to the dynamic laws of nature’s intelligence in their own Transcendental Consciousness. From their cognitions, they brought out practical knowledge concerning life in accord with natural law. Two of the technologies from this Vedic system of knowledge are the Transcendental Meditation® (TM) technique and Maharishi VedicSM Architecture. Extensive research has examined effects of the TM technique on the mind and body, including development to advanced levels of psychological development. Vedic Architecture aims to promote mental clarity, health, and good fortune for inhabitants. The case of 2000 Tower Oaks Boulevard, the largest commercial office building combining Vedic Architecture and green building, illustrates the application of Vedic technologies to harmonize human life with the ordering intelligence of nature.
The control of cheating is important for understanding major transitions in evolution, from the simplest genes to the most complex societies. Cooperative systems can be ruined if cheaters that lower group productivity are able to spread. Kin-selection theory predicts that high genetic relatedness can limit cheating, because separation of cheaters and cooperators limits opportunities to cheat and promotes selection against low-fitness groups of cheaters. Here, we confirm this prediction for the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum; relatedness in natural wild groups is so high that socially destructive cheaters should not spread. We illustrate in the laboratory how high relatedness can control a mutant that would destroy cooperation at low relatedness. Finally, we demonstrate that, as predicted, mutant cheaters do not normally harm cooperation in a natural population. Our findings show how altruism is preserved from the disruptive effects of such mutant cheaters and how exceptionally high relatedness among cells is important in promoting the cooperation that underlies multicellular development.
Objective: Health care professionals report a lack of skills in the psychosocial and spiritual aspects of caring for dying people and high levels of moral distress, grief, and burnout. To address these concerns, the “Being with Dying: Professional Training Program in Contemplative End-of-Life Care” (BWD) was created. The premise of BWD, which is based on the development of mindfulness and receptive attention through contemplative practice, is that cultivating stability of mind and emotions enables clinicians to respond to others and themselves with compassion. This article describes the impact of BWD on the participants.
Methods: Ninety-five BWD participants completed an anonymous online survey; 40 completed a confidential open-ended telephone interview.
Results: Four main themes—the power of presence, cultivating balanced compassion, recognizing grief, and the importance of self-care—emerged in the interviews and were supported in the survey data. The interviewees considered BWD's contemplative and reflective practices meaningful, useful, and valuable and reported that BWD provided skills, attitudes, behaviors, and tools to change how they worked with the dying and bereaved.
Significance of results: The quality of presence has the potential to transform the care of dying people and the caregivers themselves. Cultivating this quality within themselves and others allows clinicians to explore alternatives to exclusively intellectual, procedural, and task-oriented approaches when caring for dying people. BWD provides a rare opportunity to engage in practices and methods that cultivate the stability of mind and emotions that may facilitate compassionate care of dying patients, families, and caregivers.
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This course will be an elective internship course for J.D. students enrolled in the College of Law. Students will enroll contemporaneously in a field placement where they will be supervised by practicing attorneys. Field placements can act as a bridge between the worlds of a law student and lawyer. Placing contemplative practice in the context of the practice of law offers students a unique opportunity to consider professional values at the heart of law. I would like to develop a course that would give law students in the program the basis for developing the steadiness within so that they can handle their challenging profession with dignity and integrity. The course would encourage the knowledge that they are who they are first, and that being a lawyer is just one of their talents that, used wisely with their other skills, can give them a satisfying, rather than struggling life. The course will introduce students to the foundations and practices of several disciplines through texts, meditation practice, experiential “homework” and journaling. The goal is to encourage students to have experiences not only in class but also on the job in order to introduce them to the value of contemplative practice within the context of law practice.
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The purpose of this chapter is to show how mindfulness promotes more ethical behavior by improving the levels of awareness, and serves as a support for the development of the fundamental virtues. First of all, we provide an overview of mindfulness. After, we examine the relationship between mindfulness, consciousness and ethical decisions. Then we focus on character strengths and the impact that mindfulness can have on the development of virtues. Finally, we reflect briefly on some of the implications for companies.
A central evolutionary challenge for social groups is uniting a heterogeneous set of individuals towards common goals. One means by which social groups form and endure is by endowing group members with extraordinary prosocial proclivities, such as ingroup love, towards other group members. Here we examined the neural basis of extraordinary empathy and altruistic motivation in African-American and Caucasian-American individuals using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Our results indicate that empathy for ingroup members is neurally distinct from empathy for humankind, more generally. People showed greater response within anterior cingulate cortex and bilateral insula when observing the suffering of others, but African-American individuals additionally recruit medial prefrontal cortex when observing the suffering of members of their own social group. Moreover, neural activity within medial prefrontal cortex in response to pain expressed by ingroup relative to outgroup members predicted greater empathy and altruistic motivation for one's ingroup, suggesting that neurocognitive processes associated with self identity underlie extraordinary empathy and altruistic motivation for members of one's own social group. Taken together, our findings reveal distinct neural mechanisms of empathy and altruistic motivation in an intergroup context and may serve as a foundation for future research investigating the neural bases of intergroup prosociality, more broadly construed.
The French-born Tibetan Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard gave up molecular genetics almost 50 years ago to dedicate himself fully to Buddhist practice. Dubbed “the happiest man in the world,” he’s since authored several books from Shechen Monastery in Nepal, the most recent being Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World, published by Little, Brown and Company in June.In this wide-ranging, 30-minute interview filmed during Ricard’s most recent visit to New York, contributing editor Joan Duncan Oliver speaks to Ricard about some of the most pressing issues currently facing humanity—climate change, species extinction, and inequality—and how altruism can solve them.
Over the ensuing years, a variety of approaches have been used in an attempt to prevent children from following the path that leads to criminal behavior or to remedy that behavior before they become habitual criminals.The unique contribution of the 20th century, we believe, has been method. By introducing experimental approaches to the study of intervention strategies, enduring results can issue from programs that have failed to achieve their therapeutic goals.
The studies we selected for this work vary in the ways in which science has been applied. . . . We hoped that by selecting variety in method, this book would provide readers with the opportunity to consider evaluation techniques while also enabling some readers to develop strategies for evaluating their own programs.
Our intention was not only to stimulate clearer consideration of evaluation strategies but also to show some of the imaginative interventions that have been designed to assist children at every age. The chapters include biological, social, emotional, and cognitive approaches. We have included interventions aimed at infants, at children, and at adolescents. The order of presentation follows, roughly, a developmental perspective in which the age of earliest intervention accounts for placement.
Experience seems to show, however, that even effective prevention strategies will miss some of the people some of the time. That being the case, we are likely to need a variety of programs in order to help the variety of children in need of assistance. The chapters that follow describe programs that intervene in families, in schools, and in communities. Some target populations at risk, while others focus on individuals.
In this chapter, we make the case and propose policy recommendations to the US Secretary of Education, as well as state commissioners of education and other educational leaders, on how to effectively scale up high-quality social-emotional and character development (SECD) in all schools. First, we define SECD, social-emotional learning (SEL), and related competencies, identify effective approaches to developing these competencies through universal school-based programming, and summarize the known individual, social, and economic benefits of systematic efforts to promote these competencies in schools. Next, we review the current state of US education policy with regard to SEL and SECD, including the scope of program implementation, state standards, preservice and in-service teacher development, evaluation and assessment, and funding. We end the chapter with a set of policy recommendations on how to leverage existing strengths and build further capacity for making SECD an integral and seamless component of the education system.
Mindfulness meditation is thought to lead to positive changes in cognitive and affective functioning. However, the mechanisms underlying these changes are not well understood. One reason for this is that so far only very few studies considered the effects of specific meditation practices. We thus investigated the effects of engaging in one specific form of mindfulness meditation for a brief time period on behavioral and neural indicators of inhibitory control and metacognition. Performance on the Go/No-Go task and concurrent neural activity (EEG) was assessed before and after participants engaged in 3 weeks of mindful breath awareness meditation. Compared to a waitlist control group, meditation training enhanced the N2 event-related potential in No-Go trials and the error-related negativity (ERN) after error responses. As these two components reflect conflict and response monitoring, respectively, our results support the notion that mindfulness meditation improves metacognitive processes. The changes in the ERN were correlated with the accumulated amount of meditation time, highlighting the importance of meditation practice. Furthermore, meditation improved a behavioral marker of impulsive responding, indicating the relevance of mindfulness-based approaches for supporting health-related behaviors that are associated with deficits in impulsive control, such as substance abuse or over-eating. This study demonstrated that investigating one particular meditation practice rather than complex mindfulness-based interventions can contribute to a deeper understanding of mindfulness meditation mechanisms.
Spirit literally means that which gives life to a system, and spirituality is the state of being one with spirit. In terms of quantum physics, spirit is prime energy, which is conscious, aware and intelligent. It fills the universe. In spite of its vastness, it is one—a single indivisible field of energy. The one manifests itself as many in material forms, creating the material world. If many forms were to sustain themselves, each of them must behave not as a self-centred individual, but as an integral part of the one. They can behave so, if they are in the state of one with spirit or are spiritual. Recent discoveries in neuroscience reveal human beings are endowed with the capacity to be one with spirit and to become who we really are. Once we become one with spirit, its oneness expresses itself through us as an inner urge to serve others. This is love. This study, with the help of scientific evidence, demonstrates how spirituality could bring not only sustainability, but also happiness, to the world.
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