Meditation is in the news a lot, especially with so much exciting research being conducted on the effects of meditation on the brain. I recently read one such interesting study by Virginia Tech’s Read Montague, PhD in Frontiers in Neuroscience. Dr. Montague et al. looked at the differences in decision making between Buddhist meditators and […]
Can Meditation Lengthen Your Life (or Just Your Telomeres)?
I’m going to share a not-so-secret secret with you: I love telomeres. If you follow my blogs, you may remember me mentioning telomeres in the past, because, well…they just fascinate me. Telomeres reside at the end of chromosomes in order to protect them from deterioration. When cells replicate, telomeres are cut and become increasingly shorter. […]
Asperger’s Syndrome and Mindfulness: One Dad’s Story
A recent edition of Mindfulness had an interesting application story that I wanted to share with you. A father wrote about his experience using mindfulness to help both himself and his twin sons, who have been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. As you know, Asperger’s Syndrome has numerous symptoms, including difficulty transitioning between activities, an inability […]
Cool Mindfulness Resources for the Younger Set
One of my staff has a young daughter who is learning about meditation and breathing awareness. Four-year old Nadia will lie on her back, put a Snoopy stuffed animal on her chest, and try to rock Snoopy to sleep with her deep breathing. Does Snoopy fall asleep? Well, that’s another story. Like most things, meditation […]
Take Up a Mindfulness Practice, Lose the Cane?
Is mindfulness effective with chronic pain? Many practitioners asked this question in a recent survey. They also wanted to know how they could convince their skeptical clients to give mindfulness a try. The connection between mindfulness and healing emotional pain, like stress or anxiety, may make more sense to your patients. But physical pain? That’s […]
Do your wandering thoughts make you unhappy? You’re not alone.
Everywhere I go, I see people glued to their phones. People seem obsessed with their phones and you might even say, why not? Phones these days can do everything – take photos, store games and books, keep our calendars…Even help us chart our happiness. Yes, I did say chart our happiness. This app is one […]
Meditation or Morphine?
What if we could replace morphine and other pain-relieving drugs with meditation? Fadal Zeidan, PhD from the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center recently conducted a study in which he found that a form of mindfulness meditation, known as focused attention, drastically diminished subjects’ experience of pain. In previous findings morphine has been shown to reduce […]
Meditation: Weight Training for the Brain?
I know that mindfulness and meditation practices have positive effects not only on the spirit, but also on the brain and body, but some of my patients were not always so certain. Some would be willing to try anything once, but then there were the others who would kind of look sideways at me with […]
The Smoothie Challenge: Getting Healthier as a Team
In the midst of the 10 Day Challenge that we issued to the global practitioner community a few weeks back, I started thinking about the need for improved health closer to home. We all spend lots of time in the office, so where better to promote healthy habits than in the setting where we toil […]
Dance Therapy: Using Movement to Heal
If you read my last blog, you would have seen the video about Dance for PD®, an innovative program for people battling the symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease. Dance for PD® is so effective because it allows participants to step out of the patients’ role and just move – creating beauty while engaging mind, body, and […]