TRAIN your BRAIN

TRAIN your BRAIN to Ease PAIN

Expanding on scientific findings  reported  by DAN HARRIS and ERIN BRADY in  ABC News, July 28, 2011

Current research from medicine and neuroscience  continues to reveal amazing evidence that Mindfulness Meditation can physically change the brain. This presents challenging implications for clinicians helping people with both physical problems and mental stress.  

Emerging studies from eminent scientists suggest that these changes through meditation can assist a person to not only feel happier and less stressed -- but also become kinder towards other people. Meditation seems to help with many disorders that are often hard to treat - from controlling eating habits to even reducing sensations of chronic pain ... as explained by Shinzen Young in his posts and Books about controlling Pain through the practice of Mindfulness.. 

Mindfulness Meditation can help you to Relax and become more Comfortable ... even without the prescription medication or other pain treatment ... and can also help those other treatments to work better. CLICK to WATCH NOW - 21 min. soothing Mindfulness Meditation ... 

Listen to the gentle voice of Rita Hickman .... follow her clear and easy instructions.

Relax and Release ... get Pain Relief ... Ease any feelings of Distress, Discomfort, Stress and/or Worry !  
Meditation is an effective mind training exercise you can do alone ... or as part of a group. A recent study found that 20 million Americans now say they practice meditation. It has been used to help a wide range of conditions - to help cope with daily stress, to treat addictions and behaviour problems, to ease discomfort of inflammation [eg. psoriasis] .. and even to treat people in pain, and with recovery from surgery and cancer .Even the U.S. Marines are testing meditation to see if it can improve their focus on the task and effective performance. It has been adopted to enhance mental performance within the corporate world by executives at Google, General Mills, Target and Aetna Insurance. Students at all levels in global educational institutions now use meditation to aid focus and concentration when learning and to reduce stress. Even celebrities, musicians and writers have embraced mindfulness and similar meditation practices [eg. zen] as a daily routine to enhance their performance. 

In a ground breaking study, a research team from Massachusetts General Hospital looked at the brain scans of 16 people before and after they participated in an eight-week course in mindfulness meditation. Results, published in the January 2011 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, concluded that after completing the course, that actual changes occurred in the brains of the regular meditators after only 8 weeks. Those parts of the participants' brains associated with compassion and self-awareness grew, while parts associated with stress shrank.

To further investigate these changes in the brain, one of the world's best known meditators, the Dalai Lama, granted permission in the 1970s for his Buddhist monks who are master mediators, to have their brains studied at the University of Wisconsin, where there is one of 

the most high Tech Labs in the world.

 

Dr Richie Davidson, a PhD at the university, and his colleagues, led this exciting study.The neuroscientists were amazed by what they found in the monks' brain activity read-outs. During meditation, electroencephalogram patterns increased and remained higher than the initial baseline taken from a non-meditative state.

But you don't have to be a monk to benefit from meditation, which is now gaining increasing acceptance in the field of preventive medicine.. As Western Physicians have increasingly started prescribing meditation instead of pills to their patients, they have been amazed at the benefits to health and well-being.when people have adopted Meditation as a daily practice. 

Harvard Medical School has strongly supported this type of research. There are now millions of Americans and people in other western countries who have actually been recommended meditation and other mind-body therapies by their conventional health care providers. Over the past five years Meditation Practices have certainly become part of mainstream preventative health care.

An innovative investigation coming out of Emory University, has shown an amazing potential benefit of practising meditation - It appears to actually make practitioners nicer! 

Chuck Raison, professor at Emory University, hooked up microphones to participants who had been taught basic meditation and to those who hadn't. He then recorded people from both groups at random over a period of time. He found that even newly-trained mediators used less harsh language than people who had no meditation experience. They were more empathic with other people .. spending more time with them, even laughing more and being more pleasant. In a word, kinder .. and more caring toward others!

However, even the Dalai Lama admitted that meditation is not the silver bullet cure-all for every ailment or emotion.

To retain its benefits, even the scientists advise the practice of mindfulness and meditation on a regular basis, as part of wider approach to living daily with more compassion and our focus on the present moment. The past had gone ... the future is yet to come. Living our best in the present moment is all that we are capable of really doing. 

The Dalai Lama cautions that this all takes patience, so new mediators may not expect to see immediate results ... However patient practice without worrying about "how long it may take to get a result" will bring certain benefit both to oneself and to those around us .. "as surely as the day follows the night".

Your success, in the reassuring kindly words of the Dalai Lama "depends on practice."

Scientists are actually beginning to predict that within our generation, meditation will be seen as essential to maintaining a healthy lifestyle as diet and exercise are now regarded.

Credit is given to Maggy Patrick and Lauren Effron of ABC News for their intiial report.