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The Network for Women in Research and supporting Research www.resnet.uea.ac.uk
Mindfulness with Kathleen Madigan
1230 to 1400 Friday 8th February, 2013
Council Chamber (building 2 on http://www.uea.ac.uk/about/gettinghere/campusmap)
When we practice mindfulness we are choosing to be more present in our lives. Coming back to the fullness of the present moment, we come back to ourselves. We become more in touch with what is going on in our mind, body and environment, including subtle details of changing experience inside and around us.
Lunch will be served after the talk.
For catering purposes please book with Sarah Payne [email protected] or 01603 593269
ResNet especially encourages men to attend their events
Kathleen Madigan
Mindfulness and Compassion Focused Training
Mindfullness ~The Short Breathing Space
Dropping down into the present moment, and adopting a dignified and erect
posture, become aware of the physical experiences you are having in this
moment, aware of how your feet make contact with the floor and your legs feel
the pressure and support of the chair or whatever you are sitting on. Have a
sense of your tallness and dignity, your presence, here in THIS moment, the
balance of your head, an awareness of your posture, your shoulders and your
arms,. What can you feel with your fingertips?
And when you are ready….gently focus your attention on your breathing.
Experiencing fully each in-breath and each out-breath as they follow one
after the other in a rhythmic cycle of their own….aware of the physical
sensations of each breath…the movement of the chest, the expansion and
contraction of the belly…like a little balloon expanding and contracting with
each in breath and each out breath. Or perhaps of you the most predominant
sensation is the changing temperature of the air at the nose and mouth.
Every in-breath a new beginning and every out-breath a letting go.
The breath can function as an anchor to bring you into the present and to
help you tune into a state of awareness and stillness.
After a few minutes, expand your awareness to a sense of the whole body
breathing. Become aware of yourself in this moment in this place. Have a
sense of the space around you, the room you are in and the larger world.
Remember that this sense of stillness and peace is available to you at any moment
of the day no matter what is going on by simply attending to the in breath and the
out breath in this moment.
Kathleen Madigan
Mindfulness and Compassion Focused Training
THE STRESS RESPONSE
Sympathetic Nervous System * acts in under 3 seconds!
Hypothalmic- Pituitary-Adrenal System is activated
steroid hormones (glucocortocoids) neurotransmitters called catecholemines:
dopamine norepinephrine epinephrine
These neurotransmitters activate the amygdala , deep in the brain emotional response: fear, anger, etc
They also suppress activity in the frontal area of the brain concerned with: short-term
memory, concentration, inhibition
cortisol ( primary stress hormone)
this hormone organizes systems throughout the body to deal with the stress:
heart increases rate
lungs increases rate
circulation diverts flow to muscles and consequently away from other non vital
organs like skin. Up to 300-400% increase in flow priming the heart, lungs,
muscles and brain for added demands.
Kathleen Madigan
Mindfulness and Compassion Focused Training
immune system repositions specific immune fighters like white blood cells or
blood factors which aid in clotting like platelets.
skin decreased blood flow to support heart and muscles. This makes the skin
feel cool, clammy and sweaty.
metabolism digestive activity is a non essential function so it is shut off in teems
in hard work or crisis.
Other indicators of stress:
diarrhoea…possibly due to the decrease in blood flow to the gut.
frequent urination…due to increased heart rate and blood pressure and
therefore increased flow through the kidneys
change in appetite… possibly due to the decrease in blood flow to the gut.
brain decrease in short term memory
difficulty with cognitive processes
difficulty with concentration
The natural balance in our system is the Parasympathetic Nervous
System which can be activated in 6 minutes by calming and soothing
practices like a short mindfulness breathing space.
Kathleen Madigan
Mindfulness and Compassion Focused Training
Finding Happiness: Cajole Your Brain to Lean to the Left
Daniel Goleman
All too many years ago, while I was still a psychology graduate student, I ran an
experiment to assess how well meditation might work as an antidote to stress. My
professors were skeptical, my measures were weak, and my subjects were mainly college
sophomores. Not surprisingly, my results were inconclusive.
But today I feel vindicated.
To be sure, over the years there have been scores of studies that have looked at
meditation, some suggesting its powers to alleviate the adverse effects of stress. But
only last month did what I see as a definitive study confirm my once-shaky hypothesis, by
revealing the brain mechanism that may account for meditation's singular ability to
soothe.
The data has emerged as one of many experimental fruits of an unlikely research
collaboration: the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan religious and political leader in exile, and
some of top psychologists and neuroscientists from the United States. The scientists
met with the Dalai Lama for five days in Dharamsala, India, in March 2000, to discuss
how people might better control their destructive emotions.
One of my personal heroes in this rapprochement between modern science and ancient
wisdom is Dr. Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective
Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Davidson, in recent
research using fMRI and advanced EEG analysis, has identified an index for the
brain's set point for moods.
Kathleen Madigan
Mindfulness and Compassion Focused Training
The functional M.R.I. images reveal that when people are emotionally distressed -
anxious, angry, depressed – the most active sites in the brain are circuitry converging on
the amygdala, part of the brain's emotional centers, and the right prefrontal cortex, a
brain region important for the hypervigilance typical of people under stress.
By contrast, when people are in positive moods - upbeat, enthusiastic and energized -
those sites are quiet, with the heightened activity in the left prefrontal cortex.
Indeed, Dr. Davidson has discovered what he believes is a quick way to index a person's
typical mood range, by reading the baseline levels of activity in these right and left
prefrontal areas. That ratio predicts daily moods with surprising accuracy. The more
the ratio tilts to the right, the more unhappy or distressed a person tends to be, while the
more activity to the left, the more happy and enthusiastic.
By taking readings on hundreds of people, Dr. Davidson has established a bell curve
distribution, with most people in the middle, having a mix of good and bad moods. Those
relatively few people who are farthest to the right are most likely to have a clinical
depression or anxiety disorder over the course of their lives. For those lucky few
farthest to the left, troubling moods are rare and recovery from them is rapid.
This may explain other kinds of data suggesting a biologically determined set point for
our emotional range. One finding, for instance, shows that both for people lucky enough
to win a lottery and those unlucky souls who become paraplegic from an accident, by a
year or so after the events their daily moods are about the same as before the
momentous occurrences, indicating that the emotional set point changes little, if at all.
Kathleen Madigan
Mindfulness and Compassion Focused Training
By chance, Dr. Davidson had the opportunity to test the left-right ratio on a senior
Tibetan lama, who turned out to have the most extreme value to the left of the 175
people measured to that point. Dr. Davidson reported that remarkable finding during
the meeting between the Dalai Lama and the scientists in India. But the finding, while
intriguing, raised more questions
than it answered.
Was it just a quirk, or a trait common among those who become monks? Or was there
something about the training of lamas - the Tibetan Buddhist equivalent of a priest or
spiritual teacher - that might nudge a set point into the range for perpetual happiness?
And if so, the Dalai Lama wondered, can it be taken out of the religious context to be
shared for the benefit of all?
A tentative answer to that last question has come from a study that Dr. Davidson did in
collaboration with Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress
Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.
That clinic teaches mindfulness to patients with chronic diseases of all kinds, to help
them better handle their symptoms. In an article accepted for publication in the peer-
reviewed journal Psychosomatic Medicine, Drs. Davidson and Kabat-Zinn report the
effects of training in mindfulness meditation, a method extracted from its Buddhist
origins and now widely taught to patients in hospitals and clinics throughout the United
States and many other countries.
Kathleen Madigan
Mindfulness and Compassion Focused Training
Dr. Kabat-Zinn taught mindfulness to workers in a high-pressure biotech business for
roughly three hours week over two months. A comparison group of volunteers from the
company received the training later, though they, like
the participants, were tested before and after training by Dr. Davidson and his
colleagues.
The results bode well for beginners, who will never put in the training time routine for
lamas. Before the mindfulness training, the workers were on average tipped toward the
right in the ratio for the emotional set point. At the same
time, they complained of feeling highly stressed. After the training, however, on average
their emotions ratio shifted leftward, toward the positive zone. Simultaneously, their
moods improved; they reported feeling engaged again in
their work, more energized and less anxious.
In short, the results suggest that the emotion set point can shift, given the proper
training. In mindfulness, people learn to monitor their moods and thoughts and drop
those that might spin them toward distress. Dr. Davidson
hypothesizes that it may strengthen an array of neurons in the left prefrontal cortex that
inhibits the messages from the amygdala that drive disturbing emotions.
Another benefit for the workers, Dr. Davidson reported, was that mindfulness seemed
to improve the robustness of their immune systems, as gauged by the amount of flu
antibodies in their blood after receiving a flu shot.
Kathleen Madigan
Mindfulness and Compassion Focused Training
According to Dr. Davidson, other studies suggest that if people in two experimental
groups are exposed to the flu virus, those who have learned the mindfulness technique
will experience less severe symptoms. The greater the
leftward shift in the emotional set point, the larger the increase in the immune measure.
The mindfulness training focuses on learning to monitor the continuing sensations and
thoughts more closely, both in sitting meditation and in activities like yoga exercises.
Now, with the Dalai Lama's blessing, a trickle of highly trained lamas have come to be
studied. All of them have spent at least three years in solitary meditative retreat. That
amount of practice puts them in a range found among
masters of other domains, like Olympic divers and concert violinists.
What difference such intense mind training may make for human abilities has been
suggested by preliminary findings from other laboratories. Some of the more tantalizing
data come from the work of another scientist, Dr. Paul Ekman,
director of the Human Interaction Laboratory at the University of California at San
Francisco, which studies the facial expression of emotions. Dr. Ekman also
participated in the five days of dialogue with the Dalai Lama.
Dr. Ekman has developed a measure of how well a person can read another's moods as
telegraphed in rapid, slight changes in facial muscles.
As Dr. Ekman describes in "Emotions Revealed," to be published by Times Books,
these micro-expressions –ultra rapid facial actions, some lasting as little as one-twentieth
of a second - lay bare our most naked feelings. We are not aware we are making them;
Kathleen Madigan
Mindfulness and Compassion Focused Training
they cross our faces spontaneously and involuntarily, and so reveal for those who can
read them our emotion of the moment, utterly uncensored.
Perhaps luckily, there is a catch: almost no one can read these moments. Though Dr.
Ekman's book explains how people can learn to detect these expressions in just hours
with proper training, his testing shows that most people – including judges, the police
and psychotherapists – are ordinarily no better at reading micro-expressions than
someone making random guesses.
Yet when Dr. Ekman brought into the laboratory two Tibetanpractitioners, one scored
perfectly on reading three of six emotions tested for, and the other scored perfectly on
four. And an American teacher of Buddhist meditation got a perfect score on all six,
considered quite rare. Normally,a random guess will produce one correct answer in six.
Such findings, along with urgings from the Dalai Lama, inspired Dr. Ekman to design a
program called "Cultivating Emotional Balance," which combines methods extracted
fromBuddhism, like mindfulness, with synergistic training from modern psychology, like
reading micro-expressions, and seeks
to help people better manage their emotions and relationships.
1
Resources
Compassion Focused
Germer, C. (2009) The Mindful Path to Self Compassion Guilford Press:
London
Germer, C. K., Fulton, R. , Siegel, R. D. (Eds) (2005 ) Mindfulness and Psychotherapy Guilford Press , New York
Gilbert, P. (2009) The Compassionate Mind Constable: London
Gilbert, P. (2010) Compassion Focused Therapy Routledge: London
Tirch, D. (2012) The Compassionate Guide to Overcoming Anxiety New
Harbinger: Oakland, CA
Germer, C. (2009) The Mindful Path to Self Compassion The Guildford
Press : London
Mindfulness Focused
Kabat-Zinn, Jon (1990) Full Catastrophe Living Dell Publishing: New York
Kabat-Zinn, J, Segal, Z. V., Williams, J. M.G., & Teasdale, J. D. (2007) The Mindful Way Through Depression Guildford Press: New York and
London
Segal, Z. V., Williams, J. M.G., & Teasdale, J. D. (2002) Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression: A new approach to preventing relapse Guildford Press: New York
Kabat-Zinn, J, and M. (1997) Everyday Blessings, the Inner Work of Mindful Parenting Hyperion: New York
2
On line Resources
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egdqnodiy60 Mark Williams
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU7vKitN4Ro Jon Kabat Zinn
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPG60_4fo5U Jon Kabat Zinn
http://www.self-compassion.org/ Kristin Neff
http://www.mindfulexperience.org/ Mindfulness Research Guide
http://www.mindfulcompassion.com/cms/ Dennies Tirch , The Centre for
Mindfulness and Compassion Focused Therapy
www.bemindful.co.uk
www.bangor.ac.uk/mindfulness North Wales Centre for Mindfulness Research
and Practice
www.mbct.co.uk Oxford Mindfulness Centre, Mark Williams
www.umassmed.edu/cfm Centre for Mindfulness, UMass, USA
Kathleen Madigan, MA, MBACP ( Accred.)
www.kathleenmadigancounselling.co.uk my website
Mindfulness Mindfulness is about paying attention - deliberately - and without judgment, as best you can, to what is going on in your body and your mind and in the world around you.
• Mindfulness and meditation can help us develop our inner resources to cope with stress, anxiety and depression, the effects of pain and chronic disease; studies worldwide show significant clinical improvement in the symptoms of recurrent depression, ME, anxiety and stress as a result of this practice.
• Mindfulness can make life more enjoyable, interesting, and fulfilling.
• Being in touch enables us to cope with difficulty and the more we meditate and practice mindfulness, the more we experience a greater sense of calm, wellbeing, and equanimity.
• We also become more able to recognise the many choices available to us when stressful situations arise.
This leaflet aims to introduce the concept of mindfulness and provide some basic information about books and materials available in the UEA Library, courses run by the UEA Counselling Service and websites that might be of interest and links to other local resources.
Introduction
Mindfulness is a technique in which a person becomes intentionally aware of his or her thoughts and actions in the present moment, non-judgmentally. It plays a central role in Buddhism and in a secular context it has attracted increasing interest among Western psychologists as a non-pharmacological means of dealing with anxiety and depressive mood states.
A powerful influence taking us away from being 'fully present' in each moment is our automatic tendency to judge our experience. We can find it not quite right in some way - not what should be happening, not good enough, not what we expected or wanted. These judgements can lead to sequences of thoughts about blame, or what needs to be changed, or how things could or should be different. Often, these thoughts will take us, quite automatically, down some fairly well worn paths in our minds. In this way, we may lose
awareness of the moment, and also lose the freedom to choose what, if any, action needs to be taken.
By contrast, mindfulness practice can increase awareness so that we can respond to situations with choice, rather than react automatically. We do that by practising becoming aware of where our attention is and deliberately changing the focus of attention, over and over again. Mindfulness is not about trying to get anywhere -but simply being aware of where you are - and allowing yourself to BE where and AS you are.
Mindfulness is meditation in our lives. It looks at how we are often deceived by our minds into reacting to rather than responding to events, thoughts, bodily experiences and emotions.
Library Resources
A basic search on the UEA Library Public Catalogue on the topic of mindfulness shows a variety of books and materials. Some were written by Jon Kabat-Zinn who has been very influential in this field. As Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School he taught mindfulness meditation as a technique to help people cope with stress, anxiety, pain and illness. In 1979 he developed the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Programme in 1979, an eight week course which combined meditation and yoga to help patients cope with stress, pain, and illness by using moment-to-moment awareness.
Kabat-Zinn, J, Segal, Z. V., Williams, J. M.G., & Teasdale, J. D. (2007) The mindful way through depression : freeing yourself from chronic unhappiness Guildford Press: New York and London (RC 537 WILL)
This readable new book offers practical help for those dealing with depression. It explains why our normal attempts to 'think' our way out of a bad mood or just 'snap out of it' can lead us into a deeper downward spiral. Drawing on meditative traditions and cognitive therapy, the authors demonstrate how to sidestep mental habits that lead to despair, including rumination and self-blame, so that you can face life's challenges with greater resilience. Part 1 examines how mind, body and emotions work together to compound and sustain depression and how this vicious circle can be broken. Part 2 provides both insight and practical exercises to relate this thinking to your own experience. Here basic practices of mindfulness are introduced and in Part 3 these are refined to relate to negative thoughts, feelings, sensations and behaviours that combine to create the spiral of depression. Part 4 provides a unified strategy for living more fully and effectively, particularly in the face of depression. The book has 273 pages plus a CD of seven guided meditations.
Kabat-Zinn, Jon (2005) Full catastrophe living: using the wisdom of your body and mind to face stress, pain, and illness. New York: Delta (RA785 KAB)
This 467 page book is designed to give the reader full access to the training program patients undergo in the stress clinic and is a manual for helping readers to develop their own personal meditation practice and for learning how to use mindfulness to promote improved health and healing in their own lives. Part I guides through the major techniques, with directions for how to practice them. Part II provides a view of how mindfulness is related to physical and mental health. Part III discusses what stress is and how our awareness and understanding of it can help us to handle it more appropriately. Further parts explain how mindfulness can be used in specific areas that cause people significant stress and also give you practical suggestions for maintaining momentum in the meditation practice.
Kabat-Zinn, Jon (2005) Wherever you go, there you are: mindfulness meditation in everyday life. New York: Hyperion. (BF637.M4 KAB)
This smaller 278 page book aims “to provide brief and easy access to the essence of mindfulness meditation and its applications, for people whose lives may or may not be dominated by immediate problems of stress, pain, and illness. It is offered particularly for those who resist structured programs and for people who don't like to be told what to do but are curious enough about mindfulness and its relevance to try to piece things together for themselves with a few hints and suggestions here and there.” The first part explores the rationale and background for taking on or deepening a personal practice of mindfulness. The second explores some basic aspects of formal meditation practice and the third sets out a range of applications
and perspectives on mindfulness. Certain chapters in all three parts end with explicit suggestions for incorporating aspects of both formal and informal mindfulness practice into one's life.
Segal, Z. V., Williams, J. M.G., & Teasdale, J. D. (2002) Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression: A new approach to preventing relapse Guildford Press: New York (RC 537 SEG)
This is a key early book in the history of mindfulness-based therapy and is valuable for its clear and authoritative account of this path. It is not therefore primarily a self-help book. After introductory chapters on depression and the development of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), it aims to provide a full account of a MBCT programme, session by session. It includes the handouts and forms used in sessions and presents the material in ways that can be adapted and used easily. There are 332 pages.
Audio Guides
The library also has associated audio material such as sound recordings on Sitting meditation, The Body Scan and Mindful Movement produced by Kathleen Madigan, Mindfulness instructor’(all BF637.M4 MIN).
Counselling Service Courses
The UEA Counselling Service sponsors courses facilitated by Kathleen Madigan who has training in the teaching of Mindfulness- Based Approaches from the University of Wales, Bangor, Centre for Mindfulness Research. If you are interested to find out about plans for the next Counselling Service-based Mindfulness course please email [email protected] or telephone 01603 592651 or call in to the Main Counselling Service.
Websites
www.mindfulness-east-anglia.co.uk [the website for Kathleen Madigan]
www.mindfulness-meditation.net [site for Catherine Grey and Anna Black, teachers in London] www.bangor.ac.uk/mindfulness [North Wales Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice]
www.mbct.co.uk [the website for Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy]
www.stressreductiontapes.com [Order Jon Kabat-Zinn’s CDs here] http://www.umassmed.edu/cfm/index.aspx [Centre for Mindfulness, University of Massachusetts, USA]
Information provided for clients of the University Counselling Service
