Inside Yoga 69 (28/2/13)
Here’s a headline I cannot ignore! “NHS recognises that mindfulness meditation is good for depression”. The newspaper article, which was in Tuesday’s edition of The Guardian, explained that: “Mindfulness meditation has been shown to give patients control over their own depression and anxiety levels and levels of chronic pain, according to a paper published earlier this month in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.”
This is good news, and about time many would say, because slowly but surely those in the medical world are investigating the effectiveness of meditation. And each time a report endorses the benefits of meditation it helps the spread of a simple, but effective practice, which has a lot to offer our world in terms of healing and other benefits.
The Guardian report continued: “Catherine Kerr, lead author of the new study and director of translational neuroscience at Brown University in Providence, in the US, says that when we are depressed, attention is ‘consumed by negative preoccupations, thoughts and worries’. Instead of disengaging and moving on, we find ourselves digging deeper into negative thought patterns.
“Mindfulness gives patients control over this habitual chain via a ‘body scan’ technique, where patients systematically engage and disengage with the sensations in each part of the body. As they do so, alpha rhythms, which organise the flow of sensory information in the brain, increase and decrease. Kerr describes this as a ‘sensory volume knob’ and it is this flexible focusing skill which, the paper proposes, ‘regulates attention so that it does not become biased toward negative physical sensations and thoughts, as in depression’. Early Buddhists advanced a similar theory 2,500 years ago in a famous practice text called ‘Mindfulness of the body and breath’.”
Being mindful of our body and breath is the underlying message in my classes whether we are doing some yoga postures or sitting in formal meditation. If you are interested in focusing on mindfulness and reducing stress and depression see my Stress Reduction page, with details of next workshop.
Click on https://www.yogabristol.co.uk/?page_id=696 or click on link above to Stress Reduction
To read full Guardian article, click on http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/feb/26/mindfulness-meditation-depression-nhs?INTCMP=SRCH
And to see original report by Catherine Kerr, click on http://community.frontiersin.org/people/CatherineKerr/42439
