Calming your thoughts through mindfulness

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BY HOWARD COHEN / McClatchy Newspapers

Our worries.

They’re crescendoing like the finale of Beethoven’s “Ninth”: Bailouts, buyouts. Recession, depression.

Enter the meditative practice of mindfulness. Born of Buddhist roots, it’s increasingly recognized as a measure to calm the mind’s chatter and elevate the brain’s thinking and organizational processes.

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(photos.com)

(photos.com)

Mindfulness seminars. Mindfulness books. Even the medical mainstream is taking note — the Sept. 17 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association had a piece titled “Mindfulness in Medicine.”

“The uncertainty of tomorrow creates a lot of the angst or discomfort,” says Scott Rogers, director of the Institute for Mindfulness Studies in Miami Beach. “People are looking more and more to bring a little bit of ‘ahhh ...’ Not just stress reduction, but allowance and acceptance.”

Mindfulness is built around the premise of disengaging from overly emotional responses and extraneous thoughts that clutter the mind’s ability to think clearly. By using techniques such as breathing, visual imagery and meditation to slow down and focus on the present, the theory goes, a person can tap into a higher level of awareness. The more acute awareness is the byproduct of more active brain waves brought on by meditation, studies have shown.

Simply put, it’s going from worrier to warrior, says Rogers, 45, a lawyer who conducts seminars for other lawyers and school groups.

“We want to move into a place where the outside world will do whatever it’s going to do without us going through the roller coaster of emotions,” Rogers says. “We want to maintain this more alive, vigilant, present way of being that is somewhat independent of how things are going.”

The mindfulness practice has ties to sports psychology, says Dr. Janet Konefal, the assistant dean for complementary integrative medicine at the University of Miami.

“Most of the research about this self talk comes from coaches and psychologists involved in sports,” she said. “They’re interested in how athletes talk to themselves and how that can make the difference and be cutting edge.”

Olympics swimmer Michael Phelps, for one, is renowned for envisioning every race before he dives into the water. He focuses on the time he wants to achieve — down to the hundredth of a second — and the exact stroke count per lap he needs to achieve his goal. He credits this focus with winning a gold medal in the 200-meter butterfly at the Beijing Olympics despite a goggles failure that impaired his vision.

There is a growing body of evidence that this type of mental discipline and meditative practice can carve new pathways in the brain. It’s a concept called neuroplasticity and it’s just the opposite of what scientists had believed for years — that the brain’s nerve cells were set in childhood and didn’t change.

Research has shown otherwise. A 2005 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences measured the brain waves in a group of Tibetan monks schooled in Buddhist meditative practices from centuries ago. The researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that when the monks meditated — especially the ones most skilled in meditative practices — their brain waves, as measured by brain-scanning machines, recorded much greater and more powerful activity than previous standards of healthy people. The Dalai Lama sent the monks to the Wisconsin lab.

Rogers recounts an experiment conducted by Harvard Medical School two years ago. A group of pianists were instructed to play a five-finger scale repeatedly to a metronome’s steady beat. For five days the volunteers played the same pattern for two hours. The volunteers were hooked to a machine that sent a brief magnetic pulse into the motor cortex of their brains. This allowed scientists to gauge brain activity.

After a week of practice, scientists found that the motor cortex devoted to these finger movements took over surrounding areas in the brain, thus creating new pathways.

The experiment was repeated, but this time the volunteers were instructed to imagine themselves playing the piano. Hands never touched keys. The results were the same: The brain still cut new pathways.

“Twenty years ago, they would have said this is absolutely impossible,” Rogers says. “In stroke victims this is hugely significant because we now know parts of the brain that we thought were localized — this part for vision, hearing, the moving of the hand — won’t repair itself.

“Now we know this other portion of the brain can take on the necessary function to work with the arm. This has totally changed how we work with stroke victims. That part is not growing back but another part of the brain says, ‘I can do that.’”