Did some surfing around, found more free mindfulness mp3s, linked at the bottom of this site’s mindfulness page. Also came across this, mindfulness guru Jon Kabat-Zinn speaking at Google–first explaining, then demonstrating the practice. So, if you’ve got an hour-twelve to spare…
From PsychCentral: Habitual Meditation Reduces Pain Perception.
“…Meditation trains the brain to be more present-focused and therefore to spend less time anticipating future negative events. This may be why meditation is effective at reducing the recurrence of depression, which makes chronic pain considerably worse.”
As posted by the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. Nice, quick, lo-fi doses of calm and awareness.
5 minute Breathing Meditation (play) (mp3 download)
12 minute Breath, Sound, Body Meditation (play) (mp3 download)
19 minute Complete Meditation Instructions (play) (mp3 download)
7 minute Meditation for Working with Difficulties (play) (mp3 download)
9:30 minute Loving Kindness Meditation (play) (mp3 download)
3 minute short Body and Sound meditation. (play) –>this is an mp3 download
3 minute short Loving Kindness meditation. (play)
Mindfulness Clock (for PC Users)
Mindfulness Clock (for Mac Users)
Alongside lots of other downloadable/streamable stuff at audiodharma.com, here’s a page of Guided Meditations (also downloadable and streamable). Lots to choose from–different approaches, different voices, different lengths, from 5 minutes to 50.
“Fast meditation”? A study posted at PsychCentral shows near-instant results from just a little mindfulness practice:
Psychologists studying the effects of a meditation technique known as “mindfulness” found that meditation-trained participants showed a significant improvement in their critical cognitive skills (and performed significantly higher in cognitive tests than a control group) after only four days of training for only 20 minutes each day.
If you’re curious, a good place to start: Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are. A fast mindfulness read.
PsychCentral has news about two studies showing that Transcendental Meditation (TM) helps reduce depression…at least for African-Americans and Hawaiians over 55.
Participants in both studies who practiced the Transcendental Meditation program showed significant reductions in depressive symptoms compared to health education controls.
The largest decreases were found in those participants who had indications of clinically significant depression, with those practicing Transcendental Meditation showing an average reduction in depressive symptoms of 48 percent.
TM is meditation with a mantra–focusing your attention on a repeated word or phrase. Different, say, than mindfulness meditation, where focus is devoted to one thing in the moment–usually breathing. Here are Wikipedia’s description of TM and of meditation in general.
On theme: Marcia Lucas, PhD blogs a response at Psychology Today re meditation as zoning out.
Here’s the polite version of a question I received recently about my support of mindfulness meditation as a practice for well-being in relationships:
Why are you encouraging people to zone out? Sitting around pretending they’re above it all, and avoiding real feelings? Who wants to be in a relationship with a self-involved bliss-ninny?
Continue reading the post here.
Imported from Live Mindfully, here’s a collection of links to mindfulness MP3s from around the web. Something for every occasion–thinking, breathing, sitting, hearing, worrying, exercising… Try ‘em out.
