Considerações Saber Sobre relaxing sounds

A Q&A with Jack Kornfield about giving feedback at work, using social media wisely, and the poetry in his teachings.

Even if we’ve missed several planned sessions and start to think, “I’m not cut out for this.” Or we try it and think, “I’m not good at meditating.” Those are just thoughts. We can notice them, let them go, and get back to being kind to our mind.

If you find yourself ruminating about something that happened, tell yourself: “remembering.” You can come up with your own labels, but the point is to simply acknowledge what’s coming up, give it a nod, and then let it go without engaging any further.

It doesn’t matter when (or where) we meditate, so choose whatever time works best. Meditation could be nice to do first thing in the morning before our day begins or at night in bed.

Find a comfortable seated position. Sit so you feel supported and alert and in a way that you can stay comfortably for a while. It can help to have your knees slightly lower than your hips, to allow your spine to maintain its natural slight curve.

Mindfulness is good for parents and parents-to-be: Studies suggest it may reduce pregnancy-related anxiety, stress, and depression in expectant parents, and may even reduce the risk of premature births and developmental issues. Parents who practice mindful parenting report less stress, more positive parenting practices, and better relationships with their kids; their kids, in turn, are less susceptible to depression and anxiety, and have better social skills.

Incorporate meditation into other areas of your life: Try it on the bus or train on your way to and from work; take 5-10 minutes at the end of your lunch break to meditate; take 10 minutes to meditate before turning off the lights to go to sleep.

Those who learned mindfulness had significantly greater reductions in their systolic and diastolic blood pressure than those who learned progressive muscle relaxation, suggesting that mindfulness could help people at risk for heart disease by bringing blood pressure down.

This basic meditation technique uses an anchor, such as the breath or a sound, to help steady our attention and allow our awareness to come more relaxing sounds fully into the present moment.

Like Loving-Kindness Meditation, this technique involves invoking feelings of compassion and kindness toward yourself, and specifically for difficult situations or feelings.

To help your focus stay on your breathing, count silently at each exhalation. Any time you find your mind distracted, simply release the distraction by returning your focus to your breath. Most important, allow yourself to enjoy these minutes. Throughout the rest of the day, other people and competing urgencies will fight for your attention. But for these 10 minutes, your attention is all your own.

In recent decades, researchers have been gaining insight into the benefits of practicing this ancient tradition. By studying more secular versions of mindfulness meditation, they’ve found that learning to pay attention to our current experiences and accept them without judgment might indeed help us to be happier.

, researchers from Germany aimed to differentiate how specific components of mindfulness influenced people’s feelings in daily life. They found that when it comes to our emotions, not all mindfulness skills are created equal. Seventy students ages 20-30 received pings via smartphone six times a day over the course of nine days.

According to neuroscience research, mindfulness practices dampen activity in our amygdala and increase the connections between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex. Both of these parts of the brain help us to be less reactive to stressors and to recover better from stress when we experience it. As Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson write in their new book,