MB Mindfulness

While research showed that yoga didn’t appear to influence heart health, workplace yoga did have a positive effect on mental health and in stress reduction in particular.    NEW YORK - People who get to do yoga at work may be less stressed out than their peers who don’t, a research review suggests. At any given time, as many as one in six working people suffer from stress and other symptoms related to mental illness, researchers note in Occupational Medicine . Yoga is one of many approaches a growing number of employers are using to combat stress and improve workers’ mental health, but research to date has offered a mixed picture of how well these efforts are working. For the current study, researchers examined data from 13 trials with about 1,300 participants. Some workers in these trials were randomly assigned to participate in workplace yoga programmes ...

You need intention to start your journey into self-reflection and transformation Just as you need a lighter or a match stick to light something, similarly to get the best out of your meditation you need to set an intention. When you sit with a spark, you are ready to stoke the fire of transformation. Meditating with intention brings the best out of the time invested in the practice. Just as in a journey, you have a destination in mind to avoid unnecessary wandering, similarly, in meditation you place an intention to make your self-reflective journey fruitful. Your meditation could be to get rid of fear or pressure. It could also be for enhancing creativity or being infused with inspiration. Intention creates a platform on which you build the practice of meditation. Meditating without intention is akin to climbing a fruitless tree just to experience the tree. When you sit with intention, you know what you want or you ...

By  Moris Beracha .- Currently, there is evidence that the immune system can be improved through stress reduction, or the so-called mind-body medicine. You can use techniques that, after a long-period practice, produce soothing and anti-inflammatory effects for mind and spirit. The brain under polar circumstances (i.e., calm and happiness versus stress and depression) produces a dramatically different set of chemical mediators, including cortisol, one of the master switches of inflammatory responses. In addition, the brain transmits nerve signals consisting of two alternative parts: the sympathetic system, designed to accelerate acutely, but at a chronic cost; and the parasympathetic system, designed to calm. Experiments have shown that it is associated with anti-inflammatory properties. The hint is to learn how to control them to achieve optimal immune health. However, although these exercises are available to everyone, they require diligence and hard work to achieve la...

The UK Government has for the first time invested public funds to study the benefits of mindfulness in the classroom.  By Jamie Bristow Hundreds of children in the UK will be taught mindfulness among a range of innovative techniques with the aim of promoting good mental health, through one of the largest studies of its kind in the world (in terms of participant numbers). Led by the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families in partnership with University College London, a series of trials will see children from up to 370 schools learn mindfulness exercises, relaxation techniques and breathing exercises which aim to “to help them regulate their emotions”—alongside pupil sessions with mental health experts. The study will extend existing research into mindfulness and mental health education, comparing the effectiveness of different approaches, with the aim of establishing a robust evidence-base to help schools determine how best to promote ...