Mindful Happiness

Anthony Quintiliani, Ph.D, LADC

  • Home
  • Dr. Anthony Quintiliani
    • About
  • Mindful Happiness
  • Mindful Expressions Meditation CD
  • Contact

May 19, 2015 By Admin

Benefits of Regular Meditation Practice

Many Benefits of Mindfulness and Vipassana Meditation

MindfulHappiness-MeditationThe Dalai Lama (Gyatso, Tenzin), the world leader of Tibetan Buddhism, and Paul Ekman, the world famous Psychologist of human emotions, have teamed up to discuss how to use mindful emotional awareness skills to become more emotionally balanced and compassionate. These two highly skilled practitioners have listed 21 potential benefits of regular meditation practice. These will be listed below.

1) Attention and concentration mind training expand the gap in time and space between stimulus and impulsive emotional reactions, thus improving emotional and behavioral balance in responses to stressors.

2) Meditative focus on breath awareness helps to calm both the body and the mind, and become an alternative focus of attention when stressed.

3) The time pause that comes from meditation practice helps you to develop more adaptive responses to emotional triggers.

4) It is suggested that you maintain a mindfulness journal about regrettable  emotional reactions in your life, as well as your improvement in emotional balance.

journal-writing

5) Using vipassana awareness of the arising of phenomena, work at catching the earliest possible arising of unhelpful emotional reactions.  Stop, breathe, take executive control, and defer to a more adaptive response.

6) Regular meditation practice improves your ability to perceive and respond to the emotional reactions of others, thus improving interpersonal interactions.

7) Mindfulness-based awareness helps you to use your facial emotions to improve emotional issues both intrapsychically and interpersonally.  Smile and laugh more often!

8) Regular meditation practice, especially vipassana, will improve your ability to feel emotional sensations in your body (interoception), thus giving you a small window of time to use executive functions to improve your responses.

9) Regular meditation practice enhances executive functioning and weakens limbic emotional reactivity, thus enabling you to shorten time periods of negative reactivity and shift back to your emotional baseline more quickly.

MindfulHappiness_WhatisMindfulness-meditating-by-water

10) Meditation practice helps you to discover the behavioral implications of emotional and behavioral reactivity; you begin to understand how a stimulus situation leads to impulsive emotional reactions.  Once you know your strongest triggers, you are in a  better position to deal with them constructively.

11) Improved mindful awareness of increasing mind-body reactivity helps you to separate from it more quickly, and activate a more adaptive response.

12) Rather than “I am angry” regular meditation practice helps you to label emotional feelings as “I am feeling anger.”  This slight change in verbal description helps to separate your mind-body system from the internal reaction to an external trigger.  Anger is arising, but you are not the anger.

13) Learning meditative breathing techniques helps you to use breath as a diversion of attention away from reactive stimuli and triggers.  This re-assignment of attention reduces your emotional reactivity and calms the body.

14) Meditation practice, especially vipassana, helps you to become more aware of how to attain freedom from emotional suffering.  All phenomena are impermanent, so just wait it out rather than reacting emotionally.  Patience is good!

15) Improved awareness in the present moment helps you to better avoid and respond better to emotional situations that may trigger unhelpful emotional reactions.  Wise-mind skills help us greatly.

16) If you experience strong afflictive emotions (unhelpful, unwholesome), do your best to shift responses into the opposite directions.  This mindfulness skills is much like “opposite action” in Dialectical Behavior Therapy.

17) Use present moment mindfulness skills to increase the neuronal power of happy, good, and wholesome experiences and memories in life.

iStock_000007042277Small

18) Practice letting go of your self-cherishing, and do more to help others improve their emotional experiences in life.  Compassionate acts of kindness help both parties – the giver and the receiver.

19) As within The Four Noble Truths, recognize that suffering is normal, and that meditation practice is one way to reduce personal suffering.

20) Along with the joy of meditation, do much more gratitude practices. Be aware and happy with what you do have right now – all those things you may take for granted that are actually quite special.   You may want to keep a brief daily gratitude journal.

21) Remember that your thoughts, words and deed become how you impact your own emotions and the emotions of others in the world.  Be wholesome and compassion – kind in your thoughts, words and actions.

For more information refer to Dalai Lama (14th, Gyatso, Tenzin) and Ekman, P. (2008). Emotional Awareness: Overcoming the Obstacles to Psychological Balance and Compassion. New York: MacMillan Audio Book,  CD#6.

By Anthony R. Quintiliani, PhD., LADC

From the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, VermontChiYinYang_EleanorRLiebmanCenter

Author of Mindful Happiness

CLICK HERE to Order!

Mindful Happiness cover designs.indd

Filed Under: Featured, Meditation, MIndfulness, Practices Tagged With: DR ANTHONY QUINTILIANI, MEDITATION, MEDITATION BENEFITS, MINDFULNESS, VIPASSANA MEDITATION

Twitter

Mindful Happiness -Currently in Production

Mindful Happiness Posts

 Poem on the Wind   I am quite pleased with my experience on BEING in the wind today.  This poem will suggest that you allow the wind to be a metaphor – even a fantasy – that allows your pain and suffering to be swept away by the endless, gentle, blowing wind of nature. We […]

Participate in Groups for Meditation, Problem-Solving, and Task Completion Meditation With The Sangha Among regularly practicing meditators and various meditation traditions, the sangha is the social, emotional and spiritual collective that continues to support ongoing serious practice and progress along the Path.  Given that so much has been written about the many benefits of practicing […]

Psychological Research on the Dangers of Smartphone Abuse There is no doubt that smartphone technology bring us a great deal of advanced technological access to a world of information and communication. There is a downside. Recent research published by The American Psychological Association in March, 2017, and opinions in The Atlantic warn of potential and actual biopsychosocial […]

  My blog site mindfulhappiness.org has many posts on meditation, Buddhism, education, clinical practices and self-activated emotional health practices.  Perhaps you may wish to initiate a Reflective Journal practice after you do practices presented on the site.  There are many  benefits from maintaining a written journal about personal experiences and practices.  Not only does a […]

Winnicott’s Ideas – Best Possible Clinical Alliance To develop and maintain a strong clinical alliance it is best to follow some of the well-known clinical advice on this topic.  Rogers, Kohut, Winnicott and many others have suggested just how to do so.  Here are some general clinical recommendations for enhancing the clinical alliance. Develop authentic […]

Happiness #5 – Last Post on Characteristics This will be my last post for a while on the important topic of happiness.  Here I will hit a few highlights about simple joy and lasting inner experiences of true happiness. Simple Joy – We experience simple joy in simple experiences, small sometimes subtle events in our […]

Using Lectio Divina to Enhance Your Happiness Lectio Divina is an ancient Christian (Benedictine) meditation; it is a form of meditative prayer called “sacred  seeing.”   We  will use a modified version of the process here.   Follow the steps noted below. Sit  quietly  in meditative form, calmly abiding yourself here now.   After a […]

Calming Your Self-Critical Self with Mindfulness A core problem for many people is their incessant self (or other) criticism. This is a major part of our psychological mind suffering today. In the past life for most people was more difficult, so human basic needs were the energized priorities; today so many of us have been […]

Understanding Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy? Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (or Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, hereafter CBT) has been noted as the most common evidence-based therapy approach used in the United States.  That said, the most common “therapy” approach used here remains generic talk therapy with more or less psychodynamic characteristics. Given the absolute limited level of outcome-based evidence for effectiveness of […]

Mindful Solidarity with Standing Rock Sioux Earth Protectors The Standing Rock Sioux earth protectors are fighting earth destruction, environmental degradation, oil profiteering, and corporate greed.  Yes, I suppose finding huge reserves of crude helps many people become employed in the Dakotas. This is important. But other earth-wise activity (more solar for example) would be far […]

Consciousness of Your Emotions Besides common scientific reflections on human emotions – that is neuro-chemical-electrical cellular impulses in response to sensory inputs – our emotional response system includes you and your innermost emotional reactions to both internal and external stimuli (people, places, things, memories, experiences, phenomena). Your mental state in response to sensory contact with […]

Tonglen Meditation or Giving and Taking I have added various posts about many compassion practice.  Earlier posts have covered a range of practices – from super-easy to more demanding. Here, I will add a more advanced practice.  This Tibetan compassion meditation practice has been taught often in the Vajrayana school of Buddhism.  In my opinion […]

I Have Questions Our spiritual traditions have many sources of powerful spiritual origination: Shiva, Buddha, Jesus, Saint Francis to note just a few.  The Roman thinker Seneca noted that our most feared day is our last on earth, but this is also the beginning of our eternity.  As a practicing Buddhist, a secular meditation teacher, […]

  How Most People Learn in Psychotherapy It is highly important that clients learn from their therapists.  In most cases this includes alternative ways of thinking, emoting, and behaving. So what can we learn from educational research on how people learn? Of course we all know it begins with a solid therapeutic alliance – the […]

So Many Ways to Self-Medicate –  It Just Brings More Suffering Very often poor child-parent (child-caretaker) object relations, attachment with care takers, and attunement by care takers negatively impact young children early in their lives.  The well-documented scientific fact that environmental conditions play a more important role in gene-expression than pure genetics implies clearly that […]

Vipassana Meditation and Introduction Vipassana meditation, as taught by S. N. Goenka, has been practiced in India, Europe, the United States and in many other parts of the world. There are various claims for effectiveness when used as a form of meditative treatment with various populations (often correctional and substance using populations); however, there is […]

Grief, Mourning, and Traditional Chinese Medicine Based on the Buddhist reality of impermanence – we all will someday die; it is also quite true that we all will suffer from loss, grief, and mourning when others we care about die.  The typical stages in this process are Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. There are […]

Emptiness – Meditation Practice The Brahma-Viharas (higher abodes) include four powerful meditation practices ( Loving Kindness/Maitri or Metta; Compassion/Karuna; Sympathetic Joy/Mudita; and, Equanimity/Upekkha) that involve boundless radiation outwardly all the way into the infinite universe. These boundless or infinite space meditations, working with deep absorption and projecting kindness outwardly, may lead to positive changes. Experienced […]

Practice Approaches to for Mindful and  Enhanced Emotion Regulation Brought to us by way of  The Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont Mindful Approaches for Enhanced Emotion Regulation; here are some approaches to practice. 1)In some ways you could understand the progression from auto-pilot mind to greater stability and equanimity of […]

Deepak Chopra Ideas on “The Future of God” – Part 1 Deepak Chopra’s new book, The Future of God… (2014) presents some very challenging perspective on spirituality, atheism, and formal religion.  Here I will simply present some paraphrased details and my own ideas on these topics. Basic Foundations Human beings have special talents for searching […]

Mindful Happiness Tags

VIPASSANA MEDITATION SELF MINDFUL MEDITATION MEDITATION PRACTICE ACTIVITIES MINDFUL MEDITATION TRAUMA PRACTICE ENLIGHTENMENT VERMONT BUDDHISM CLINICAL SUPERVISION MINDFULNESS PRACTICES WISE MIND SUFFERING BREATHING MINDFUL TRAINING DR ANTHONY QUINTILIANI THICH NHAT HANH SELF MEDICATION COVID-19 HAPPINESS WALKING MEDITATION CONSCIOUSNESS MINDFULNESS TRAINING ANTHONY QUINTILIANI SELF COMPASSION PSYCHOTHERAPY EMPTINESS COMPASSION ACTIVITY SELF CARE ELEANOR R LIEBMAN CENTER ADDICTION JOURNALING BRAIN EXERCISES MBSR SELF ESTEEM TRAINING THERAPY. MINDFUL HAPPINESS VIPASSANA

Mindful Categories

Mindful Happiness Pages

  • About
  • Contact
  • Dr. Anthony Quintiliani
  • Mindful Expressions Meditation CD
  • Mindful Happiness
  • Site Map

Copyright © 2022 · Mindful Happiness