March 1, 2015 By Admin

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Chronic Pain and Doing Body Scanning Although doing body scans cannot fully relieve your pain, it may help you manage it better. If your pain is serious and chronic you need to work with a qualified pain management professional, who will use both psychological and medical interventions. Note that a recent issue of Consumer Reports reviewed […]

Approaches to Treating Chronic Pain Chronic pain is one of the most common and costly physical conditions in the United States. The following approaches have proven to be somewhat effective in reducing personal suffering from chronic pain. Although some of these can be practiced on your own, it is wise to work with a pain […]

The “I AM THAT” Meditation Elena Brower’s new book, Practice You: A Journal (Sounds True, 2017) has many thoughtful suggestions on how to connect with the true inner self, and – more importantly – how to improve your self-views and the experience of your deep inner self. Below I have modified her presentation of the “I Am […]

Basic Self-Compassion Process Practice: To practice self-compassion as needed, follow these specific self-compassion steps. Sensitize your mindfulness skills to become aware of your immediate experience of suffering. Hold a strong intention to respond with self-kindness. Use self-talk to be kind to yourself. Begin by softening your body. Relax your muscles, tendons, joints. Hold a natural […]

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 […]

Meditation on Gratitude – Why it is so Important The daily rapid vibrations from our fast-paced and sometimes dangerous world may impact us in ways that make unhealthy norms of being. The struggle to feel good enough, to have enough, to be somebody, to keep up with the raging ads about what you need NOW and […]

Risks and Solutions for Compassion Fatigue Perhaps nothing more than compassion fatigue causes more helpers to prematurely exit their fields. First responders are generally seen as the most at risk for compassion fatigue (and possibly PTSD), followed by emergency room medical staff. A third group, medical and clinical staff working with high risk terminally-prone patients is […]

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 […]

Self-Reality Checks Are Needed in Your Mindful Clinical Practice It is highly important for helpers working in the co-occurring conditions field to become keenly aware of their own realities in practice and life that impact clinical effectiveness. Below I have listed four areas that show up in clinical surveys and added four more that I […]

Insights – Vipassana Mediation There will be future, more advanced vipassana meditations posted on the site. For now, however, we will end this series with a final post about the insights often experienced via vipassana meditation. We learn via experience about impermanence, suffering and its causes, no-self, emptiness and many other things – or, perhaps, […]

Inner Workings of Self-Medication Process To continue our discussion about the self-medication process we will first turn to the human brain. The human brain is the most complex system known to science. Here, my comments will be basic. Self-medication often has roots in the quality of our earliest childhood experiences (attachment and object relations with […]

Mindfulness Can Activate More Grace in Our Lives Today we all need to be cultivating more and deeper grace. Grace needs to be activated. Given so many of our cultural problems (murders and mass murders by gunfire, rampant personal and corporate greed, ego-entitlement, chronic stress, feelings of insecurity, technological advances that do not ADVANCE us, […]

In The Dhammapada the Buddha includes an important section on the topic of happiness. How to be happy in a life of changing joy, suffering, and neutrality? How to be happy in a world of attachment/craving for desired pleasures and avoidance of all suffering? Attachment, impermanence and unhelpful experiences – all cause suffering. It is quite […]

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 […]

“i Rest” Yoga Nidra Practice (Richard Miller, Ph.D.) All regular meditation and yoga practices are capable of bringing us closer to our true self and our relationships in the world. A by-product is deep relaxation and equanimity. Richard Miller, Ph.D. (Clinical Psychologist, yogic scholar, spiritual teacher), has created a yoga nidra practice that promises to […]

Attitudes of Gratitude Thoughts and Applications M. J. Ryan presents some interesting practices in the book, Attitudes of Gratitude (1999). Here are some ideas. Hope you will practice some of them soon. As The 14th Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh suggest, we should always appreciate the preciousness and miracle of human life – our own life no matter what […]

Trauma: Object Relations Therapy Object relations therapists, D. W. Winnicott especially, have presented a logical analysis on how to provide object-relations-oriented therapy to people suffering from the effects of psychological trauma. Such attachment-based trauma therapy provides support and healing from trauma, loss and long-term trauma-effects. The interventions below combine the best of object relations therapy, […]

America’s Opioid Problem-2020; A Brief Update Unfortunately, Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) is alive and well in 2020. Today approximately 150 People are dying each day due to opioid overdose. The CDC noted that from 1999 to 2017 approximately 399,000 people died in the United States from Opioid overdose. Related to chronic pain, this is one […]

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 […]

Personal Happiness in the Age of COVID-19 We are all in this together! However, wealth and employment status do play important roles. RTI International and the Consortium for Implementation Science have serious concerns about the links between racial equity, social justice, and personal responses to COVID-19. Neuroscience notes that personal happiness in a brain-mind-body thing. Its […]