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

How We Make Habits – An Understanding Twenty-five hundred years ago the Buddha reportedly taught how humans make habits.  The insights of this earliest Buddhist Psychology sheds shame on the West, with its almost-the-same version of this view in the 20th century. One must wonder if B. F. Skinner or N. Chomsky knew about Buddhist […]

Meditation on Ecodharma and Buddhist Ecology   Sit calmly and begin to breathe in and out deeply and slowly. Open your eyes to see and appreciate the natural environment you are in. Close your eyes now if you wish to do so. Know that this nature – the sky, clouds, stars, father sun, mother moon, […]

Anahata – Heart Chakra Meditation Practice Rumi noted that to reach the sky we must use our hearts. The Heart Chakra is a very popular focus of meditation practice.  Here we will simply review some characteristics and then move on to a meditation practice. Specific characteristics: Green color, YAM sound (say at least three times […]

Forgiveness Meditation Practice – Mindful Happiness – Dr Anthony Quintiliani Sit comfortably in a meditation posture. Allow your breath to remain natural without any intentional modification.  Allow your body to relax, and allow your mind to be open to and to expect forgiveness.  Focus attention on your heart area deep within your soul, and allow […]

Counseling/Psychotherapy with Self-Compassion Please begin by ending all conversations, and PLEASE shut-off your phones and/or laptops.  Simply be for a moment in the quietude of your inner self. Please close your eyes if you wish to do so. Contemplate the sacred nature of your profession – saving lives, reducing suffering, being a constant object, practicing […]

Crisis Resilience Skills  – Mindful Happiness Below I will list various interventions that have proven effective in reducing the level of personal crisis. The sources for many of these skills came from Burns (1980), Ellis (1995), Seligman (1988), Linehan (1993, 2015)), Hayes (2018), and Thich Nhat Hanh (various publications). The skills noted are for immediate […]

Mindful Ways to  Help a person Change Unhelpful Behaviors Brought to you by The Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont Although behavior therapy and contingency management remain the most effective means to initiate changes in unhelpful behaviors, more generic approaches offer some promise.  See the steps noted below to change an […]

More on Yoga Nidra Yoga nidra is sometimes called yoga sleep or yoga relaxation. It is a very powerful mindfulness technique that allows one to relax the body and limbic brain area, while holding mental control for deeper relaxation and projective practices without falling asleep. For some it may be like lucid dreaming, but a […]

Vipassana Meditation:  Impermanence Although standard vipassana meditation practice leading to insight about the true nature of reality does not recommend what I am about to do, I plan to do it anyway. This meditation center is all about innovation in practice and generalization regarding the benefits of meditation for both regular meditators and novices.  Below […]

Making Boundless Space for Your Emotional Dragons In the past I have offered posts about radical acceptance and ways of dealing with your personal dragons or demons.  Here I will offer a more advanced perspective on how directly engaging your emotional dragons is a very important part of your spiritual path – your spiritual journey […]

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 […]

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, […]

Taoist Meditation on Healing Colors of Light In Taoist views the four seasons (five if you include “Indian Summer”) are strongly associated with emotional moods and bodily energies. Healing colored light is also part of this viewpoint. For each of the colors we use, follow the process noted below. Sit quietly and breathe calmly. Circle […]

Cognitive Defusion in Mindfulness Psychotherapy A well-meaning therapist might ask: What is cognitive defusion. Well this practice, as used in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, is beyond cognitive restructuring of cognitive distortions and automatic negative thoughts ( I call “Red Ants”). The practice concretely de-literalizes the personal truth and meaning of unhelpful, repetitive thoughts and words. […]

Mindfulness in the NFL Yes, mindfulness as part of sports psychology programming is being used in the NFL.  Yes, big and physically tough football players are being helped via a mindfulness component of sports psychology. There are some important roots here. Dogen, the famous ancient Japanese Buddhist meditation master, brought Chan Buddhism from China to […]

Core Elements in Clinical Supervision In addition to what supervisors bring into group supervision and clinical training, the list below will be used for discussion about YOUR supervisory role. The order of content below is generally random. The content noted applies to clinical supervision; it could also apply to doing effective therapy. The skills and […]

Effective Clinical Supervision Perhaps other than the mental health status of the therapist and her/his ethical clinical skills, there is no more important variable in successful clinical work than effective CLINICAL supervision.  I emphasize “clinical’ because in today’s bureaucratic systems, so much supervision tends to be about required procedures like utilization level, reporting requirements, and documentation for services […]

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 […]

Human Beings Have Trouble BEING Human – Some Sound Advice from Dr Anthony Quintiliani The world today appears to be even more destructive than ever before in human history.  However, historians and violence researchers inform us that we as average persons are safer today than we were in the past.  Finger-tip access to world-wide media […]

Mindfulness-Based Emotion Regulation The following emotional regulation practices (also called emotional balance skills) have been supported by over 2500 years of mindfulness training and current psychological research on human emotions.  These practices/skills are to be practiced before they are needed, and directly applied when they are needed.  Here is the list. 1) Practice noticing and […]

Mindful Happiness Tags

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

Mindful Categories

Mindful Happiness Pages

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

Copyright © 2022 · Mindful Happiness