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Anthony Quintiliani, Ph.D, LADC

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April 12, 2015 By Admin

Mindfulness Training

Mindfulness-Based Emotion Regulation

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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 expanding the gap (time/space/energy) between internal emotional impulse and external behavioral activation.

2) Focus on calm, slow, deep breathing when overly aroused emotionally.

3) Be mindfully aware of what (people, places, things, memories, etc.) causes your emotional dysregulation, and experiment with ways to alter your reactions to such triggers.  Note that these conditions are impermanent – they arise and that fall away.

4) Maintain a personal journal about regrettable emotional reactions and behaviors.  When things improve, also write about that in the journal.

5) In the vipassana tradition, work on recognizing (acute awareness) the initial arising of an emotional reactions in your body (sensations), and experiment with ways to alter or stop the parade of madness.

6) Use compassion to become aware of the other person’s increasing emotional suffering, and act accordingly to reduce it.

7) Use the proprioception of facial nerves to alter emotion in your brain by smiling at fear and anger in you.  If the fear is something serious, do what you need to protect yourself.

8) Practice interception skills by becoming more and more aware of sensations in your body that signal emotional reactivity and dysregulation. Take advantage of this early warning system to change your reaction to a more productive response.

9) When you fail to control emotional reactions, do your best to shorten the behavior and verbal activation period.  Apologize quickly and sincerely.

10) Understand the cognitive-behavioral model so you can use such information to improve the moment and your reaction.

11) Practice labelling your emotional content via thoughts, words and actions so you may be able to extend cognitive (pre-frontal) control over reactivity.

12) Increase your desire to be free from emotional suffering, which anger and other afflictive emotions simply increase.

13) Read about the Four Noble Truths, and practice daily meditation, yoga, or exercise to be in touch with your brain, mind, and body.

14) Do not willingly invite anger or emotional reactivity into your human space.  Find a more productive alternative to practice.

15) Do the 4-Ds: drink water, distract, do something different, and delay your response (thoughts, words, actions).

16) Investigate themes in your emotional reactivity.  Isolate the BIG ones, and get help to transform them and your reactions.

17) When experiencing afflictive emotional states, practice opposite action (DBT skill). Try your best to do something in the opposite direction.

18) When feeling emotionally hurt or angry, do your best to LET GO of your hurt ego and self-cherishing and apply a practice or skill immediately.

19) When feeling sorry for yourself or angry about something that is impermanent, practice gratitude review. Thinks of things you have gratitude about.  Really concentrate on them.

20) Follow the wise advice of Thich Nhat Hanh, Chogyam Trungpa, and Pema Chodron by holding your anger as if it was a newborn baby.  Since it is part of your experience, allow your mind to transform it into something that needs to be taken care of with loving kindness and unconditional love.  Know you are suffering!  Be kind to yourself and your emotional reaction.  Do not act on it.

21) Practice loving kindness meditation for yourself and others on a regular basis.

22) If you are very skilled, practice smiling at your fears and inhaling the pain and suffering from others as you exhale your own loving kindness to others.

For more information refer to The 14th Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso) and Ekman, P. (2008). Emotional Awareness: Overcoming the Obstacles to Psychological Balance and Compassion. New York: MacMillan Audio Books, CD 6.  See also Chodron, P. (2010). Smile at Fear: A Retreat with Pema Chodron. Boston: Shambhala Audio, CDs.

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!

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Filed Under: Breathing, Featured, MIndfulness, MIndfulness Activities, Training Tagged With: DR ANTHONY QUINTILIANI, EMOTIONAL BALANCE, EMOTIONAL REGULATION, MINDFUL HAPPINESS, MINDFULNESS TRAINING

March 29, 2015 By Admin

Happiness: One Path According to The Buddha

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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 difficult to overcome these worldly realities.  The only way to overcome negative reactions is through the knowledge and use of the mind. The difficult practices of mind over emotions, compassion over self-interest, and equanimity over dysregulation are set up as comparisons between how an enlightened person lives versus how an unenlightened person lives.  Each of the Buddha’s statements below includes the fact that enlightened beings do not do what is typical in the world of samsara.  In fact, enlightened beings have life-long practices so they will not be typical.  So, remember that each statements noted comes with the suggestion that the enlightened person will be without a trait or tendency that is highly common in the world and its people.

Enlightened people who wish to be happy with live: without enmity, hatred, affliction, defilement, restlessness, sensual obstructions, dis-ease, unpleasantness, victory or defeat, fire-like passion, ill will, misery, distress, craving, grief, unwholesomeness, and foes.   Therefore, to be ultimately happy you must do your best to attain these outcomes of practice.  Consider these statements: Working on attainment of these conditions implies true happiness via the path to enlightenment – The Way. Or, as Buddha called it, the “pathway to the stars.”

The section ends with statements about the importance of personal health (psychological and physical implied), personal contentment with what is, and personal attainment of nibanna (enlightenment).  To live in the ways described above results in “world-transcending insight” on how to be in your life. The end product of these efforts is true happiness – an un-attached, un-craving, un-avoiding happiness.

Refer to Carter, J. R. and Palihawandana, M. (Trans.). (1987). Sacred Writings, Vol.6, The Dhammapada, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 254-261.

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 Tagged With: BUDDAH, DR ANTHONY QUINTILIANI, HAPPINESS, MINDFUL HAPPINESS

March 10, 2015 By Admin

Meditations on Emptiness

An Advanced View on Meditations on Emptiness

An earlier post on the Dalai Lama’s book, Meditations on the Nature of Mind, ended with suggested meditations (my own themiddleway-faithgroundedinreasonpersonal contemplation’s) about emptiness.  I will first review those contemplations.  Contemplate deeply on what emptiness means personally to you.  Contemplate about a time when you received a glimpse of personal emptiness.  Contemplate on your experience to see if it was positive, neutral, of negative (happiness, neutral or suffering).  Why do you think you experienced it the way you did?  Contemplate on ways you may be able to use the experience of emptiness to reduce personal suffering and increase personal happiness.  Please do these four contemplations one after the other before you attempt to contemplate of what follows here.  I created these suggested contemplations after my own long meditation practices on emptiness.  Keep in mind that Lord Marpa noted a very long time ago that only fools think emptiness is the same as nihilism.  It is not nihilism.  Also remember that when your mind shifts away from the object of your contemplation (emptiness) gently return attention back to the object, AND each time try to go deeper into concentration on your contemplation.

What follows here is a compilation of various insights about meditation on The Middle Way and on emptiness.  Some come from The Dalai Lama; some come from T’song-kha-pa; some come from Nargarjuna; some come  from Chandrakirti; and, somemindful_happiness very far less exquisite ideas come from me.  My effort here is to make the wisdom of the wisdom leaders more pragmatic and practical for us today, in our world as it is now.  A key concept in the process of becoming enlightened is that we do it more for the sake of others.  Thus, the bodhisattva/bodhichitta compassionate action ideals are seriously pursued.  Our practice is based on the desired unification of two important bodies: Dharma and Form.  The Dharma refers to the body of emptiness and other ultimate realities, and the form refers to the body of Buddha.   Pursuit of Buddhist Dharma and the experience of emptiness connect us to the pure path of liberation.  Wisdom about no-self, impermanence, dependent origination, karma, causes and effects, interconnectedness, conventional vs ultimate truth, and ultimate emptiness of intrinsic existence of all phenomena – all lead the way to liberation and enlightenment.  They all lead us from conceptual knowing to experiential knowing, and from the Samara world of conditioned sense pleasures and suffering to wisdom.  In many respects to practice a wisdom-informed life IS to move along the path, The Middle Way to complete realization.  In the final analysis of emptiness, there lies a clear implication that there is no such reality as an object becoming established on its own.  Therefore, there can be no-self nature, thus no-self.  What appears to be middleway-emptiness-Mindful-Happinessconcrete in nature is actually made up of totally dependent arisings.  One may experience a contradiction here; if we are the Buddha already, does it matter if it is just emptiness?  The answer to this inquiry is far more complex than it sounds.  Only our thoughts and our minds perceive the concrete self-phenomena as existing in and of their own. The correct view of it all suggests that there is no thought or cognition about Dharma (even if we study it); it is more about post-perceptual experiences and understanding via pure wisdom experiences. T’song-kha-pa noted that in the “profound Middle Way” there is NO independent, intrinsic, concrete self or things.  It is pure wisdom of experiential awareness.

Now on to the contemplation practices.

Again, I am creating these on my own as means to experience some glimpse of emptiness in meditation.

  • 1) Contemplate about your own compassionate actions for the benefit of others.  When you feel/experience being deep enough into contemplation, add the experience of emptiness to this process.  Be mindfully aware of what happens in the experience?
  • 2) Contemplate deeply in the ultimate wisdom that there is no intrinsic existence in any phenomena, including your own contemplation right now.  What happens in your experience?
  • 3) Contemplate deeply about how your own life is conditioned via sense pleasures and avoiding suffering.  Go even deeper, and contemplate the factors of non-existence (emptiness) in this process. What happens to your experience at this point?
  • 4) Contemplate deeply on the experience of experiential awareness now.  Continue until you are experiencing just experiencing without conceptual or cognitive awareness.  Now what happens to your experience?
  • 5) Lastly, contemplate deeply on what experiential insights may have been found via your four experiential contemplations.  Shift gently to cognition now, and note what the insights are.

Now take a few deep, slow, calm breaths and bring your experiential self back into awareness.  Be aware! Move your body slightly before you attempt to stand up.  Think about what you might wish to share with others.

For more information refer to The Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso). (2009). The Middle Way: Faith Grounded in Reason. Boston: Wisdom Publications, pp. 119-147. Also refer to The Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso and others). (2011). Meditation on the Nature of Mind. Boston: Wisdom Publications, pp. 126-139.

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: Activities, Emptiness, Featured, Meditation, Meditation Activities, The Middle Way Tagged With: DR ANTHONY QUINTILIANI, MEDITATIONS ON EMPTINESS, MINDFUL HAPPINESS

March 1, 2015 By Admin

Mindful Movement as a Form of Meditation Practice

Using Mindful Movement as a Form of Meditation Practice with the Body

In Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction practices Hatha Yoga has been used as part of the recovery process from both psychological and physical suffering. In my own clinical use of mindful movement with children, youth and adults, I found that basic Qi Gong/Che Kung, MindfulHappiness_WalkingMeditation-002Walking Meditation, and Trauma-Informed Yoga proved to be very helpful in improving participants’ mood and personal motivation.  So why/how does repeated, formal sequences of body movement help people? Like general regular exercise, these mindful movement routines tend to lubricate the body (tendons, joints, etc.), improve strength (muscles), enhance resiliency (sticking with it for reinforcement), perhaps modify neurotransmitters, change breathing rate and depth, produce cognitive distraction from negative thoughts and emotions, lead to bodily stimulation and later relaxation, as well as MindfulHappiness_AnthonyQuintilianiimprove attention, mindfulness, and concentration.  There are many ways regular body movement can help us.  The Buddha’s own advice was to move the body to improve attitude and mood: sit, lay down, walk, and stand up the next time you experience unhelpful emotions to see what happens.  Today many examples of these movement meditation forms are available –  often free online, through Google, in social media, and via Apps.

One of the most interesting explanations about why yoga (body meditation) is so helpful to people has been presented by the 14th Dalai Lama ( Tenzin Gyatso along with Khonton walking-meditation_MindfulHappinessPeljor Lhundrub and Jose Ignacio Cabezon) in the book, Meditation on the Nature of Mind.  The Dalai Lama suggest that there are many ways to attain enlightenment: four ways of yoga, five paths, and ten stages of the bodhisattva.  Although he supports all means for attaining enlightenment, The Dalai Lama makes a special effort to support the “yoga of single-pointed concentration.”  Apparently this form of yoga is one of the most personally “experiential” in its application.  In the yoga of single-pointed concentration the self arises in the body (asana); there is Meditation on the Nature_0complete awareness in the present moment of the body (holding its suffering or joy) but without distraction and cognitive elaborations (thinking).  With the help of a trusted yoga teacher’s guidance, voice and sometimes corrective touch, there arises a strong calm abiding with self-compassion for what the object of meditative yoga is: the body as the personal home of  emotional suffering.  With this state of being comes equipoise and the “clear light” of experiencing your bodily experience, in the now. There is a self-arising realization in the present moment of the” you” experiencing the body as it passes through life’s joy, suffering and neutrality.

For more information refer to The 14th Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso), Khonton Peljor Lhundrup, and Jose Ignacio Cabezon (2011). Meditation on the Nature of Mind. Boston: Wisdom Publications, pp. 120-126.

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: Body Meditation, Featured, Meditation, Meditation Activities, Mindful Movement, MIndfulness, Walking Meditation Tagged With: BODY MEDITATION, DR ANTHONY QUINTILIANI, MEDITATION PRACTICES, MINDFUL HAPPINESS, MINDFUL MOVEMENT, WALKING MEDITATION

February 11, 2015 By Admin

Mindful Loving Practices in Significant Relationships

Mindful Loving Can Improve Relationships

MindfuLove-MindfulHappiness

The 14th Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso), Pema Chodron, David Richo and many others have provided us with helpful advice about improving the quality of our significant relationships.  The Dalai Lama in various writings reminds us that to have true compassion for others – including those we love – we must first have self-compassion.  We cannot know true compassion for others if we do not have compassion for ourself.  Open-heartedness in kindness and caring begins within us.  Once we have it and can feel it, then we can provide it to others.   In the end we are reducing our own suffering as well as the suffering of others.

Pema Chodron, in A Beginner’s Guide to Meditation,  reminds us that we can experience true transformation only after we practice honoring ourselves as the sources of innate compassion and insight.  Bodhichitta (open, soft, warm and kind heartedness) is necessary for social wisdom and personal transformation to occur.  We must begin with ourselves.  The various approaches to compassion, generosity, loving kindness, and sharing – they all begin within.

David Richo’s book, How to be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving, also notes that it all begins within us.  He quotes Milton’s Paradise Lost: “A paradise within” is the starting point.  According to Richo, it all begins with mindful attention.  Paying caring attention to the person you are in relationship with is highly important for improving the quality of that relationship.  Be present, listen, observe, and be part of mutually-supportive interactions.  Having skills in mindful attention is a must.  Mindful acceptance is another required characteristic for successful relationships.  Accepting the other person – all parts of them – sometimes may even require radical acceptance (see Tara Brach’s work).  Mindful appreciation and gratitude for the other person and their caring actions are part of the formula for healthy, loving relationships. Let us not forget the importance of mindful affection – respectful, mutual holding and touching.  Mindful affection, perhaps more than any other mindfulness-based practice, may be the single most powerful connective aspect in loving relationships.  Deep, caring, mutual affectionate interactions are required.  Mindful allowing is also important – the quality in a relationship that allows space and time for the other person to be who they are.  It is clear that specific mindful actions improve the quality of significant relationships, and that these mindful interactions are mutual in nature.

mindfulhappiness_acceptance-of-othersThere are other powerful components in loving relationships.  Support for each person’s self-esteem and self-respect is absolutely necessary.  The quality of early attachment relationships will play a highly significant role in the quality of current relationships.  Trust, feeling safe, being supportive, and experiencing love all improve our relationships.  Likewise, emotional self-regulation and the ability to let go of ego-based and habitual control mechanisms become more and more important as our relationship grows closer and deeper.  Insight into our own narcissistic desires and self-hating extremes (if existing) will be necessary to overcome archaic emotional entanglements.  We must change these conditions of the self.  We all suffer, and we all can experience happiness.  Regular couples meditation and loving kindness and compassion practices will be helpful.  There are enemies of healthy relationships: ego, fear, over-attachment, self-centered desire, clinging, over-controlling, and entitlement – all work against loving relationships.  Do good! Be kind! Allow yourselves to become ONE with it all.  Since love may be the ultimate possibility of possibilities (as Richo notes), true mutual selflessness may also be part of this process.

For more information refer to Richo, D. (2012). How to be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving. Boston: Shambhala Publications.

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: ANTHONY QUINTILIANI, Featured, Mindful Loving, MIndfulness Tagged With: DR ANTHONY QUINTILIANI, MINDFUL HAPPINESS, MINDFUL LOVING

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