Brain & mind
What happens in your mind changes your brain, both temporarily and permanently; neurons that fire together, link together. And what happens in your brain changes your mind, because mind and brain form a single, integrated system. Dr. R Davidson
Let´s start from the beginig... How do the brain and mind work?
When your mind changes, your brain changes too. As psychologist Donald Hebb puts it, when neurons fire together, they "wire" together: mental activity actually creates new neural structures. So even a fleeting thought can leave lasting marks on the brain. For example, London taxi drivers, whose jobs require them to remember many twisting streets, develop a larger hippocampus—a key brain region for visual-spatial memories—because that part has an extra workload.
As you become a happier person, the left frontal region of your brain becomes more active (R.Davidson 2004).
What flows through your mind sculpts your brain. So you can use your mind to change your brain for the better, which will benefit your whole being and every person whose life you come into contact with.
Much like the microscope revolutionized biology, in recent decades new research tools, such as magnetic resonance imaging, have brought extraordinary progress to our scientific understanding of the mind and brain.
As a result, we now have many more ways to be happier and more effective in our daily lives.
What is Neuroplasticity?
The term neuroplasticity is used to describe the the quality of the brain to change that occur in response to any experience.
Neuroplasticity shows us that the brain is constantly modifiable and changeable. We must be more responsible for the structure of our brain. Neuroplasticity shows us how the state of mind changes the structure of the brain and neurons, and this changes the state of life. -DR. Richard Davidson-
When the framework of neuroplasticity is applied to meditation, we suggest that the mental training of meditation is fundamentally no different than other forms of skill acquisition that can induce plastic changes in the brain.
Mindfulness Meditation
MINDFULNESS means the skillful use of attention to both your inner and outer world. Since your brain learns primarily from what you pay attention to, mindfulness is the threshold for absorbing good experiences and making them part of you.
MEDITATION at its core is the training, or the directing the focus of attention in a deliberate way. It is the human capacity to open to perspectives larger than the ordinary consciousness. And there are a hundred forms of them.
MINDFULNESS
Mindfulness is a nonjudgmental, caring attention, a spacious and kind awareness of the present. It includes an appropriate response to the present situation. And this is really important because people take mindfulness to be passive. And it's not. It actually orients us. It brings us clearly into the present.
Mindfulness, is all-helpful. It is liberating. And it's helpful in your work, with your kids, in relation to your body and your mind.
Traditionally, mindfulness is taught as four different dimensions:
1- Mindfulness of the body, which includes the senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and especially of the physical body.
2- Mindfulness of feelings that determine a lot of what happens in human experience.
3- Mindfulness of mind, which is primarily mindfulness of the thoughts, beliefs, images, and structures that we use to understand the world.
4- Mindfulness of the process of life and relationships, to see the way that life operates. This is the mindfulness that shifts from the content of experience to the invitation of freedom.
A synonym for mindfulness that we'll be using is loving attention or loving awareness- an attention that's focused on present experience and an ability to observe and be fully present for body, for mind, for spirit, or for the vastness of life. And in that presence, to begin to know, understand, or connect and interact in a more real way.
MEDITATION
Meditation Is a form of mental training, not just a relaxation technique, that can be understood through scientific principles.
The best meditation is the one each person practices. The most important is PRACTICE. The benefits of meditation come from practice, and that's where the difference lies.
What we are doing and what we will be training in and practicing with loving awareness, is the meditation.
The mindfulness is at the core of all of these practices that takes our life itself as the focus and brings a presence to it.
Four key constituents of well-being that are affected by meditation: resilience, positive outlook, attention, and generosity.
Contemplative neuroscience
There has been a growing interest in contemplative traditions, which have spent thousands of years investigating the mind, and therefore the brain.
Although contemplative may sound exotic, you have already been a contemplative if you have ever meditated, prayed, or simply gazed at the stars with a sense of wonder.
Concentration is a requirement for any meditative practice, and concentration is in turn cultivated with any practice.
Concentration means the ability and the capacity of the mind and psyche to attend to quite fully, to focus, and in its deepest level to become unified with a particular experience.There are many forms of concentration. And all of them require a repetition where you do it a 100 and 1,000 and 10,000 times until you become so focused on that experience that all the thoughts and difficulties and other parts of your identity begin to drop away and you become one with that experience. In doing so, the mind becomes not only focused, but quiet, peaceful, directed, and often quite ecstatic.
It takes work for most of us to do it over and over again. This is a real training.