A 6-month study with crossover at 3 months was designed to evaluate the possible beneficial effects of transcendental meditation upon bronchial asthma. 21 patients kept daily diaries of symptoms and medications and answered questionnaires at the end of the study and 6 months later. Other measurements included physician evaluation, pulmonary function testing, and galvanic skin resistance. The...
Volumes have been written speculating how therapy expands the lives of clients. Far less is understood about the impact of doing clinical work on the therapist's own life. In the process of the therapeutic journey, not only do clients contact buried grief, but therapists too, inevitably revisit their own buried darkness, offering them ongoing opportunities for growth and renewal.
The purpose of this article is to describe the rationale and protocol for a pilot study in women with breast cancer that integrates the two complementary therapies of mindfulness and exercise. A sample of 30 women diagnosed with breast cancer within the previous 12 months who have completed initial treatment for their disease will be recruited from oncology physicians' offices. The pilot will...
Theory suggests that mindful individuals exhibit enhanced attentional processing (e.g., attentional control) and that they maintain a detached perspective to problematic stimuli. For smokers, smoking and affective stimuli are problematic stimuli when they try to quit. In this cross-sectional study, smokers (n = 158) completed 3 modified Stroop tasks (to assess attentional control), 3 Implicit...
In Brief Diabetes poses a major life stress that requires considerable physical, emotional, and psychological accommodation and coping. Mind-body therapies have drawn significant interest for their potential to assist in managing stress and adaptation to chronic illness. This review highlights the literature and research on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction to improve the health and well-being...
Explore2009John D Agee, Sharon Danoff-Burg, Christoffer A. Grant
This study sought to compare a five-week mindfulness meditation (MM) course to a five-week course that taught progressive muscle relaxation (PMR). Forty-three adults from the community were randomly assigned to either MM (n = 19) or PMR (n = 24) courses after responding to flyers and other advertisements for a free stress management course. Mindfulness meditation participants practiced...
Mindfulness is a trained or dispositional state of "being" that has been linked to positive mental and physical health effects. Although preliminary findings on cortical activation have shown mindfulness to be associated with increased frontal activation and reduced limbic activity, very little is known regarding the influence of mindfulness on autonomic nervous system activity. The present...
A growing body of research indicates that mindfulness-based therapies may be useful for treating substance abuse. However, the incorporation of mindfulness into substance abuse treatment is limited by a lack of basic research in this area. For example, instruments designed to measure mindfulness vary widely in content and validity and the fundamental relationships among mindfulness, alcohol...
The present article describes data from pilot studies with the Swedish versions of the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) and the Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills (KIMS). The MAAS and two of the KIMS scales, Act with Awareness and Accept without Judgment, were found to correlate in the predicted direction with measures of well-being and emotional distress. The KIMS scales Observe...
Ecospirituality provides a framework for exploring the spiritual dimension of person and environment and the dynamic interplay between this sacred dyad and human health. The aim of this phenomenological study was to explore and describe the experience of environmental meditation by using a new, spirituality-based meditation intervention that focused on ecospirituality with patients with...