If you’ve ever had a panic attack, or remember a close call when driving on a busy highway, then you’re familiar with the effects of the stress hormone cortisol flooding the body. It’s a horrible feeling! But cortisol isn’t concerned with how you feel. It’s concerned with your survival. Your body is an incredible organism with a brain that functions to protect the body against perceived threats. This could be an oncoming car or a recurrent negative thinking pattern. The primitive part of the brain that scans every moment of your experience for potential threats – the amygdala – has a “hair trigger” and would rather be safe than sorry. So, when the Amygdala gets even a fuzzy sense of a threat —whether “real” or perceived—it instantly activates the autonomic nervous system producing a cascade of stress hormones and a host of physical changes in the body to allow you to either fight off or escape from a predator – commonly referred to as the Fight - Flight response.

This phenomenon is obviously essential for your survival in the face of immediate physical dangers (that near miss on the highway requires immediate evasive action), but it can become a huge problem when the perceived “threat’ is actually chronic stress, which may include automatic reactive and negative thinking patterns that originate within your own mind. The amygdala doesn’t know the difference!

Repeated activation of the Fight-Flight response, even for “threats” that come in the form of thoughts and emotions, like excessive worry, anger, and rumination, means long-term exposure to cortisol. Such exposure has been linked to everything from hypertension, cancer, infertility, high blood sugar, aggression, and more. Excessive cortisol makes the brain more sensitive to pain and exhausts the adrenal glands, which brings a whole host of ailments including insomnia and weight gain. Additionally, cortisol suppresses happy hormones like serotonin, leading to depression.

And it gets worse! Cortisol also effectively turns off the body’s innate repair mechanisms – anything not needed for immediate survival. Think immune system, reproductive system, and digestive system. Cortisol ramps down the functioning of these systems and ramps up those needed to deal with the stressor: especially the cardiovascular and adrenal systems. You can see how long term exposure to cortisol is not a healthy way to live.

How can we rebalance this mind-body system? As Dr. Lissa Rankin points out in her book Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself your body has natural self-repair mechanisms that fight infections, slow aging, and boost immunity. But these mechanisms cannot operate while the nervous system is stuck in “Fight-Flight”. What’s needed are ways to engage and strengthen the body’s parasympathetic nervous system: the part that soothes and calms the amygdala.

There are many simple mind-body practices that activate the soothing parasympathetic nervous system: meditation, yoga, tai chi, qigong, aromatherapy, and physical exercise. To keep yourself in balance, and protected from the damaging effects of cortisol, you must carve out time for self-care, and practice regularly. These practices are protective and healing and have no side effects!

Years ago, before I discovered meditation and yoga, I lived in a chronic state of Fight-Flight and cortisol saturation. I had the chronic pain, weakened immune system, and regular panic attacks to show for it. Now, having practiced and taught meditation for several years, I was recently invited to participate in a university study that examined the cortisol levels of meditation teachers. To my delight, I learned that my levels of cortisol were significantly lower than the average. I have no doubt that my mindfulness meditation practice is responsible for that. Take care of your body-mind. If you don’t, who will?

Mind-Body Practices for Reducing Cortisol

• Mindfulness Meditation
• Restorative Yoga
• Chair Yoga
• Tai Chi
• Qigong

The ability to control impulsive eating during stressful times is a challenge. We all experience typical garden-variety upheaval from time to time. While intellectually we know this is temporary. Life will soon become predictable and comfortable again. But in the meantime, we start observing our own sense of discomfort around the experience of things being “unsettled”.

Eating When You’re Not Hungry

Sasha Loring, a meditation teacher, psychotherapist, and mindful eating expert, is the author of Eating With Fierce Kindness (my all time favorite book on the practice of mindful eating). She identifies three main reasons that drive us to eat, even when we’re not hungry:

1. eating to reward oneself

2. eating to feel pleasure

3. eating to feel relief from discomfort

One thing the practice of mindfulness begins to reveal is that we all have a bundle of reactive habits we turn to when the going gets rough. They may soothe us in the short term (“Aahhh that melt-in-your-mouth chocolate), but over the long-term do us more harm than good.

Mindfulness and Eating

Jean L. Kristeller, PhD , professor of psychology at Indiana State University, and co-founder of The Center for Mindful Eating, explains how the practice of mindfulness builds internal skills that can help us turn off the automatic pilot that drives much of our habitual reactive eating. Kristeller defines “mindfulness” as a cognitive state marked by attentional stability that disengages habitual reactions and allows for inner wisdom to emerge.” Sound good? It is! By strengthening your mindfulness muscle you learn to pause between the event that triggers a compulsion toward non-hunger eating, and the often instantaneous reaction to that trigger (mindLESS eating). This skill that can be strengthened through formal and informal (mini) meditation practices.

Some people have an incorrect understanding of what meditation really is, so let’s dispel some common myths: Meditation is neither a trance state, nor is it primarily a relaxation tool. Rather, meditation is an attentional process that promotes self-regulation. It’s the skill of attention that strengthens our ability to skillfully intervene between stimulus and response. Mindfulness is a state of being awake and alert in the present moment, without judging your experience. It’s the noticing that’s important.

Appetite Awareness

Another skill fortified by mindfulness practice is our capacity for internal awareness – of both physical sensations in the body, and emotions and thoughts in the heart and mind. We can learn (through practice) to notice and pay attention to physical sensations like hunger and fullness, as well as emotions that may be driving us to eat when we’re not hungry. One really helpful tool that I’ve been working with is the Hunger-Fullness Scale. Developed by Linda Craighead, PhD, a researcher and expert on disregulated eating at Emory University, the Hunger-Fullness Scale is a simple and convenient informal practice for gauging your actual physiological appetite, and strengthening your bodily awareness. Research shows that stronger appetite awareness is connected with improvements in eating and weight control. One tool Craighead developed is the “Hunger-Fullness Scale”.

Credit: Linda Craighead, PhD Emory University

When you get into the healthy habit of mindfully connecting with your body throughout the day, your awareness of how hungry or full you actually are becomes more and more clear. The Hunger-Fullness Scale suggests you eat when you are “Mildly Hungry” (i.e. you rate your internal physical sensations of hunger at between a 2.5 to a 3.0), and that you stop eating when you are “Mildly Full” (i.e. you rate your internal sensations of fullness at approximately a 4.5 to a 5.0). Use of the Hunger-Fullness Scale is a mini-mindfulness practice (a “micro practice”) that anyone can do. And the more you practice, the better you get!

Consider using the Hunger-Fullness Scale in conjunction with a Mindful Eating Mini Meditation before each meal and snack. It only takes a few moments and no one need know you’re doing anything. Check out this 3 minute Mindful Eating Mini Meditation video produced by The Mindfulness Clinic in Toronto: www.bit.ly/14mubTY

Looking for a way to quiet your mind that doesn’t involve sitting still and following your breath? Walking meditation may be for you. It is just as beneficial as sitting meditation, with some differences. Obviously you’re walking instead of sitting, but the focus of your attention is also a bit different. Rather than attending to each breath, in walking meditation you gently attend to the experience of each step. When the mind wanders away from the feeling of walking, the practice is to patiently bring it back.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Healthcare, and Society at the University of Massachusetts and the pioneer of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), explains that mindful walking differs from regular walking in that, “you’re not going anywhere.” It’s an opportunity to bring awareness to an aspect of life, like so many others, that has become quite automatic or “mindless.”

Walking meditation shares the same 2,500-year-old tradition as sitting meditation. Ancient texts state the Buddha himself taught that meditation should be practiced in four different “postures” – sitting, standing, walking, and lying down. The idea seems clear - train the mind to abide in the present moment in a variety of contexts, and become “present” for the whole of your life.

Walking meditation is done very slowly in a “lane” in which one walks back and forth. Remember, you’re not going anywhere. Beginners often like to use the phrase “lifting, moving, placing, landing” to help them focus their attention on the four components of each step.

For even more of a beneficial boost, take your walking practice outside. Research from Japan has shown that walks in nature, compared with urban walks, produced a 12.4 percent decrease in the stress hormone cortisol, a seven percent decrease in sympathetic nerve activity (“fight or flight”), a 1.4 percent decrease in blood pressure, and a 5.8 percent decrease in heart rate. Participants had better moods and less anxiety.

The best advice I received when learning to meditate was “Be kind to yourself.” This was challenging, since my mind drifted (a thousand times!) during meditation practice. How could I be kind to this frustrating, unruly, disobedient mind? Through mindfulness practice we become aware of the nearly constant chatter of the mind, observing how it seems to replay certain thought patterns over and over, and seeing how this activity ends up driving much of our day-to-day experience. When we sit down to meditate, with the intention of simply following the rise and fall of our own breath, we see how busy the mind really is. This is totally normal and something most people encounter when they first try to meditate. However, struggling against, or trying to control, the busy mind is futile. Rather, in mindfulness we cultivate an interior environment of patience. Just as we would create an environment of safety and kindness while teaching something new to another, mindfulness asks that you do the same with your own busy mind. But most of us aren’t so kind to ourselves. Why is that?

One of the reasons I began to study and practice mindfulness meditation is that I longed to feel at ease in my own skin. Others seemed to have this quality, and I wondered why it seemed so elusive. I’ve learned that the degree to which we experience this ease depends, in part, on the strength of attachment bonds developed early in life. The strength of these bonds affect the formation of our “internal working model” of “self” in relation to others – who we can trust, and whether we see ourselves as worthy of love. Research shows that people with insecure attachment bonds have less compassion for themselves than those who feel securely attached. In early childhood what we perceive as our reflection in the eyes of others, especially our primary caregivers, becomes a dominant influence on how we see and treat ourselves.

But there is good news! Internal patterns of self-judgment and inner criticism, just like the brain itself, are changeable! We can cultivate inner kindness and compassion for ourselves through the practice of mindfulness. Studies show that people who are able to pay attention to their present moment experience not only have greater emotional balance; they also have a greater ability to respond rather than react to difficult or unpleasant situations. Kristen Neff, PhD, author of Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind notes, “Self-kindness, by definition, means that we stop the constant self-judgment and disparaging internal commentary that most of us have come to see as normal. It requires us to understand our foibles and failures instead of condemning them. It entails clearly seeing the extent to which we harm ourselves through relentless self-criticism, and ending our internal war.”

Mindfulness is a means through which we can notice, be present with, and befriend the inner critic – during our meditation practice and in daily life - for example, when we make a mistake or fail in some way. Mindfulness practice trains us to be aware in the moment when we’re allowing the inner critic to dominate our inner landscape. With mindful self-awareness we have a choice in the moment – we don’t have to automatically believe the inner commentary! We create the conditions for the arising of what’s been called the “sacred pause” - that moment when we can actually stop in the midst of reactivity and adopt a kinder, more understanding view toward ourselves– just like we would do for someone else who was hurting.

Hugging Practice
Pick one routine activity you do every day. For example, brushing your teeth, washing your hair, drinking your morning coffee, or walking from your car to work. Make it your practice to do this activity mindfully for at least one week. Let your senses be wide open as you gently hold your attention on your present moment experience – the buzz of your toothbrush, the sensation of shampoo and warm water against your scalp, or the feel of each foot touching the ground as you walk. When your mind is pulled away from your immediate physical experience – for example, thinking about what you need to do when you get to work – simply note this in a kind and friendly way, and gently bring your attention back to your present moment experience. You’re building your muscle of paying attention to the present – the only moment where change is possible.
Physical touch releases Oxytocin – “the hormone of love and bonding”. Increased levels of Oxytocin boost feelings of trust, calm, safety, generosity, and connectedness and also strengthen the ability to feel warmth and compassion for ourselves. Oxytocin reduces fear and anxiety and can counteract the increased blood pressure and cortisol associated with stress. Self-Compassion expert and author Dr. Kristen Neff recommends this practice when you notice you’re feeling tense, upset, sad, or self-critical: “try giving yourself a warm hug, tenderly stroking your arm or face, or gently rocking your body.” It seems a bit silly at first, but your body doesn’t know that. “What’s important,” she says, “is that you make a clear gesture that conveys feelings of love, care, and tenderness.” If others are around, fold your arms in a non-obvious way, gently squeezing yourself in a comforting manner. You can also imagine hugging yourself if you can’t make the actual physical gesture. Notice how your body feels after receiving the hug. Does it feel warmer, softer, calmer? You’ve just tapped into your body’s Oxytocin system and changed your biochemical experience.

By now you’ve probably heard that mindfulness is good for you. A regular practice in moment-to-moment awareness can make us happier, healthier, and kinder. Recent studies linking mindfulness and women’s sexual response are garnering a lot of attention. (More on this later!) As it turns out, the benefits of mindfulness that improve life in general – increased self-awareness, more self-compassion, less anxiety, and improved attention – also heighten our experience of loving, and being loved. While mindfulness benefits both genders, women experience special benefits when it comes to intimacy. Why? As Dr. Elizabeth Kavaler, a urologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, notes, “the biggest part of sexuality in women is emotional and mental.”

The Physical

Now, about those studies. Brown University researchers measured the effect of mindfulness on sexual arousal. Women who underwent mindfulness training experienced faster and more intense sexual arousal than a control group. The study’s lead author, Gina Silverstein, attributes the difference to increased “interoceptive awareness” - the ability to observe and describe what’s happening inside your body and mind without judging the experiences as “good” or “bad” or trying to change them. By practicing this skill, says Silverstein, we can “turn off the autopilot.”

And there’s more. Brain scans of long term mindfulness meditators reveal structural changes. Specifically, increased folding (“gyrification”) of a part of the brain called the “insula”. A Dartmouth study reported that women with more gyrified insula experience more intense orgasms.

The Mental

If you’ve ever tried to sit quietly and follow the rising and falling of your breath, you quickly learned that the mind soon has other ideas. Namely thinking – about things you needed to do, things you forgot to do, worrying about something that might happen, or regretting something that already happened. Anything but simply feeling the sensations of breathing! This constant mental chatter can prevent a woman from feeling sexual stimuli. Mindfulness training quiets this chatter.

Another aspect of the mind that is troublesome for intimate relationships is our hard wired “Negativity Bias.” An ancient survival mechanism, Nature ensured that negative experiences made a lasting impression on the brain (such as that close call with the hungry tiger!) Forgetting such encounters tended to shorten one’s lifespan! But today’s world is less about physical threats and more about psychological ones – often of our own creation. Our constant mental chatter tends to be negative – our interpretation of an offhand comment, anger at being delayed by traffic or someone’s forgetfulness, rumination about feeling disrespected, or anxiety about health or finances. Unfortunately, the body doesn’t know the difference between actual physical threats and our tendency to dwell on and rehash unpleasant psychological “threats”. It churns out long-lasting stress hormones regardless. Not a recipe for blissful intimacy.

Through mindfulness practice you train your mind to ignore distractions – those arising in our own minds as well as those from the outer environment. Over time (changes happen in a matter of weeks) the mind learns a new way of being – and literally rewires itself! Mindfulness also strengthens your ability to refocus on the present when life’s normal ups and downs occur. With practice, these skills become stronger and stronger. The chattering mind, with its negativity bias, begins to quiet down. We learn to simply “abide” in this moment, which is not nearly as bad as we think. In fact, we find that it’s often quite wonderful! Perhaps not perfect, but wonderful nonetheless.

The Emotional

Mindfulness is about more than presence of mind. It’s also about presence of heart. It shows us our infinite capacity for love and compassion – starting with ourselves. The more we pay attention to our “mental chatter,” the more we learn just how much of it is critical, harsh, and destructive. From this place of awareness, we can befriend and soften that harsh inner critic. We discover that we’re actually complete and whole, with a loving heart that is limitless. Compassion, forgiveness, connection – all are natural outgrowths of this practice of kind, loving attention. And it may just be the best formula for intimacy there is!

I remember when chronic pain and obsessive worry kept me awake night after night. Typically, around 2 am, my mind was scanning the horizon like a lighthouse, searching for something to worry about. When it locked on it wouldn’t let go, mentally approaching the “problem” from every conceivable angle – until the alarm clock went off. Does this sound like you? Are you exhausted day after day due to the inability to sleep? What would life be like if a good nights sleep was something you could count on? How about a life with more energy, better moods, improved concentration, and enhanced health? Sound good?

Restful sleep is a foundation of good physical and emotional health. But many people lie awake nightly, or have difficulty returning to sleep once awakened. Sleep medications can produce unwanted side effects, including dependency. Medications can also lose effectiveness over time. Is there a natural alternative that’s actually good for you, without side effects, and the effectiveness of which increases over time? There is!

Medical researchers are looking closely at mindfulness training due to the substantial benefits it offers for insomnia as well as a host of other health, quality of life, and productivity concerns. Stress is a major cause of insomnia, but pain, anxiety, and depression – all magnified by stress - are also associated with sleeplessness. Researchers are studying why mindfulness training offers such valuable relief for insomnia.

Jeff Greeson, PhD, MS, clinical health psychologist at Duke University explains, “When we don’t know what to do with intrusive and persistent thoughts, the mind and body feel threatened. That signals the ‘fight or flight’ response which starts a cascade of sleep-robbing emotions like agitation and anxiety.” Greeson’s study of 151 sleep deprived adults, mostly women, who received 8 weeks of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) training in mindfulness techniques and gentle yoga, showed significant improvements in sleep quality, sleep disturbances, and less daytime sleepiness. “When people become more mindful they learn to look at life through a new lens. They learn how to accept the presence of thoughts and feelings that may keep them up at night. They begin to understand that they don’t have to react to them. As a result, they experience greater emotional balance and less sleep disturbance.”

Stress is so pervasive today. People worry about the economy, their jobs, bills. “All that worrying, obsessing, and ruminating can increase the risk of illness and disease,” explains Greeson. “When the mind worries, the body responds.” The key, he says, is not to push those thoughts away, but to acknowledge them “That helps people manage their reaction to stress and anxiety and helps them remain calm.”

Researchers at the University of California at San Diego compared mindfulness training with sleep medication in two groups. One received the 8-week MBSR program. The other was prescribed the sleep medication Lunesta™. The MBSR participants significantly reduced the time it took them to fall asleep, increased their total sleep time, reported no adverse events, and scored their satisfaction with treatment as high. Although the patients who received sleep medication obtained similar benefits, their treatment satisfaction scores were not high, most continued using sleeping pills, and several reported adverse events. Because MBSR produces no side effects, and the positive potential benefits of mindfulness extend far beyond sleep, the researchers encouraged people with insomnia, especially those unable or unwilling to use sleep medications, to consider mindfulness training with MBSR.

This year a study by Duke University and Aetna found mindfulness training to significantly improve sleep, stress, pain, and blood pressure. Researchers concluded that mindfulness training reduces stress by teaching people how to significantly shift their attention to the present moment, with a curious and non-judgmental perspective.

If you’re lying awake night after night with a busy or worrying mind, you may already be feeling the effects – from chronic fatigue to more significant health consequences. Imagine a life with more energy, and the feeling of being well-rested and alert! You can learn time-tested practices that will reverse the cycle of sleeplessness. Mindfulness training can improve the quality of your sleep, your health, and your life – no pills, no side effects, no dependency.

Many of the people who come to Integrative Mindfulness for mindfulness training suffer from anxiety, just as I once did. Several years ago, when I was in the midst of a very stressful period in my life, I experienced anxiety attacks on a regular basis. For me, this would be a sudden and uncontrollable surge of stress chemicals throughout my body that brought my day to a complete halt until it passed. I also had chronic insomnia and spent most nights worrying. I knew something was wrong, but I was so caught up in the momentum of my life, and absorbed in my worried thought patterns, that I couldn’t see a solution. Ultimately my health suffered and I became physically ill and depressed. My body insisted that something change.

If you experience anxiety you’re not alone. Anxiety is very common. Chronic anxiety afflicts 15.7 million people in the U.S. each year. One of the best books I’ve come across on this subject, and one which I frequently recommend to my students, is Calming Your Anxious Mind: How Mindfulness and Compassion can Free You From Anxiety, Fear, and Panic by Jeffrey Brantley, MD, founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program at Duke University Center for Integrative Medicine. Dr. Brantley notes that anxiety is a “powerful interaction of biology, cognitive-emotional influences, and stress.”

Anxiety and chronic stress are the result of repeated and long-term activation of the body’s fear system, the “fight or flight” reaction which involves many body systems and is designed to help us survive immediate danger. For example, avoiding a collision while driving. Anxiety develops when the part of the brain responsible for soothing the activated fear system ceases to function effectively. The“fight or flight” reaction is necessary to survive occasional emergencies, but in anxiety the body and mind have learned (or overlearned) the reaction too well, and our natural system for calming the fear reaction have become compromised. “Fight or flight” becomes a long-term way of living.

Here’s the good news – just as the body and mind overlearn, repeat, and sustain the fear reaction, the parts of the mind that naturally calm the fear response can also be trained and strengthened – bringing the mind-body system back into healthy balance. This is where mindfulness is so effective in reversing anxiety.

Chronic pain affects 30 to 40 million U.S. adults, costing an estimated $600 billion a year. But researchers have learned more about the physiology of pain in the past ten years than in the previous thousand. Pain is created by the brain in response to what it thinks is a threat. Contrary to previous thought, there isn’t just one pain center in the brain, there are many, according to Pain Explained, a publication of the Neuro Orthopedic Institute (NOI) of South Australia. “These parts include clusters of nodes used for sensation, movement, emotions, and memory, and they all link up to each other electrically and chemically.” In chronic pain, some of these nodes are hijacked or enslaved by the pain experience. While this is a complex process, one primary feature of chronic pain is hypersensitivity in the body’s alarm system of sensory neurons whose function is to send “danger” messages to the brain, particularly in the presence of inflammation.

Injured body tissue has a fairly specific window of time for healing. However, pain can persist even when the injury has had time to heal. This typically happens because the body’s natural alarm system becomes hyper-vigilant and abnormally sensitive, sending exaggerated “danger” signals. The brain’s faulty interpretation of these signals becomes deeply ingrained and persistent. “This can mean just touching the skin, or a slight temperature change, might cause the body’s sensors to send danger messages to the brain.” The brain incorrectly concludes that a threat remains, and that you need all the protection you can get. It produces pain, which is the body/mind’s normal way of motivating you to “get away” or escape from the “danger”. According to the NOI, brain responses such as movements, thoughts, autonomic and endocrine responses are then based on faulty information about the health of the tissues at the end of the nerve cells. “It’s as though an amplifier on a sound system is turned up.”

Thought Viruses Maintain the Chronic Pain Cycle

Thoughts and beliefs are nerve impulses too, and part of the chronic pain loop. As the NOI explains, “the brain has learned to be very good at protecting you from anything that might be dangerous to your tissues. Anxious and worrisome thoughts are threatening to a brain that is already hyper-vigilant about your survival. Research has identified thought processes – “thought viruses” - powerful enough to maintain a pain state. Some powerful thought viruses include:

I’m in pain so there must be something harmful happening to my body,”

“I’m staying home and not going out until all the pain goes away,” and

“I’m so frightened of my pain and of injuring my back again that I’m not doing anything!”

Meditation Helps Chronic Pain Sufferers Diminish “Thought Viruses”

People who practice mindfulness meditation find pain less unpleasant because their brains anticipate the pain less, according to a 2010 study. Scientists from the University of Manchester discovered that regular meditators show unusual activity during anticipation of pain in part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, a region involved in controlling attention and thought processes when potential threats are perceived. “Meditation trains the brain to be more present-focused and therefore to spend less time anticipating future negative events. This may be why meditation is effective at reducing the recurrence of depression, which makes chronic pain considerably worse,” said the lead researcher. The value of meditation is that it soothes the hypersensitive threat/alarm/danger system at play in chronic pain.

Depressive Thoughts Make Pain Worse

In new study at the University of Oxford, researchers induced a depressed mood in study participants and found this disrupted the neural circuitry that regulates emotion, causing an enhanced experience of pain. Researchers believe that a sad mental state disables our ability to regulate the negative emotion associated with pain. Thus, pain has a greater impact. “Rather than merely being a consequence of having pain, depressed mood may drive pain and cause it to feel worse.” Mindfulness meditation is beneficial in preventing the relapse of depression by strengthening the practitioner’s ability to recognize the physical, cognitive, and emotional effects of depressive thoughts, and to proactively “decenter” from those thoughts.

Communication in the Brain Affects Pain

A 2012 Northwestern University study is the first to show that chronic pain develops the more two sections of the brain – related to emotional and motivational behavior – talk to each other. The more the frontal cortex and nucleus accumbens communicate, the greater the chance a patient will develop chronic pain. “The nucleus accumbens is an important center for teaching the rest of the brain how to evaluate and react . . . . and may use the pain signal to teach the rest of the brain to develop chronic pain,” said the study’s senior author.

With this knowledge of how and why chronic pain develops, and with training in mindfulness meditation, you have tools for influencing patterns of thought and emotion that may be driving your pain. Mindfulness meditation is a complementary practice which can enhance standard medical treatment by your healthcare provider. You can proactively change the vicious cycle of chronic pain.

Mindful eating is as common a practice at many monasteries, meditation retreats, and Zen centers as walking or sitting meditation. Like the more formal mindfulness meditations, mindful eating is a practice of presence, noticing sensations, and observing one’s surroundings. In the monastic setting, practitioners enter dining halls silently, bow to their food to acknowledge the farmers who grew it and the chefs who prepared it, then eat slowly and silently, bringing awareness to each mouthful of food. While we may not have the luxury to eat every meal in silence, we can incorporate some simple mindfulness practices into mealtime and move a more enjoyable relationship with food and more compassionate relationship with ourselves.

Many of us have made it a practice to inhale our breakfast in the car on the way to work or distractedly eat dinner standing up while watching the news. Our attempts at a better relationship with food usually involve strict, unpleasant dieting that feels more like punishment than health. Contrary to dieting, eating mindfully is not about restriction but about listening to our bodies, cultivating awareness of the present moment, and appreciating our meals. For those of us who eat as a stress release or coping mechanism, the practice of mindful eating provides us with the opportunity to face the normally unconscious, uncomfortable feelings that drive us to eat when we do not need or want to eat. We discover that what we are truly hungering for is not food, but a way to satisfy some other kind of hunger: emotional hunger, for example. The reason we are typically unsatisfied after eating and seem to experience endless hunger is that we have not given ourselves the opportunity to fully taste and enjoy our meals, have not made ourselves available to the body’s cues of satisfaction or hunger, and most importantly have not addressed the discomfort that we are compelled to suppress by eating. Instead of ignoring our feelings, punishing our bodies, and squelching the opportunity to enjoy our meals multiple times a day, we can bring awareness and healing to the experience of eating.

By practicing mindful eating, we do not need to binge because we are choosing to consciously address our feelings instead of stuffing them down with food. We no longer need to diet because by fine-tuning our relationship with the body and mind we automatically make healthier choices. Slowing down to fully experience our meals also invites us to become aware of the beauty and richness of the food we eat, where it comes from, and the time and care it takes to grow, harvest, transport, and prepare before it reaches our mouths. We bring awareness to our connectedness to the earth, the plants, animals, and people, and we can abide in our open-heartedness towards all of life, including ourselves.

Simple Mindful Eating Practices to Incorporate Each Day

1. Sit, Breathe, Eat
   As much as possible, get in the habit of sitting down to eat. When you sit, feel the weight of your body on the chair. Check in with yourself: what sensations are happening in the body? Before lifting your fork, take several deep breaths. Notice the feeling of the breath entering and leaving your body. Say a little blessing or grace before beginning your meal; thank the earth and elements, the farmers that grew your food, and yourself for taking the time to nourish your body and spirit.
2. Chew Your Food
   It’s incredible how quickly we can gulp down food after hardly chewing. As difficult as it may be at first, commit to taking one bite at a time putting down your fork in between bites, and fully chewing your food. Doing this will allow you to fully taste and enjoy your food and will also give your body time to cue your brain that it’s time to stop when you are full.
3. Eat Until You are Satisfied
   Even if you do not do this with every meal, as a practice once daily commit to eating only until you feel moderately (or two-thirds) full. What happens when you do this? Notice the feelings that arise when you stop yourself from automatically reaching for another mouthful of food. Observe how your body feels five, twenty, sixty minutes after this practice.

photo credit Andy Newson via FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Are you interested in something you can do for your self to slow the aging process, and enhance the quality and length of your life? Then you’ll be interested in the emerging body of scientific research on stress, aging, and mindfulness, a practice correlated with a protective effect on our cells. By taking up a regular mindfulness practice you can improve your well-being, slow the aging process, and help protect yourself against the most common diseases of aging.

Chromosomes 101
At the heart of this story are our chromosomes – the bundles of DNA in each of our cells - especially the tips, or end caps, of chromosomes called “telomeres”. Telomeres are like the protective ends on shoelaces that keep them from fraying. Telomeres are necessary for a cell to divide in a healthy way. Each time a normal cell divides, the telomeres become shorter and shorter. Ultimately, the cell’s telomeres become so short it can no longer divide. The result is that the cell dies. Historically this shortening of telomeres was thought to be a one-way street: shorter telomeres meant the aging and death of cells, and eventually the living thing made up of these cells.

However, new research concludes that telomere shortening is neither inevitable, nor one-way street. Dr. Elizabeth H. Blackburn of theUniversity of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues, discovered why. In 2009 they received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of Telomerase – a protective enzyme in our cells that actually replenishes and lengthens telomeres. More telomerase means longer telomeres, and thus longer and healthier cell life, and presumably longer life for the organism. As you can imagine, the implication of Blackburn’s discovery for the treatment of age related disease, and the investigation of the aging process, is now growing rapidly.

Stress and Telomere Length
Many common diseases of aging are associated with shorter telomeres: cancer, diabetes, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, weakened immune system, and cardiovascular disease. Research has linked chronic stress to shortened telomere length. Interestingly, pessimism in post-menopausal women shortens telomeres as well. Chronic stress wears down our telomeres and causes our cells, and our bodies, to age and die more rapidly. But what happens to telomere length when we learn to positively change the way we manage stress? Studies now show that reducing stress and increasing positive states of mind, particularly through the practice of mindfulness, promotes telomere maintenance and lengthening.

What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness, as taught in the 8-week program “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction” or “MBSR,” is one of the most extensively studied methods for reducing stress and improving quality of life and overall health. Mindfulness is the skill of paying attention, on purpose, in the moment, without judgment. It’s considered an inherent aspect of human consciousness, and it can be strengthened thr ough a variety of mental training techniques collectively known as mindfulness meditation.

How Does a Mindfulness Practice Result in Longer Telomeres?
The evidence reveals that mindfulness meditation practices are associated with increased levels of telomerase, the enzyme that protects, replenishes, and even lengthens telomeres. Researchers believe this is so because mindfulness promotes the adaptive regulation of emotion and reactivity, and is linked to greater psychological well-being. Mindfulness practice decreases rumination (the pattern of revisiting negative thoughts), while it increases the intensity and frequency of positive and pro-social emotions like empathy, kindness and compassi on for yourself and others.

“We have found that meditation promotes positive psychological changes, and that meditators showing the greatest improvement on various psychological measures had the highest levels of [the chromosome protecting enzyme] Telomerase.”

Clifford Saron, PhD
University of California, Davis
Center for Mind and Brain

Researchers believe that cultivating positive mental states, and decreasing negative moods and thinking, through a regular mindfulness practice, results in a “stress-buffering” benefit for our cells. This positive change boosts our levels of telomerase which replenishes and lengthens telomeres and the life-span of our cells. In this way a mindfulness practice buffers cells against the long-term wear and tear effects of stress, and is thus believed to slow the rate of cellular aging.

References:
Blackburn, E. H. Telomeres and Telomerase: The means to the end.
Nobel Lecture by Elizabeth H. Blackburn, delivered December 7, 2025 at Karolinska Institute, Stockholm (retrieved fromwww.nobelprize.org)

Epel, E. et. al. Can meditation slow rate of cellular aging? Cogniti
ve stress, mindfulness, and telomeres. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2009 August; 1172: 34–53.

Jacobs, T. L. et. al. Intensive meditation training, immune cell telomerase activity, and psychologicalmediators. Psychoneuroendocrinology (2010)