Sanctuary—Jack Kornfield
Sanctuary—Jack Kornfield Free Essay
A sanctuary is something sacred. To find something sacred in a world full of hatred, racism and other evils in the world is hard. A sanctuary is central to Buddhist practice which is meant to mean creating a place where a heart is not aggrieved by hatred. A place where there is no hatred or fear or ignorance, stepping out of the ground full of poison and confusion. This allows one to create a temple or a sacred ground. All people require a sanctuary as the world is hard for everyone. This is a place where one is reconnected with themselves. Going back to the time before one was born and trying to discover oneself. One may look at the body and see that they have aged though they do not feel as if they have aged. Meditation reminds people to step out of stress and helps in their returning to the free world. There are two dimensions to people’s beings that are the universal and the personal truth. When one was born, they came with a thing of value which they have to fulfill. One has to agree with the soul to allow them to get satisfaction and happiness in life. A sanctuary provides a place to reconnect what people know and are compassionate about. Finding a sanctuary entails finding freedom within oneself, the freedom with joy, liberty to love in the middle of hardships. Greta meditation has to have great weeping because the soul needs that to fulfill its purpose and bring something beautiful in life. Meditation allows one to bound to one’s fears and steps out of the body of fear rather than fleeing from one’s troubles. In finding sanctuary, people need each other to help each other to find their desired freedoms.
Judson Brewer, MD Ph.D. Past and Future Meet Present: The Center for Mindfulness’ Research Priorities
Many people are going through stress which affects their health. There are various methods of treating depression which include mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and maintenance antidepressant treatment. Both methods have been seen to have similar effectiveness, with none being taken to be more superior to the other. They have been seen to be associated with long-lasting positive results about relapse or reoccurrence, residual depressive symptoms, and life quality. When people talk about themselves is rewarding and the body produces nucleus accumbens is activated and which may be used to test how stress is perpetuated. Negative and positive reinforcement directly affect a person’s system. These include eating, smoking, and sleeping among others. Habit formation and reinforcement help in shaping a person’s identity and image. Mobile technology may be used to help people get trained in how to stop bad habits such as smoking. Applied mindfulness RAIN which stands for recognizing, accepting or allowing, investigating, and noting may also be used in helping people to overcome bad habits. Recognizing enables one to know the nature of a certain habit such as a craving. Accept helps them in seeing if they are resisting the experience. Investigation enables them to know what is happening to their bodies right then. The note helps people in labeling or mentally noting the sensations of the body from time to time. Meditation has been proved to help in reducing stress levels. It produces active feedback to the brain. Relaxing helps people in the process of meditation and getting over stressful conditions. When taught about corporate mindfulness, people can achieve stress reduction. Living positively and loving oneself is key to a healthy life.
Cognitive Neuroscience of Mindfulness Meditation
There are different types of meditation which include concentration and analectic-linguistic reasoning and emptiness. There have been clinical interventions that have entailed incorporating Buddhist meditation. They include among others, mindfulness-based stress reduction which helps people deal with their emotional and physical pains. Other treatments include the prevention of relapses in depression. Mindful-based stress reduction includes formal meditation practice and informal meditation practice. The formal one involves attention shifting, compassion, and breath-focused practices. The informal practice involves meaningful pauses which help in building the muscle of attention. Yoga has also been acknowledged to be effective in the reduction of stress reactivity, agony, depressing symptoms, and apprehension. Mindfulness is, however, not composed of distraction, avoidance, and subdual of emotional experience or behavior. It is finding ways to deal with one’s fears and life’s difficulties, rather than avoiding them. Attention distraction and attention focus are some of the ways through which people may avoid having negative emotional beliefs. Mental patterns may be integrated to help people with various disorders. There are various forms of self-processing which include narrative self and experimental self. The narrative self encompasses rumination, past-future orientation, and fixed self-concept. The experimental self entails focusing on the present moment, reducing stress, anxiety, and the continuous change of self-experiences. Meditation is hence associated with neural changes. This is about attention regulation of emotions, shifting from conceptual to experiential self, and the neural synchrony of the systems of the brain. The brain is capable of developing psychological mechanisms of attention, emotion regulation, and self-view. Fear and other social situations affect reactivity to negative self-belief. People hence have to learn to control their social situations such as fear and anxiety to avoid sending a negative message to the brain and their health in general. Choosing healthy habits and practices such as meditation and yoga helps relax the body and shift it to concentrate on positive energies.
Hardwiring happiness: Dr. Rick Hanson at TEDxMarin 2013
It is possible to turn experiences into resilience. People have normal needs to feel loved and a lack of it leads to negative views and feelings. Ignoring these feelings makes people feel lonely and inadequate. Changing these feelings leads to positive feelings and thoughts. The inner energies that people want are built from the brain structure and positive experiences. For example, for one to have more feelings of confidence, they have to experience accomplishments. To get the experiences to the brain, one has to overcome the brain’s negativity bias. The negativity bias creates a weakness in efforts to grow or heal. People should learn to take in the good and have good experiences to ensure that memory becomes a feeling. Staying with such feelings will aid in their absorption. The steps for taking in the good include having a good experience. The experience must be enriched to assist its growth in the brain. A good experience should also be absorbed and one should also link the positive feelings with the negative ones. This will help in healing oneself. All persons go through good times. Enjoying and living them helps them in internalizing them and making them form part of their major memories. Positive memories keep people going though they are hard to be maintained. Good should not be taken lightly. Every good thing should be used to feel one’s brain to prevent negative memories and energies from taking up the brain and the memories. It is possible to link the negative memories with the positive ones though one should not be carried away into falling deep into the negative experiences. Creating good memories is key to living a happy life full of positive energy
Heroin Facing the Dragon
As long as the body is not clean of drugs, the mind can never be free. People go through difficult times in life which make them enter into drugs and hurt themselves. Being in such situations makes them have negative emotions of rather dying than dealing with their experiences. Addicts have been welcome to the monasteries which through their programs of self-discoveries, Buddhist practices, and monastic disciplines help them recover. Getting clean comes with hard decisions such as leaving spouses who are also drug addicted. Physical and mental suffering has to be endured to get healed. Detoxing may involve days of taking the medicine offered by the monastery. The medicine can withdraw poison from the body and blood. The medicine is painful if not withdrawn from the body. Withdrawal pain is reduced by taking the monastery’s medicine. Addiction is a reaction to something and meditation helps the minds of the addicts to get strengthened against addiction. It helps them to get control of their lives, get their minds off the drugs, and to relax. The sufferings have to be faced for the body to get over the bad habit that has been instilled in it. Withdrawal is one of them in which the body suffers. It has to be taught how to survive without the poison that it has gotten used to receiving. Concentrating on the positive side of the detoxing process is helpful to the addicts in dealing with their withdrawal and other types of suffering. Individual reflection is also very helpful in the healing process. Positive thoughts are also important in helping the addicts get through their detoxification process. Eventually getting back to society is one of those thoughts.