Jennifer Weiss, Osteopathic Physician

Barren trees_ reaching branches

Mindfulness Practice

Mindfulness Practice

Choosing to use mindfulness in the form of formal meditation or in each moment of our day can improve our healing and create longer lasting well being.

Mindfulness meditation has gained in popularity over recent years but it comes from a very old tradition, and is found in many different cultures. Recent publications and use of electronic media have made it more accessible to those of us that don’t live in mountain caves or monasteries. Pioneers in the field have studied the impact of mindfulness meditation on certain health conditions both physical and mental. Current resources are abundant and take the form of retreat centers open to the public, books, videos, and audio recordings that make the possibility of meditation open to almost anyone.

My favorite advice about meditation comes from a day of sitting with Jack Kornfield. He said, and I’m paraphrasing, stopping your thoughts is no more possible than stopping your skin from sweating. It is your skin’s job to sweat and it is your mind’s job to think. The key to mindfulness mediation is not in controlling your mind and creating complete emptiness. The key is in the practice of non-attachment to your thoughts.

When I am sitting in meditation focusing on my breathing and start thinking about what I will cook for dinner, I can notice “I’m thinking about dinner and not my breath” and choose to return my mind back to my breath. Or I can think “yes, dinner, and in order to cook dinner I have to go to the store, and I wonder if there is enough gas left in the car or if I have to stop for gas and the last time I went to that market they only had half of what I needed, which market would be more efficient? and I wonder if my husband will be home in time for dinner because if he’s not going to be I’d have more time for meditating and if I could go to just one store and not get gas that would give me more time too…” and suddenly all my meditation time is gone because I attached to the story of planning, instead of just noticing, “there goes my mind thinking and planning again, let me check in with my breath.”

Meditating is a practice. Most of us choose this practice because we have a goal – more control over our thoughts, our worry, our sense of equanimity and peace. Most of us become determined with our practice because of suffering. It is a gentle kindness that the tool of meditation is there for us whenever we choose it and for whatever reason.

But one more caution – any tool we use to fix ourselves must should be examined for the underlying messaging we are giving ourselves that we are not ok right now. This inherent paradox lies in all of our efforts to improve our lives and our selves. But meditation offers us the right here, right now, truth of being ok, right here, right now… just noticing how remarkable it is that I don’t have to decide to make my heart pump and my lungs inhale, to just be here.

Here are some great tools and teachers:

Mindfulness Meditation and Tools for Decreasing Stress

  • Jon Kabat Zinn has written many great books and has a series of fabulous meditation CD’s.  The best book for living with pain or chronic illness is called “Full Catastrophe Living.”  The Meditation CD’s offer a range of 10minutes to 45 minutes of guided meditation.  It is accessible and soothing entry into the world of meditation.
  • Jack Kornfield has also written many great books on meditation.  He is one of the founders of Spirit Rock a Vipassana Meditation center in Marin, CA.  Two of my favorite books are “A Path with Heart,” and ” After the Ecstasy the Laundry.”
  • Emotional Brain Training is a behavior modification system designed to allow you to move beyond the stress triggers which cause you to choose escape rather than living in the moment.  It is somewhat complex but offers excellent tools for moving out of stress and into joy.

Everything in Osteopathy is true
—James Jealous

The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease
—Thomas Edison

Harmony only dwells where obstructions do not exist
—A.T. Still

The breath of life in the cerebrospinal fluid Tide is the fundamental principal in the primary respiratory mechanism. ~ W.G Sutherland

Along in 1874, after years of independent thinking, there came to Dr. Still the concept of Osteopathy ~ Dr. Asa Willard in the Cranial Bowl

What is harmony but Health?  It takes harmony of every nerve, vein and artery in every part of the body. ~ A.T. Still

All diseases are mere effects, the cause being a partial or complete failure of the nerves to properly conduct the fluids of life. ~ A.T. Still

The hearing of spirit is not limited… the whole being listens.  There is a direct grasp of what is right before you, that can never be heard with the ear, or understood with the mind. ~ Thomas Merton

The fundamental principle advocated in cranial technique, viz: allowing the physiological function within to manifest its unerring potency, rather than the application of blind force from without. William G. Sutherland, D.O.

Here you lay aside the long words, and use your mind in deep and silent earnestness; drink deep from the eternal fountain of reason, penetrate the forests of that law whose beauties are life and death. ~ A.T. Still

Do not try to force anything within the cranial mechanism. ~A.T. Still

It is as if the whole body, functioning as a unit, is responding to a force similar to that moving the tides of the ocean. ~ Rollin Becker

Spirit in osteopathy turns out to be scientific, practical, and very useful in a medical medel that Osteopathic Physicianscan readily abide by. ~ From interface; Mechanisms of Spirit in Osteopathy by A.T. Still

And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air. ~ William Wordsworth

It is the stillness of the Tide, not the stormy waves that bounce upon the shore that is the potency, the power. ~ W.G Sutherland

Normal doesn’t simply mean a readjustment of the bones to normal position. ~ A.T. Stills

Freedom is experienced in the infinite number of pauses.  ~Rollo May

It is the stillness of the tide not the stormy waves that bounce upon the shore that is the potency, the power. ~ W.G. Sutherland

I believe that all the remedies necessary to health are within the human body. ~ A.T. Stills

Man should study and use the drugs compounded in his own body. ~A.T. Stills

The greatest mistake in the treatment of disease is that there are physicians for the body and physicians for the soul, although the two cannot be separated. ~ Plato

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