![]() The movement gives the mind something more to do than just focus on the breath, which is so elusive. You get to use your body as an anchor for your attention. That’s the beautiful thing about a mindful movement practice. To have an anchor to hold our attention and to gently pull ourselves back is essential. An untrained mind is very much like that. Often, the metaphor used is the untrained puppy dog that’s not on a leash, that will go anywhere the new smell is. I’m wondering if you can tell me about why it’s important to have that kind of anchor.ĬB: I think anchors are essential, especially when you first start this practice, because our minds are untrained. Any movement can be mindful.ĪWC: One thing that I’ve noticed is the importance of anchoring our attention in both seated mindfulness practice and mindful movement. It just adds movement as an anchor for your attention. The mindful movement practice doesn’t change the practice all that much. A seated formal mindfulness practice would be, for the most part, paying attention to your body sensations, breath, thoughts, and emotions. I had some questions about this and went to Cara Bradley, a mind-body expert and mindful movement instructor for her advice on times when it feels like there’s a mental barrier to seated, still meditation.Īva Whitney-Coulter: To start off, not all movement is mindful, so what makes mindful movement different?Ĭara Bradley: What makes movement mindful is when we place all of our attention on movement and the body and what’s happening in the body as you move the sensations that are arising, even the thoughts. As I’ve practiced yoga more, it’s become easier for my mind to settle and seated meditation now feels accessible to me when it didn’t before. Mindful movement has felt more manageable to me because there is more to focus on. “It opens it up to a broader audience.In the past, I’ve struggled with seated meditation because when I remove distractions, it feels like an opportunity for anxious thoughts to take over. “This trial was intended for the majority of older adults who face sleep problems but do not have a clinical diagnosis of insomnia,” he says. The findings are still preliminary, and while they’re not yet robust enough to make clinical recommendations, Black says he envisions mindfulness as a simple, inexpensive intervention for people who don’t have serious sleep problems, like those enrolled in the study. Mindfulness might also simply make people think they’re getting higher quality sleep. It allows people be present without further interpretation of their symptoms.”Īnother possibility is that by curbing mood disturbances, meditation can lessen anxiety and let people relax more. “Through mindfulness practice, people learn how to observe thoughts without having to elaborate. “Before going to bed, people who can’t sleep worry a lot, and they start ruminating about not being able to sleep,” says Black. The researchers speculate that mindfulness meditation improves nervous system and cognitive system processes that relate to arousal and stress. The two groups had similar results for anxiety and stress. ![]() They also had improvement in areas like depression, insomnia symptoms and fatigue. At the end of the sessions, the researchers measured everyone’s sleep quality and found that the people learning mindfulness scored higher in better sleep than the other group.
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