Can Mindfulness Really Rewire the Brain?
The burgeoning field of mindfulness, neuroscience and psychotherapy just never gets old to me. I am on a panel with Ron Siegel, PsyD, author of The Mindfulness Solution
The series includes Dan Siegel, Rick Hanson, Tara Brach, Sara Lazar and Ron Siegel on the current state of affairs of mindfulness and neuroscience. The topics included the most current neuroscience research, how we can use it with trauma, chronic pain, depression, shame and even its potential benefits for aging.
The actual science that’s continuing to come out about mindfulness and its neurological benefits is incredibly motivating.
Did you know that mindfulness practice is showing that we can grow the area of our brain that’s responsible for learning and memory (the hippocampus)? So there’ll be less of the, “Honey, did you remember where I put my keys?”
What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of the term “Mindful Recovery?”
A couple weeks ago I highlighted a therapist in Los Angeles named Stan Friedman who had a story of how he broke free from the auto-pilot of negative thinking and into a space of choice and possibility. I want to open this up as an opportunity for people to send me stories of mindfulness that can show the rest of us how it has had a practical impact on a particular event or their lives.
We spend a lot of our attention day in and day out, knowingly and unknowingly trying to be somewhere else than where we are. You may have had this thought before, but still the same process continues. It’s as if our mind is in the business of constantly trying to evade life as it is.
Sometimes you run across a story that provides a great teaching. 
Every day we walk outside our door to go to work, the post office, the grocery store or wherever, our mind is already ahead of itself. In many of the mindfulness-based classes I teach we start with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s raisin exercise where we pretend we’ve never seen this raisin before and proceed to bring all our five senses to it. Inevitably people come out saying they noticed so much more about the raisin than they ever knew. Many say they enjoyed it so much more and found it satisfying.
Part of the process of healing from our various mental and physical afflictions is learning how to do a 180 degree shift from self-avoidance to self-inquiry. Self-inquiry is a simple process, but at times not easy.
We’ve all heard the adage that “It is what it is,” telling us that whatever is happening is simply the reality of the current experience. But I like to add on another piece saying, “It is what it is, while it is.” 
In my life, as in many peoples’, my in-basket is never empty. A story is created in my mind that there is so much “to do” that “I don’t have time” for the less important tasks. I have clients that I see along with a number of projects that I engage with when I’m not seeing clients. This morning I found that same story about not having time invading my mind, creating tension in my shoulders and making me irritable.
