Charbonneau — The year of mindfulness: 2014
COLUMN — The popularity of mindfulness continued to climb in 2014. It’s not the same phenomenon that Transcendental Meditation (TM) was in the 1960s.
I learned both meditation techniques and still practice them occasionally. I studied mindfulness while living in London in 1967. While returning from work one day on the tube (subway), I noticed an ad for meditation at the London School of Economics. Teachers of the program didn’t call it mindfulness but looking back, I now realize that’s what it was.
When I returned to Calgary the following year, the Beatles and TM were all the rage, so I took the leap and received my personal mantra.
The applications of meditation are quite different in 2014 than they were in 1967 when hippies were looking for escape from the corporate establishment.
Meditators in 2014 are still looking for escape but now it’s from the incursion into our daily lives from cell phones and technology. Mindfulness can help calm the cacophony of noise that leaves us agitated and unfocused.
So, just what is mindfulness? A Buddhist monk and former cellular biologist describes it this way: “In mindfulness, the meditator remains attentive, moment by moment, to any experience without focusing on anything specific,” says Matthieu Ricard in Scientific American.
The beauty of meditation is that no specific equipment or gear is required, only a comfortable posture that is not too tense or lax. While mindfulness finds its origins in Buddhism, and other religions practice forms of meditation, mindfulness is not inherently religious.
Researchers see growth in brain cells of expert meditators in parts of the prefrontal cortex called the Brodmann areas. Fifteen years of research shows that meditation produces significant changes in both the function and structure of the brains of experienced practitioners. But even novices can benefit.
Kids can benefit. The stress of peer pressure, raging hormones, the pressure to succeed in school and sports can take a toll on young minds. Tralee Pearce, health reporter for the Globe and Mail, explains: “Research already shows that mindfulness therapy has huge potential for kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and anxiety.”
Toronto teen Caitlin Saracevic says the short meditative breaks help curb her ADHD, which makes her feel “constantly on the go mentally, with a thousand thoughts going on at once.”
Even the corporate establishment, the enemy of hippies, is buying into mindfulness as a way of improving employee performance. Executives met in the heart of hippiedom, San Francisco, in February this year to bliss out on mindfulness.
The leaders of Google, Facebook and Instagram gathered in a hotel conference room to swap meditation techniques, pausing to “get present” and laying out the benefits of a compassionate workspace. The conference was organized by Wisdom 2.0, a conference where meditation gurus and technology leaders trade practices on living mindfully.
The Founder of Wisdom 2.0, Soren Gordhamer, is confident about the corporate applications of mindfulness: “Wisdom 2.0 addresses the great challenge of our age: to not only live connected to one another through technology, but to do so in ways that are beneficial to our own well-being, effective in our work, and useful to the world.”
David Charbonneau is a retired TRU electronics instructor who hosts a blog at http://www.eyeviewkamloops.wordpress.com.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
You mention that you continue to do TM occasionally, but the benefits of TM, like the benefits of mindfulness, accumulate over time…
In the case of TM, all the stress-related benefits end up creating a situation in the brain where a pure, never judgemental, always mindful, sense-of-self emerges. Ironically, the EEG signature of this state becomes less and less likely to occur the longer one practices mindfulness or concentrative practices. This study discusses the psychological and physiological research on people who report the existence of this state for at least one year:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.12316/full
You mention the impact mindfulness has on schools, but while mindfulness advocates celebrate small improvements in test-scores, schools that have everyone learn TM go from being “worst” to “among the best” on virtually every measure, and in the case of the first public school in USA to embrace TM this way, the principal is named the 2008 Principal of the Year by the National Association of Secondary School Principals for changes he says were due to TM:
http://blog.sfusd.edu/2012/09/a-quiet-transformation.html
The evidence being gathered around the world of TM’s effects on students isn’t lost on [non-USA] national governments. The government of Brazil has announced they want to have 48,000 people trained as TM teachers–one for each public school in Brazil–so that all 45 million public school kids can learn TM for free. Peru is going slower: they want existing teachers and guidance counselors trained as TM teachers in order to conduct their own long-term studies on 250,000 school kids after they TM.
The David Lynch Foundation works with existing governmental agencies, charities, military and veterans organizations, etc., and collects donations to hire TM teachers to teach TM for free: http://www.davidlynchfoundation.org
Based on the upcoming research done at the governmental level outside the USA and how the governments who conducted it are responding, the David Lynch Foundation projects that there will be enough governmental workers trained as TM teachers to allow 10 million people to learn TM for free within 3 years.
Whatever benefits have been found for mindfulness are nothing to what researchers are finding happens when the most stressed populations learn TM and mindfulness courses often last 8 weeks, while TM is taught over 4 days -try going to a refugee camp in Africa and conducting an 8 week seminar:
http://www.davidlynchfoundation.org/africa.html
read the results of those two studies and imagine you’re the head of an international organization dedicated to trying to handle the 100,000,000 Africans thought to have PTSD. Now imagine similar findings in schools, prisons, homeless shelters, etc: the more stressed-out the population, the faster and more dramatic the effects from TM.
What would YOU do?
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