attention Archives | Ahimsa Meditation

Let’s talk about attention today, shall we? Our main question is the importance to train attention. We will discuss how to do it by means of mindfulness meditation.

Attention crisis

Have you noticed that many of the job openings advertise the necessity to be good at multitasking? It has been going on for years and many of us think that it is a skill worth developing. It cannot be far from the truth – multitasking is harmful to our brain and it results in attention deficit disorder.

On top of that, we constantly feel that we lack the time and when we finally get our few hours of ‘me time’, we may fixate on doing things that actually do not matter so much to us. This ‘busyness’ and constant pre-occupation negatively affect our ability to focus and sustain attention.

Something opposite to a development happens afterwards. We are not able to work productively, it becomes more difficult to get things done, and what’s more, we stop taking pleasure from what we are doing.

Untrained attention becomes a cause of many modern diseases

We stop paying attention to our physical health, what we’re eating and how we are consuming food. As a result, we are getting sicker.

We are not attentive to our mental health and we let stress rule our world. As a result, our anxiety levels are rising.

We do not pay attention to our relationships. As a result, partnerships break up and our world is as single as ever.

We all could be more attentive to our inner values and meaning of our lives. We could live happier simply knowing we are creating a better life for all.

Finally, we could definitely pay attention to wider society and all sentient beings – our world needs better environmental protection and we should care much better for animal welfare.

The very concept of attention

Attention re-establishes and strengthens the connection. Connection leads to greater regulation, which leads to a state of dynamic order. It is a signature of ease, of well-being, of health (as opposed to disease). For this to take place, attention has to be nourished and maintained by intention.

Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) is a serious dis-regulation in the process of attention. We can also see more often people developing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Learning how to train and refine our ability to pay attention and to sustain attention may be a lifeline back to what is most meaningful in our lives (taken from Jon Kabat-Zinn “Meditation is not what you think”).

Another great work on attention was carried out by Alan Wallace PhD, who wrote a book called ‘The Attention Revolution’. He said: ‘Investigation into the nature of the mind is meditation and truly effective meditation is impossible without focused attention. The untrained mind oscillates between agitation and dullness, between restlessness and boredom. When we train attention, it has a profound impact on the character and ethical behaviour. Purification of the mind requires training in 3 things: ethics, attention and contemplative insight’.

Meditation to train attention

We can see that attention and meditation go hand in hand. If you’ve tried our concentration meditation on breathing instructions, it was very difficult to sustain attention whilst counting your breaths. Yet it trains your mind and with time it re-learns how to pay attention. Attention allows us to develop meditation practice too. After we are comfortable with meditation practice for beginners, we can start developing vipassana meditation (insight meditation), which may bring us contemplative insights indeed. You can use elements of insight meditation to help with anxiety, depression and PTSD (you can find our tailored meditation programs on the Courses page).

On a physical level, studies have also confirmed that amygdala shows dampened activity after just 30 hours of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction practice. It can be as substantial as 50% down from baseline. It means that lessening of the brain’s stress reactions will eventually result in an improved ability to regulate attention (taken from “The Science of Meditation” by Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson).

A complex system of attention and our ego

Our health, both physical, mental and emotional, is quite a complex system.

What happens when we start paying close attention to something or someone is that our own sense of self just vanishes. No fixation on it anymore. This letting go of your ego is very beneficial for your mental health.

This state of awareness, when we are able to pay attention, help us to cultivate curiosity, reflection, honesty and open-mindedness in our life views.

We at Ahimsa Meditation are convinced that this interconnectedness of mental health and meditation benefits, plant-based nutrition and nonviolence serve us a lot of good when we are attentive to ourselves, but also to our relationships and all sentient beings. This ability to pay attention can energize our ethical action, so we are inclined to act for the benefit of all interconnected lives.

Start developing and training your attention with our meditation for beginners

We invite everyone to start your meditation practice and gradually train attention and cultivate your mind. Meditation for kids is another gentle exercise every parent can add to their child routine. Increased attention will make everyone’s life more colourful, full of more harmonious relationships and joy.

Meditation is a training process in training the mind to concentrate and direct thoughts.

Someone uses meditation as a means to better know themselves and their surroundings. For others, meditation is a method to reduce stress and learn to be happy. Meditation offers countless different benefits to your body, mind and spirit. The rest that you get during meditation is much deeper than the rest during the deepest sleep. The deeper you relax, the more dynamic your activity becomes.

Physical benefits of meditation

Learning meditation and mindfulness techniques and regularly practicing it assists our kids ’education and supports their efforts. Students can boost their mental working capacity and they would be able to prepare for the exams more effectively.

Meditation effects on the brain

Meditation tunes brain waves to the alpha rhythm that heals. The mind becomes fresh, refined and in excellent condition.

If you use it on regular practice, meditation benefits for the brain will be as:

your anxiety and anxiety are reduced
increased emotional stability
improving creativity
the state of joy prevails
intuitive abilities develop
you gain clarity and peace of mind
problems lose their significance even before they enter your life

Meditation sharpens the mind by focusing on and expanding it through relaxation. Meditation helps you realize that the state of happiness is determined precisely by your inner mood, your position.

Benefits of daily meditation for cerebral hemispheres

One of the important effects of meditation is the balanced functioning of both cerebral hemispheres. Meditation has a great advantage over other types of practices in that with their help you can balance the work of the left and right hemispheres – this will add order to your life.

Usually, the activity of one of the hemispheres predominates. So, for more analytically oriented people, the left hemisphere dominates, which is responsible for logical thinking, verbal processes, and for those who are called artistic natures, the right hemisphere prevails. It is capable of intuitive perception of the outside world, and therefore it is associated, first of all, with creative processes, such as drawing, playing instruments, writing. Classes in energy and spiritual practices also belong to the right-hemisphere, because they are associated with the development of imagination, visualization ability, and other similar abilities.

Mindfulness meditation benefits for emotional background

Reducing stress is the most common reason people try to meditate. Usually, mental and physical stress causes an increase in the level of the hormone cortisol. This leads to sleep disturbance, depression and anxiety, high blood pressure, fatigue, and clouded thinking.

Chronic stress leads to inflammatory diseases. A study of mindfulness meditation found that regular practice of meditation reduces stress and eliminates the inflammatory processes it causes.

A large drop in cortisol under stress seems to kick in with continuous practice, so it’s easier to handle life’s upsets.

Benefits of daily meditation for the body

Meditation brings changes on a physical level – each cell of your body is filled with prana (vital energy). When the level of prana in the body increases, this leads to an increase in joy, calmness, and enthusiasm.

Physical effects of meditation on the body:

lowers high blood pressure
reduces the level of lactate (lactic acid) in the blood, eliminating anxiety attacks
reduces pain associated with stress, such as headache (tensional), ulcer, insomnia, muscle, and joint pain
increases the production of serotonin, which is responsible for good mood and social behavior
strengthens the immune system
increases energy level, because you get access to an internal energy source

Benefits of morning meditation in sleeping

It is known that meditation helps to regulate sleep and after you begin to meditate, you can get enough sleep in less time. Meditation provides at least short-term improvements, even for beginner meditators. For long practitioners who spend considerable time in meditation, the need for sleep is greatly reduced when compared with people from the same demographic group who do not meditate.

Studies of the effects of meditation on the human body

Rick Hanson PhD is confident that mindfulness goes very far by changing how your brain operates. He quotes the following in his book “Just one thing”:

“Studies have shown that regular practices of mindfulness:

Thicken cortical layers in regions of the brain that control attention (Lazard et al, 2005)
Add neural connections in the insula, a part of the brain that supports both self-awareness and empathy for the emotions of others (ibid)
Increase the relative activation of the left prefrontal cortex, which helps control and reduce negative emotions (Davidson 2004)
Strengthen your immune system (Davidson et al, 2003)
Reduce the impact on pain and accelerate post-surgical recovery (Kabat-Zinn 2003; Kabat-Zinn, Lipworth Burney 1985”

Here is a huge list of benefits quoted in a wonderful book “The Science of Meditation” by Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson:

The first rigorous studies of how meditation affects attention were done by Amishi Jha et al., “Mindfulness Training Modifies Subsystems of attention” in Cognitive, affective and behavioral neuroscience. 7:2 (2007)”
After 8 weeks of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program – better focus and attention. The program consists of mindfulness of breath, body sensations scan, attentive yoga and moment-to-moment awareness of thoughts and feelings. It’s a daily attention practice.
Mindfulness also improves working memory: students up scores by more than 30% (Michael Mrazek et al., “Mindfulness Training Improves working memory capacity and GRE performance while reducing mind wandering” Psychological Science 24:5 (2013): 776-81)
Just 3 x 10 minutes of meditations improve cognitive control. Mindfulness also improves working memory: students up scores by more than 30% (ibid)
Better impulse inhibition went along with a self-reported uptick in emotional wellbeing. Cliff Saron’s study shows meditation improves the ability to inhibit impulse as stated by Bajinder K. Sahdra et al., “Enhanced response inhibition during intensive meditation predicts improvements in self-reported adaptive socioemotional functioning” Emotion 11:2 (2011): 299-312”. The study suggested 10 h of mindfulness over 2 week period.
The brain’s default mode activates when we are doing nothing that demands mental effort -> we are constructing ‘self’. Mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation quiet the default mode circuit. It means that self-focused thoughts and feelings that arise in the mind have much less “grab” and decreasing ability to hijack attention.
Mindfulness practice lessens inflammation day to day (not just during meditation). Benefits show up after just 4 weeks of mindfulness practice (~30hrs) as well as loving-kindness as quoted by E. Walsh “Brief Mindfulness Training Reduces Salivary, IL-6, and TNF-α in young women with depressive symptomatology” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 84:10 (2016) and T.W. Pace et al., “Effect of Compassion Meditation on Neuroendocrine, Innate Immune and Behavioural Responses to Psychological Stress” Psychoneuroimmunology 34 (2009): 87-98)
A large drop in cortisol under stress seems to kick in with continuous practice, so it’s easier to handle life’s upsets.
Unemployed job seekers showed reduced destructive self-talk that floods us with thoughts of hopelessness and depression -> how we relate to our gloomy self-talk has a direct impact on our health.
Meditation helps with high blood pressure. Just 14 minutes of meditation practice in a group who suffered from kidney disease, cardiac or hypertension lowered the metabolic patterns that lead to these diseases. It was stated by Jeanie Park et al., “Mindfulness in African-American Males with Chronic Kidney Disease”, American Journal of Physiology 307:1 (July 1, 2014)
Meditators have shown the “down-regulation” of inflammatory genes. Such drop, if sustained, might help combat diseases with onset marked by chronic low-grade inflammation. These include cardio disorders, arthritis, diabetes, and cancer.
Loneliness spurs high levels of pro-inflammatory genes. MBSR can not only lower these levels but also lessen the feeling of being lonely, as quoted by J.D. Creswell et al., “Mindfulness-based stress reduction training reduces loneliness and pro-inflammatory gene expression in older adults: a small randomized control trial” Brain, Behaviour, and Immunity 26 (2012).
Mindfulness associated with increased telomerase activity, in the work of N.S. Schutte and J.M. Malouff “A meta-analytic review of the effects of mindfulness meditation on telomerase activity” Psychoneuroendocrinology 42 (2014).

Start your meditation practice today with our simple instructions on concentration meditation (on breathing) or develop your regular meditation practice with our Insight Meditation (vipassana) instructions. Please get back in touch if you want to suggest a piece of research that we’ve missed or you have any questions.

Tag: attention

Why It Is Important to Train Attention With Meditation