Can Meditation Really Slow Aging?

Big claims are made for mindfulness, and one of the biggest is that it can slow down the aging process.

Counting Breaths During Meditation

People who teach mindfulness meditation often recommend counting breaths to keep the attention focused on the breath.  Methods vary little, all some variation of counting to ten.  Some recommend counting inhales and exhales, others count only exhales.  Most count each breath from one to ten and then start over again at one.  Another method has the meditator count exhales to ten, and then count exhales down from nine to zero.  Repeat.  But you get the point.  Focus on the breath by counting each breath.  If you lose your count, or realize you’ve counted past ten because your mind has wandered, just return to one and start over.

But sometimes the counting becomes so automatic, so routine, that I can count from one to ten and repeat, barely noticing the count, my mind wandering all the while.  Little work with focused attention is being done.  To counter this I learned a very effective counting method from James Austin at a workshop on Zen and the Brain.

A Contemplation on Contemplation

I've been posting some stuff from a book I'm working on.  Here's more:

Years ago I sat as a student in an eight-week MBSR class.  There was a woman sitting next to me who was disturbed about the class.  During the second class she spoke up.  She said she was an executive at a high stress firm, and she liked the pace.  Type A-plus, she wanted to move fast and was afraid meditation would make her lose a step. She didn’t want to be all calm and laid back and warm feeling.  She wanted to clear her head and be creative.  She wondered if she shouldn’t be in the class.  The teacher missed a tremendous teaching moment.  Meditation could help her realize who she was, not change her into a person she didn’t want to be.  The beauty of the practice is that it offers almost exactly what anyone wants to get out of it.  For crying out loud, this same MBSR program trained military snipers.  But the teacher told her she was wrong.  She should be all calm and laid back and hippie-like.  She would be so much happier.  The woman left at break and never came back.

I swore then that if I ever taught it would be for people like her.

Twenty Breaths to Less Stress

Here's a simple meditation technique that anyone can fit into their schedule.  It’s called the Twenty Breaths Practice.  It only takes a few minutes, can be performed almost anywhere, and can yield great stress relief.

International Bipolar Foundation Interview

I have a webinar on meditation and mental illness on the International Bipolar Foundation website.  View it here:

https://ibpf.org/practicing-mental-illness-guide-meditation

Can Meditation be a Bad Experience?

There can be some bumps on the road to the positive effects of mindfulness.  People with repetitive negative thinking should be cautious when considering formal, seated meditation practices.  But a healthy experience is still possible, and there are many varieties of mindfulness practices from which to choose.

Please read my article on this on my blog "Getting Older With Bipolar."  You can find it here.

Stay Open

Here's the last of the posts from the introduction to the book I'm working on:

The fifth and final ground rule was the hardest for me to adopt:  Stay open to new ideas; don’t think you know it all.

I’ve always been very curious, so the new ideas part wasn’t too difficult.  In fact, sometimes my experience with mental illness made me very vulnerable to influences I may not have chosen on a better day.  While ramping up into a manic episode I’d adopt some new persona or fall into an interest or belief and go way overboard as I expressed my new lifestyle.  This has happened with things as varied as objectivism, liberation theology, and fly-fishing.  I’d go full into something to the exclusion of all else, only to drop it entirely as I settled down and recovered.