by Kathie England

Mindfulness

Why is mindfulness capturing the headlines in the media this week?

TIME Magazine’s cover story for the February 3 issue is titled “The Art of Being Mindful.”

This article explores how mindfulness meditation is helping individuals cope with anxiety and depression as well as helping anyone learn to give attention fully to whatever they’re doing. It discusses how “powering down the internal urge to keep in constant touch with the outside world is not easy,” but there is a price we pay for this need to be constantly connected.

Researchers continue to report that multitasking leads to lower overall productivity in both students and workers. They seem to have less ability to filter out irrelevant information and they make more mistakes.

Research also shows that meditation and mindfulness training can lower cortisol level and blood pressure, increase our immune response, and impact the structure of the brain.

This article outlines five steps to mindfulness meditation and offers three mindful tips. These three tips are to wear a watch (it helps you avoid picking up your cell phone to check the time and get distracted), keep phones out of your bed (be fully awake before you look at any device), and get into nature.

Another  fascinating article from the Huffington Post on January 28 is titled “Davos: Mindfulness, Hotspots, and Sleepwalkers” is definitely worth reading. Here is the link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/otto-scharmer/davos-mindfulness-hotspot_b_4671062.html

(Davos, Switzerland is where the World Economic Forum recently met.) The author suggests that mindfulness is approaching a tipping point and has the potential to help us deal with the ecological, social, and spiritual divides of our time.