Post by Admin on May 18, 2016 10:14:47 GMT -5
Was listening to Linda Graham's lecture on neuroscience and looked her up on google. Found an excellent paper she wrote (summarizing her presentation)in 2012:
Starts like this:
THE NEUROSCIENCE OF INTEGRATING MINDFULNESS AND EMPATHY TO
STRENGTHEN RESILIENCE
Developing the 5 C’s of Coping: Calm, Compassion, Clarity, Connections to Resources, and
Competence.
Linda Graham, MFT
FACES Conference, Seattle, WA
October 19, 2012
All the world is full of suffering; it is also full of overcoming. – Helen Keller
FOUR PATHS TO OVERCOME SUFFERING
Our interest in the integration of mindfulness and empathy is to alleviate suffering, to move into
healing and growth, into resilience and well-being.
Resilience is the capacity to cope well with life’s inevitable challenges and disasters, to meet the
stressors and storms of life with adaptive and skillful responses. Capacities of resilience - to
rebound from a setback, bounce back from trauma, triumph over adversity – are innate in the
brain and develop in interactions with other resilient brains.
Neuroscience - the 20 year old technology that can “peek inside the black box” and learn how
the brain functions in real time - helps explain how our innate capacities for resilience develop in
the first place, even how the brain develops and integrates the structures needed to encode our
responses in our neural circuitry. The discovery of neuroplasticity – the lifelong capacity of the
brain to rewire its circuits and even rebuild itself - gives us great hope that we can rewire lessthan-optimal
coping strategies when we need to.
Mindfulness and Empathy do rewire our habitual responses to outer stressors and strengthen the
functioning of the brain to do so. Modern brain science shows mindfulness and empathy to be
two of the most powerful agents of brain change known to humankind.
The 2,500 year old Buddhist wisdom tradition offers an 8-fold path to alleviate suffering.
Mindfulness is a key component of that path. Steady mindfulness practice cultivates an
awareness and acceptance of experience, unfolding moment by moment, that allows us to pause,
step back, reflect, shift perspectives, discern options, and choose wise resilient courses of action.
Science shows that even 8 weeks of mindfulness training creates measurable changes in the
structures of the brain we use for focused attention, interoception (knowing what’s happening in
our bodies), integration of the processing of the two hemispheres of the higher brain, and that it
helps us access a mental play space of neural flexibility and receptivity that allows our brain to
more easily rewire.
Western psychology, for at least 150 years, has offered practices to alleviate suffering of mind
and heart and psyche and realize our full human potential. Within that tradition, I see empathy
as an entire resonance circuit in the brain that supports resonance – picking up the “vibe” ...
Read whole article HERE.
Starts like this:
THE NEUROSCIENCE OF INTEGRATING MINDFULNESS AND EMPATHY TO
STRENGTHEN RESILIENCE
Developing the 5 C’s of Coping: Calm, Compassion, Clarity, Connections to Resources, and
Competence.
Linda Graham, MFT
FACES Conference, Seattle, WA
October 19, 2012
All the world is full of suffering; it is also full of overcoming. – Helen Keller
FOUR PATHS TO OVERCOME SUFFERING
Our interest in the integration of mindfulness and empathy is to alleviate suffering, to move into
healing and growth, into resilience and well-being.
Resilience is the capacity to cope well with life’s inevitable challenges and disasters, to meet the
stressors and storms of life with adaptive and skillful responses. Capacities of resilience - to
rebound from a setback, bounce back from trauma, triumph over adversity – are innate in the
brain and develop in interactions with other resilient brains.
Neuroscience - the 20 year old technology that can “peek inside the black box” and learn how
the brain functions in real time - helps explain how our innate capacities for resilience develop in
the first place, even how the brain develops and integrates the structures needed to encode our
responses in our neural circuitry. The discovery of neuroplasticity – the lifelong capacity of the
brain to rewire its circuits and even rebuild itself - gives us great hope that we can rewire lessthan-optimal
coping strategies when we need to.
Mindfulness and Empathy do rewire our habitual responses to outer stressors and strengthen the
functioning of the brain to do so. Modern brain science shows mindfulness and empathy to be
two of the most powerful agents of brain change known to humankind.
The 2,500 year old Buddhist wisdom tradition offers an 8-fold path to alleviate suffering.
Mindfulness is a key component of that path. Steady mindfulness practice cultivates an
awareness and acceptance of experience, unfolding moment by moment, that allows us to pause,
step back, reflect, shift perspectives, discern options, and choose wise resilient courses of action.
Science shows that even 8 weeks of mindfulness training creates measurable changes in the
structures of the brain we use for focused attention, interoception (knowing what’s happening in
our bodies), integration of the processing of the two hemispheres of the higher brain, and that it
helps us access a mental play space of neural flexibility and receptivity that allows our brain to
more easily rewire.
Western psychology, for at least 150 years, has offered practices to alleviate suffering of mind
and heart and psyche and realize our full human potential. Within that tradition, I see empathy
as an entire resonance circuit in the brain that supports resonance – picking up the “vibe” ...
Read whole article HERE.