Absenger Cancer Education Foundation | ACEF
Helping cancer survivors feel better with yoga, meditation & qigong
Create The Life That YOU Love with MindBodyMed!
Read latest research about mindfulness meditation as an approach to produce biological benefits that may promote health and control cancer.
Meditation is the name we give to the practice of training our mind. Credit: useitinfo / Flickr Creative Commons
A calmer mind and greater mental clarity can be yours in just six-weeks of guided meditation practice. Starts June 23 – 7 pm.
Human chromosomes (grey) capped by telomeres (white). Image Credit: U.S. Department of Energy Human Genome Program
Meditation may have profound effects on telomeres, DNA regions at the end of chromosomes, protecting them from deterioration.
Jim Johnson, from Lakeshore Buddhist Sangha, facilitates formal meditation study and practice at ACEF.
Grief and loss in chronic disease remain a hidden problem, but mindfulness exercises can help.
When dealing with chronic disease or cancer, you walk a fine line between the past and a new emerging future.
What role does meditation play in cancer survivorship?
Meditation can help you manage stress, symptoms of chronic illness, and enhance your overall health and well-being.
Now you can practice meditation every Wednesday at 12:30 PM EST with Werner Online. Start a regular mindfulness meditation practice while Werner leads you through a 17-minute Mindfulness Meditation session. Mindfulness meditation practice focuses on the powerful ways in which you can participate in your own health and healing. By learning to quiet your mind and let go of discursive thinking, you can open the door to a healthier, happier life.
Thoughts, feelings, beliefs and attitudes can influence and affect every aspect of biological functioning, and how you care for your body can affect how you think and feel and what you believe.
Mind body medicine gives you many opportunities and can do many things to take control of your own health. You can use mind body medicine practices, some ancient and some recent to shape your own health and overall well-being.
For example, Tang et al. (2010) have shown that IBMT (integrative body–mind training, IBMT), increases anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) activity and improves self-regulation. Tang et al. (2010) go on to say that deficits in activation of the anterior cingulate cortex have been associated with many disorders. For further reading see Fernandez-Duque & Black, 2006; Hong et al., 2009; Posner, 2007; Posner, Rothbart, Sheese, & Tang, 2007 and Segal et al., 2010.
The ability to increase cingulate cortex connectivity through mindfulness meditation practice could provide a means for improving self-regulation and your own health. Greeson (2009) writes that greater mindfulness meditation practice can reduce stress, stress-related medical symptoms, increase positive emotions and increase quality of life. Greeson (2009) goes on to say “studies are beginning to show a relationship between (a) how much people practice meditation, (b) how much more mindful they become, and (c) the positive effects they experience in terms of mental and physical health” (p.10).
In this class, you will engage in mindfulness meditation practice, a mind body medicine modality . Werner will guide you through the mindfulness meditation practice giving you an experiential learning experience.
Through the mastery of mind body techniques, you might experience deeper relaxation, fewer physical symptoms of illness, less pain, less fatigue and more energy, as well as enhanced immune system functioning (Tang et al., 2010). In other words, mindfulness allows you to play an active role in your own health and wellness. You probably will be able to more successfully deal with pain, chronic illness, stress, and anxiety, as well. Over time, you may experience greater self-awareness and more positive perceptions about your life.
To learn how to take control of your own health and wellness through mindfulness meditation practice, register for Werner’s 17-Minute Midweek Meditation now! Its FREE and happening online in Werner’s Learn It Life Classroom.
This class is aimed at beginners and novices to meditation, as well as participants suffering from chronic health conditions and cancer.
See you Wednesday,
Werner
Writing a Paper or Report? Cite This Post As:
APA: Absenger, W. (2013, February 22). Practice Meditation Online for FREE with a Mind-Body Medicine Expert [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://amacf.org/2013/02/practice-meditation-online-for-free-with-a-mind-body-medicine-expert/
References:
Fernandez-Duque, D., & Black, S. E. (2006). Attentional networks in normal aging and Alzheimer’s disease. Neuropsychology, 20(2), 133–143. doi:10.1037/0894-4105.20.2.133
Greeson, J. M. (2009). Mindfulness Research Update: 2008. Complementary Health Practice Review, 14(1), 10–18. doi:10.1177/1533210108329862
Hong, L. E., Gu, H., Yang, Y., Ross, T. J., Salmeron, B. J., Buchholz, B., … Stein, E. A. (2009). Association of Nicotine Addiction and Nicotine’s Actions With Separate Cingulate Cortex Functional Circuits. Archives of General Psychiatry, 66(4), 431. doi:10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2009.2
Posner, M. I. (2007). Educating the human brain (1st ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Posner, M. I., Rothbart, M. K., Sheese, B. E., & Tang, Y. (2007). The anterior cingulate gyrus and the mechanism of self-regulation. Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, 7(4), 391–395.
Segal, D., Haznedar, M. M., Hazlett, E. A., Entis, J. J., Newmark, R. E., Torosjan, Y., … Hof, P. R. (2010). Diffusion tensor anisotropy in the cingulate gyrus in schizophrenia. NeuroImage, 50(2), 357–365. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.12.071
Tang, Y.-Y., Lu, Q., Geng, X., Stein, E. A., Yang, Y., & Posner, M. I. (2010). Short-term meditation induces white matter changes in the anterior cingulate. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(35), 15649–15652. doi:10.1073/pnas.1011043107
This article shows that short-term meditation can affect white matter in the brain. Why would that matter to a cancer patient? One of the premises of mind-body medicine is awareness and self-regulation. Increased ability to self-regulate is associated with improved Quality of Life (QoL) of cancer patients and better management of the biopsychosocial effects associated with a diagnosis of cancer and the side effects associated with cancer treatment.
The Abstract:
The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is part of a network implicated in the development of self-regulation and whose connectivity changes dramatically in development. In previous studies we showed that 3 h of mental training, based on traditional Chinese medicine (integrative body–mind training, IBMT), increases ACC activity and improves self-regulation. However, it is not known whether changes in white matter connectivity can result from small amounts of mental training. We here report that 11 h of IBMT increases fractional anisotropy (FA), an index indicating the integrity and efficiency of white matter in the corona radiata, an important white-matter tract connecting the AC [Read more…]
After my first year in Saybrook’s Mind-Body Medicine Ph.D. program (research track) my mission becomes a little clearer. I am still not quite clear on what my dissertation will be about.
The past year was very exciting. I wrapped up several intensive residential requirements, and participated in the Initial Professional Training Program (PTP) and the Advanced Professional Training Program (ATP) at Dr. Gordon’s (who just happens to be the Dean of College of Mind-Body Medicine) Center for Mind Body Medicine. I also had the opportunity to take the Center’s model of Mind Body Skills Groups into the workplace, where it received rave reviews from my participants.
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