Kelly Noonan Gores – Grow Mindfulness

Cultivating Kindness through Meditation

In a recent meditation podcast, Diana Winston discussed Meditation and Kindness. She maintained that kindness is “embedded in meditation” because to meditate we have to be able to do so “non-judgmentally”. Even when our mind wanders, which is a natural human characteristic, we can return to our focus without beating up on ourselves. We can acknowledge that in this era of disruptive advertising and the incessant pull of “weapons of mass distraction”, we are going to become “lost in thought” at times and lose our focus. Our concerns and worries about the past or future will also intrude. However, to be kind to ourselves and achieve the refuge inherent in meditation practice we have to avoid engaging in “negative self-stories” such as, “I am hopeless at meditation”, “I will never master the art of meditating” or “I’m bad at everything I do”.

Meditation as kindness to our self

The practice of meditation is itself an act of kindness towards our self. When we meditate, we open a rich store of benefits, not the least of these is the increasing capacity to handle our difficult emotions and our destructive thoughts. Meditation builds our “awareness muscle” and strengthens our capacity to pay attention. It can serve to enrich our relationships by building our ability to engage in “deep listening”. Kelly Noonan Gores, in her book, Heal: Discover the Unlimited Potential and Awaken the Powerful Healer Within, stresses the healing effects of meditation, especially meditation practices involving mantras, positive imagining, gratitude and forgiveness. Mindfulness practices can help carers engage in effective self-care in the face of all the demands on their time, energy, and emotions.

Meditation as kindness to others

While there are specific loving-kindness meditations designed to offer kindness to others, the very practice of meditation brings benefits to others because of our improved awareness of our emotions, thoughts and actions and their impact; increased emotional self-regulation; and enhanced capacity for listening, empathy and compassionate action.

Guided meditation on kindness

During the podcast, Diana offers a guided meditation on kindness that extends beyond self-kindness to kindness towards others. She begins with encouraging a couple of deep breaths to release accumulated stress and bodily tension. As she describes the meditation process, she adopts a trauma-sensitive mindfulness approach by offering a choice of anchors such as the breath, sounds, and bodily sensations, to enable us to focus our attention. Diana suggests that if very strong emotions or pervasive thoughts intrude on our meditation practice, we can temporarily turn our attention to them, explore their origins and significance and then return to our anchor.

Reflection

There are so many benefits to be gained from meditation, not the least of these being kindness towards our self and others and the capacity to heal ourselves. There are many forms of meditation – we have only to explore what approach is best for our self and this may vary over time. As we grow in mindfulness through regular meditation practice, we will realise the multiple benefits of meditation and this will be self-reinforcing. However, we need kindness and persistence, particularly in the early stages, where we can be discouraged by our “conscious incompetence”.

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Image by Kirill Lyadvinsky from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

The Benefits of Mindfulness Meditation

In an interview podcast with Bob O’Haver, Gloria Kamler, mindfulness meditation teacher and stress-relief expert, discussed her reasons for meditating and how her practice has evolved over more than 30 years. She indicated that in her first 10 years of meditation practice, she used to repeat mantras over and over for two and half hours each day. This proved not only to be unsustainable as she began working with clients, but she also found that she did not experience effective transfer to her daily life of the peace and calmness she experienced during meditation. It was then that Gloria turned to mindfulness meditation and the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, the developer of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). She now offers training in MBSR and meditation.

She also indicated that her reasons for meditating have evolved from seeking peace and calmness (at the time of the Vietnam War) to achieving emotional regulation, living her life more consciously and developing kindness towards herself and others. She realised that, in working as a therapist with people with chronic pain, she needed to achieve kindness towards herself (despite her frailties and fragility) and others and develop the capacity to accept what is. Gloria suggests that we start each meditation practice session with the question, “Why am I meditating?” – this process strengthens our focus, raises our awareness of what we are actually doing and clarifies our purpose.

Benefits of mindfulness meditation

In a recent guided meditation podcast as a member of the MARC faculty, Gloria discussed what she experienced as the benefits of mindfulness meditation. She explained that her concept of meditation was the “training of attention” to be able to see more clearly what is happening in her life, to develop a different perspective and to be more settled and contented when dealing with the waves and vicissitudes of life.

Gloria maintained that mindfulness meditation developed our brains so that we were no longer fully captured by our habituated fight/flight/freeze response driven by our amygdala. She argues that for a majority of time we are working on “auto-pilot”, not being aware of what is going on inside us or in our immediate environment. When faced with a challenging situation we can revert to responding the way we always responded – with silence, anger, frustration, resentment, envy, aggression, or inaction. Mindfulness meditation enables us to develop choices and to become more skilful in navigating the ups and downs of life. In speaking of developing flexibility, freedom and choice, Gloria quotes Albert Einstein on how to create new ways of behaving, “The only way to change a habit is to do something different.”

Gloria found one of the benefits of mindfulness meditation that “totally surprised” her, was the tendency to be “much kinder and compassionate”. She found that this benefit was stimulated through a growing awareness of her connectedness to others and nature. She discovered that we are “naturally wired to be kind”. However, this capacity is often latent because we become “wired to the amygdala” that takes over – acting as our “Commander-in-Chief” determining what we perceive and how we think and feel, leading to our habituated responses. Gloria found that, through mindfulness meditation, she did not take her life experiences so personally, was able to “witness her own fragility”, act more skilfully and consciously and take compassionate action.

Skills developed through mindfulness meditation

Gloria suggests that there are three basic skills that we practice in mindfulness meditation:

Concentration – bringing our attention back to our desired focus, whether that be our breath, sounds, bodily sensations, or other anchor. In this way we reclaim our attention and build our “awareness muscle”.
Sensory and emotional clarity – being very aware of what we are sensing and our emotional responses to our perceptions. Associated with this, is developing the space between stimulus and response, and realizing that we have choice and freedom in how we respond – leading to emotional regulation.
Equanimity – allowing ourselves to be with what is, rather than resisting it. Gloria suggests that it is natural to resist, to hold tightly to things as they have been and resist what is new and challenging.

Self-Healing through mindfulness meditation

Kelly Noonan Gores in her book, Heal: Discover Your Unlimited Potential and Awaken the Powerful Healer Within, discusses the futility of the Disease of Resistance and the need to understand its message. She argues that the way forward and the means to break the hold of our tendency to resist is to “learn the language of the body”. Gloria suggests that technology can separate us from our reality and our bodies. By becoming grounded through mindfulness meditation, we can overcome self-sabotage and learn to work with our innate healing power and wisdom. In another meditation podcast, Gloria offers a guided meditation on “body and breath”.

In the meditation podcast that is the focus of this post, Gloria spends some time instructing us on how to become grounded, especially through our feet. She suggests, for example, that we concentrate on the bodily sensation in our feet – whether it is tingling or numbness, the sensation of socks on our skin or the feeling of something solid beneath us. When we become grounded, we no longer feel out of control or constantly buffeted by the turbulence of life. Mindfulness meditation becomes our refuge.

Reflection

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation, we can live our lives more fully, show compassion towards ourselves and others and experience joy, beauty and healing. We can become less controlled by our emotions and habituated responses and more open and creative.

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Image by Manfred Antranias Zimmer from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Self-Healing and the Healing Power of Nature

In a previous post I discussed Amy Scher’s book, How to Heal Yourself from Depression When No One Else Can, where the focus is on the use of energy techniques for self-healing. In this post, I want to explore further the concept of self-healing and the power of visual media and nature to empower people to explore the many dimensions of self-healing.

This exploration will take us to Louie Schwartzberg’s podcast interview with the creators of the Heal Documentary – Kelly Noonan Gores (Director and Executive Producer) and Adam Schomer (Producer). Interestingly, both Kelly and Adam have been practising yoga and meditation for many years. Each of them brings to the interview lives rich with insight and experience.

Kelly is the author of the book, Heal: Discover your unlimited potential and awaken the powerful healer within, on which the documentary is based. She has worked as an actress, director, producer, and writer and established Elevative Entertainment, an independent production company designed to raise awareness, inspire, and empower people to enrich their lives and that of others they interact with. A recent interview with Kelly conducted by Brianne Hogan gives some insight into her passion for self-healing and her own wellness routine.

Adam is an intrepid explorer of human capacity and nature’s richness. He produced the documentary, The Road to Dharma – a Docuseries recounting his participation in a group undertaking a motorcycle exploration of the Himalayas in their search for freedom from fear and self-limiting beliefs. Adam is a producer and director of documentaries, including the award-winning The Highest Pass (2012).

Self-healing and healing through nature

Fundamental to the Heal book and documentary is the concept of self-healing – the belief that your body can heal itself. Our body maintains our human functioning through its autonomous systems such as breathing, digestion and circulation, all without our direct intervention. In Louie’s podcast interview, Kelly and Adam strongly advocate that we explore the terrain of self-healing and empower ourselves to enrich our lives by taking back control over our health and well-being.

Kelly and Adam stressed the need to overcome fear which leads to dis-ease and to become co-creators of our own lives and wellness. They agreed that the “emotional inflammation” surrounding the global COVID-19 pandemic was disabling people and that we have to find a way to overcome habituated ways of responding and seek out ways to restore our energy and power. They suggest that obsession with the news and social media is having a negative effect on people’s health as is “nature deficit disorder” resulting from a loss of connection with nature and its healing power.

All three participants in the podcast interview highlighted the mind-body connection and maintained that our “mindframe” (worldview) determines our perspective on our life experiences and the “waves” (challenges and disturbances) we encounter in daily life. Both Kelly and Adam see visual media as a way to enable people to experience emotion, challenge their mindframe, realise mind healing, and engage in more healthful behaviours. Kelly suggested that adverse life events such as illness serve as a “wake-up call” and a way of nudging us towards becoming the best we can be and empowered to pursue our life purpose. She drew on the work of Bruce Lupton to reinforce the disabling effects of our negative beliefs.

Kelly stressed the role of nature as “a healing modality”. She reinforced the value of nature in “earthing” (becoming grounded) and the healing power of “forest bathing” (lowers blood pressure and activates the parasympathetic nervous system). Louie expressed the view that nature imagery too is a healing modality and his view has been supported by the numerous positive health benefits identified by people who have watched his film, Fantastic Fungi. He mentioned that, based on the research supporting the health benefits of visceral nature imagery, some hospitals are employing this as a healing modality for illnesses such as alcohol addiction.

Reflection

Louie’s interview podcast with Kelly and Adam provided more exposure for their incredible commitment to promoting self-healing and their passion for, and expertise in, consciousness-raising documentary films. They collectively stressed that as we grow in mindfulness and awareness through meditation and absorption in nature, we can empower ourselves to heal our own bodies and minds and develop genuine wellness and ease.

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Image by Nikolaus Bader from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.