How Meditation Affects Us All
January 25th, 2008 by Kishore
An attendee at the “Neuroscience of Meditation” event recently published an article on Divine Caroline detailing her experience with meditation. The article also details her experience at the DtaS event. Personally, I found the article deeply touching…I encourage everyone to check it out.
Here’s a brief excerpt:
After a break, I explained to Goldin that I had experienced the same results. I told him that my boyfriend, who had practiced mindfulness meditation for almost four years and had initially benefited, ultimately had a hard time with meditation in the end. I told Goldin that I was a writer searching for answers, and that my boyfriend had taken his own life last January, and so I wondered if mindfulness meditation was really for everyone.
He spoke about skillfulness in a meditation practice, and how we needed to have the awareness to ask ourselves, “Do I have the cast iron mind space, or the ability to hold the experiences that come up when I do deeper meditation practice?” Ultimately, his answer was the one I had been searching for all along.
Later, the woman sitting next to me handed me a folded piece of paper and said to me, “This isn’t from me; it’s from another women who just left.” On the front it read, “To a writer who will write a book I will read.” I opened the note from this mystery woman and read, “I came tonight thinking I would take my life. I won’t now because of you. Thank you.” I gasped. Once again, I became reminded of how we were all interconnected. My quest for truth had taken my breath away.
Takeaway
It is amazing the impact we have on each other, especially when we share our passions, our vulnerabilities, our humanity. In many ways, that’s all I’m trying to do with this science cafe.
More Info
Paper on Suicide Prevention using Mindfullness
This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Neuroscience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.