Mindfulness meditation

 The first search on Meditation led me to a research conducted by Harvard and their conclusions on mindfulness. 

Depression is a major problem across the globe and unlike a physical ailment, there is no direct treatment for it, and existing ways don't really work for everyone. There are talk therapies and antidepressants. Some might feel relief after venting out their problems, and realize that they are heard and understood, somehow that helps us feel better about our problems when we realize we are not alone with our own sad secrets. But sometimes the more you focus on them, the worse it could get. In other words, it doesn't work for everyone. 

There's a need for alternative approaches...

Benjamin Shapero, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Psychologist at MGH's Depression Clinical and Research Program, is working on a different approach, mindfulness-based meditation along with Gaelle Desorbes.

The interest and acceptance of the practice has really seen an increase in the past few years. There are experimental evidences as well on the benefits of meditation towards a wide array of physical and mental ailments, although some studies don't seem to have been done with a larger sample size for reliable data. While some do have significant experimental results from a larger sample size. 

Desbordes has personal experience of meditation and its benefits when she started doing it due to stress in academics. She benefitted from the practice greatly and that created an interest for her in the topic and how it works, and what does it actually do. In order for it be a therapy or simply a practice its effects need to be demonstrated scientifically. 

She studies brain activity through Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for people who meditate and its effects over a time period, to study the difference. She works on how meditation helps clinically depressed patients, how quickly it helps them disengage from negative thoughts compared to simply educating a person on depression and training them for muscle relaxation. 

One of her hypothesis on how mindfulness-based cognitive therapy works is that it improves the body awareness in the patients and helps them reduce self-rumination. Its simply replacing negative thoughts with a better alternative and training our brain to keep us focused on those, and with practice our brain develops something similar to a muscle memory, and gets habituated with a healthy practice. Even so much as an 8 week meditation seemed to have a huge impact on the person's brain. Not only this, there is also a lot of other research being conducted at Harvard on the benefits and effect of meditation on the body and mind. 

When it comes to research on mindfulness, there are challenges as well.  How do we define mindfulness? It is now more or less defined as being totally absorbed in the moment, being present. Yet others also describe it as a nonmeditative state where they set aside the mental distractions. 

And another challenge is there are so many different ways to practice meditation which needs to be sorted through. There are compassion meditation, mindfulness meditation, with variations on how often or how long meditation sessions last.

Desbordes seeks to understand what exactly in mindfulness meditation that works against depression in patients and so that more attention could be given on that and less on the least important parts.