Name: The Power of Mindfulness: What You Practice Grows Stronger - Shauna Shapiro
Uploaded: 2017-12-19T05:35:48.000Z
Duration: 13 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

>> If, in rush hour traffic, you can remain perfectly calm,

if you can see your neighbors travel to fantastic places without

a twinge of jealousy, if you can love everyone around you unconditionally,

and if you can always find contentment just where you are,

then you're probably a dog. >> [LAUGHTER] >> Right?

We hold ourselves to these unrealistic standards of perfection, and

then we judge ourselves when we don't live up to them. The thing is,

we're not supposed to be perfect. Perfection isn't possible, but

transformation is. All of us have the capacity to change,

to learn, and to grow, no matter what our circumstances. As a professor and

scientist, I study how people change, how people transform. And

one of the most effective vehicles I've found is mindfulness.

My own journey into mindfulness was unexpected. When I was 17,

I had spinal fusion surgery, a metal rod put in my spine.

I went from a healthy, active teenager to lying in a hospital bed unable to walk.

And during the many months of rehabilitation, I tried to figure out

how to live in this body that could no longer do what it used to.

The physical pain was difficult, but worse was the fear and

the loneliness, and I simply didn't have the tools to cope, so

I began searching for something that could help. And eventually the search led me

to a monastery in Thailand for my first meditation retreat.

At the monastery, the monks didn't speak much English and I didn't speak any Thai,

but I understood mindfulness had something to do with paying attention in the present

moment. My only instruction was to feel the breath going in and

out of my nose. So I began, one breath, two breaths, my mind wandered off...

I brought it back. One breath, two breaths, it wandered again,

sucked into the past or lost in the future, and no matter how hard I tried, I

just couldn't stay present. Now, this was frustrating because I thought meditation

was supposed to feel like this... And instead it felt more like this.

>> [LAUGHTER] >> Right? Being present isn't so easy.

In fact, check it out for yourself. I've been speaking for about three minutes.

Have you noticed your mind has wandered? All of our minds wander.

Research from Harvard shows the mind wanders, on average, 47% of the time.

47%, that's almost half of our lives that we're missing, that we're not here.

So part of mindfulness is simply learning to train the mind in how to be here,

where we already are. Like right now, let's practice together.

Allow your eyes to close, and just feel your feet on the floor,

wiggle your toes, and sense your whole body sitting here,

Feeling the breath as it naturally flows in and out of the body,

just being here. And as you're ready, taking a deeper breath in and

back at the monastery, I was trying hard to do just this, to just be present.

But no matter how hard I tried, my mind kept wandering off. And at this point,

I really started to judge myself. What is wrong with you? You're terrible at this.

Why are you even here? You're a fake. And then not only was I judging myself,

I started judging everyone. Even the monks... Why are they just sitting here?

>> [LAUGHTER] >> Thankfully, a monk from London arrived who spoke English.

And as I shared with him my struggles, he looked at me and said, Oh dear,

you're not practicing mindfulness, you're practicing judgment, impatience,

frustration... And then he said five words that have never left me:

What you practice grows stronger. What you practice grows stronger.

We know this now with neuroplasticity. Our repeated experiences shape our brain.

We can actually sculpt and strengthen our synaptic connections, based on repeated

practice. For example, in the famous study of London taxi drivers,

the visual-spatial mapping part of the brain is bigger,

stronger. They've been practicing navigating the 25,000 streets of London

all day long. When you look at the brains of meditators,

the areas related to attention, learning, compassion,

grow bigger and stronger. It's called cortical thickening,

the growth of new neurons in response to repeated practice. What we practice grows

stronger. The monk explained to me that if I was meditating with judgment,

I was just growing judgment. Meditating with frustration, I'm growing frustration.

He helped me understand that mindfulness isn't just about paying attention,

it's about how we pay attention with kindness. He said it's like these

loving arms that welcome everything, even the messy imperfect parts of ourselves.

He also pointed out that we're practicing all the time, moment by moment,

not just when we're meditating, but in every moment. We're growing something in

every moment. So the question really becomes, what do you want to grow?

What do you want to practice? When I left Thailand,

I wanted to keep practicing mindfulness. And, I wanted to understand it

scientifically, so I began a PhD program, eventually became a professor. And

I've spent the past 20 years investigating the effects of mindfulness across a wide

range of populations, including veterans with PTSD, patients with insomnia,

women with breast cancer, stressed-out college students,

high-level business executives... And over and over the data showed two key things.

First, mindfulness works, it's good for you.

It strengthens our immune functioning, it decreases stress, decreases cortisol,

helps us sleep better. When we published our first research back in '98,

Now there are thousands of studies showing the beneficial effects of mindfulness,

it's good for us. The second thing we learned was quite unexpected.

Almost all of the people we were working with, regardless of their age,

were talking about the same thing--this underlying sense of I'm not good enough,

I'm not okay, I'm not living this life right, this tremendous self-judgment and

shame. And we all know what they were talking about,

because shame is universal, all of us feel it. And worse,

we have this mistaken belief that if we shame ourselves, if we beat ourselves up,

we'll somehow improve. And yet, shame doesn't work, shame never works,

it can't work. Literally, physiologically, it can't work because, when we feel shame,

the centers of the brain that have to do with growth and learning shut down.

What happens is the amygdala triggers a cascade of norepinephrine and

cortisol to flood our system, shutting down the learning centers and

shuttling our resources to survival pathways. Shame literally

robs the brain of the energy it needs to do the work of changing.