zenwrit

Even before actually listening to music, I have found that the act of choosing the music I want to hear to varies considerably depending upon the degree to which I’ve been present in the moment.

judgment tests

put me more at ease and I started to perceive the music in a much more dimensional way.

Americans die younger and experience more injury and illness than people in other rich nations, despite spending almost twice as much per person on health care.

message needs more thought, move it to your to-do list.

The soldier was connected with the man behind the piano, and they were both sharing the present moment,

It allows for a gap in thinking, in which thoughts are observed, but are not labeled.  It creates a space where time doesn’t matter and only what is happening in the present moment; within the body is all there is.

Listen to the music of life.

“a moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness“

We are essentially absent in our own lives, failing to notice the experiences as they occur. Put simply, mindfulness is a way of paying attention.

Musicians spend unusually large amounts of time alone practising, in a state of what pianist-composer Rolf Hind calls “solitary absorption”.

reach for a tall glass of water.

For example, caffeine can cause anxiety, while high-sugar fruit drinks may give a short-term energy boost that's followed by deeper fatigue.

ight (similar to sunlight) can make you feel more alert.

People who use their gym locker tend to be fitter than those who don’t, but it is not using a gym locker that raises your aerobic capacity.

Whether you go neuro-slumming (Googling “brain training”)

look for clothing, sometimes several seasons ahead of time, which will eventually be sold in stores.

spent doing retail analysis and communicating with store associates and managers about how to make smart purchasing decisions and minimize marked-down inventory.

spend long hours working while on business trips, though tacking on extras days to sightsee abroad

prioritizing tasks, you plan the order in which you'll do them, so that you can tell what needs your immediate attention, and what you can leave until later.

To-Do Lists are essential if you're going to beat work overload.

allocating priorities from A (very important, or very urgent) to F (unimportant, or not at all urgent).

Not asking for clarification when you know that you do not understand.

also genuinely interested in understanding what the other person is thinking, feeling, wanting or what the message means,

we don’t address the appropriate elements we will not be very effective, and can actually make the situation worse.

Our findings suggest the usefulness of MBSR as an intervention for a broad range of chronic disorders and problems. In fact, the consistent and relatively strong level of effect sizes across very different types of sample indicates that mindfulness training might enhance general features of coping with distress and disability in everyday life, as well as under more extraordinary conditions of serious disorder or stress.

improvements were consistently seen across a spectrum of standardized mental health measures including psychological dimensions of quality of life scales, depression, anxiety, coping style and other affective dimensions of disability. Likewise, similar benefits were also found for health parameters of physical well-being, such as medical symptoms, sensory pain, physical impairment, and functional quality-of-life estimates, although measures of physically oriented measures were less frequently assessed in the studies as a whole.

a recent randomized study of depressives in remission found one-year relapse rates of major depressive episodes to be halved when conventional treatment was supplemented by a mindfulness program [3]. Another investigation of mindfulness training among anxiety and mood disorder patients showed pre- to postintervention improvements in mental health outcomes with an effect size of 0.7 [10].