Interview
Meditation
Quote

The present moment

From Andrew Newberg

Video Interview Transcript

Well I think when you start to think about the negative side of things, the negative emotions that people have the idea of mindfulness and living in the present moment can be a very hopeful approach to take. I see this a lot in my own patients at times where you know maybe people have a stomach issue. And so every time their stomach hurts them a little bit they start: Oh! Is it going to get worse? Is it going to get you know is it gonna turn into cancer? or is it going to... Am I going to suffer? Or am I going to have to go through...? And so they just keep ramping up this whole thing. When right now if you just focus on the moment it's just that their stomach hurts a little bit. And so what mindfulness does in a very effective way is say let's not go to those, the next step, and the next step, and the next step. Let's just focus on where we are right now. And by doing so, we don't have those overreactions. We keep our emotions in check. And in that way we have more positive feelings about things. We have a more optimistic approach to things. And of course if you start to apply that to your relationships with other people then again you don't feel that the person is now going to do something even worse to you. The next time, you feel like OK you know where am I right now and how am I going to deal with this and how can I work with this person effectively and can I listen to the person instead of thinking about all the things that are making me angry. Let me just listen to the person. So the more you can be in that present moment on a lot of levels levels both in terms of how we communicate, how we speak, how we start to think about the problems that we have, these are very effective ways of keeping us in a more calm state, keeping our brain in a more calm state. And the brain imaging studies again support this idea that by activating our frontal lobes, we help to kind of modulate or tamp down our emotional responses so that we can feel more compassion, more love, more positivity instead of ramping up all of that negative emotion.

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