Tag: EFT

The benefits of Meditation in relation to anxiety

A post by Dr Mercola includes a section on ‘The Benefits of Meditation’ in relation to anxiety. you can find it HERE

The Benefits of Meditation

Meditation is another option that can help you combat anxiety in the long-term. One style of meditation is mindfulness—a directed-attention, waking state practice in which you keep bringing your attention back to the now. It’s a practice of single-tasking, originally developed for monks, who remain focused on the present moment in all activities. Besides improving your focus and boosting your mental cognition, mindfulness training helps relieve feelings of stress and anxiety.

If you think about it, nothing is uncertain in the NOW. You know exactly where you are and what you’re doing right this very moment, so by focusing on your direct experience in the present, uncertainty-driven anxiety can be reduced. With practice, you’ll likely lower your “intolerance of uncertainty” score.

It’s now becoming more well-known that meditation actually changes your brain.16 The increased calm and quiet you feel is not an imaginary effect. Neuroscientist Sara Lazar has used brain scans to look at the meditating brain, which shows that long-term meditators have an increased amount of gray matter in the insula and sensory regions. They also have more gray matter in the frontal cortex, an area associated with memory and executive decision making.

After just eight weeks, people who took part in a mindfulness meditation study, meditating 40 minutes per day, were able to shrink their amygdala—the part of your brain that governs your fight or flight response, and plays a significant role in anxiety, fear, and general stress. A smaller amygdala correlates to reduced stress and anxiety.

WHY CRY? – Crying can help relieve stress but….

……. for Optimal Health You Need Better Stress-Relieving Tools

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Story at-a-glance

  • Tears that are shed due to an emotional response, such as sadness or extreme happiness, contain a high concentration of a chemical linked to stress. One theory of why you cry when you’re sad is that it helps your body release some of these excess stress chemicals, thereby helping you feel more calm and relaxed
  • According to recent research, higher heart rate is tied to earlier death, even in those who exercise regularly
  • Compared with those who had a resting heart rate of 50 beats a minute or less, men with resting heart rates of 71 to 80 beats per minute increased their risk of early death by just over 50 percent. Those with heart rates between 81 to 90 beats doubled their risk, and a heart rate over 90 was equated with triple the risk
  • Energy psychology techniques such as the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) can be very effective by helping you to actually reprogram your body’s reactions to the unavoidable stressors of everyday life

Check out Dr Mercola’s page HERE

EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques)

Those of you that have looked at my SunWALK model will know that it is a ‘flow-of-energy’ model – or meta-framework – for understanding, and working with many, sub-models. SunWALK might well be a more Western way of re-presenting Taoism. Acupuncture, Tai-chi, Martial Arts are just a few of the sub-models that exist within the overall embrace or framework of Taoism – as I intended in the meta-model framework of SunWALK. I am always interested to discover new energy models, techniques, therapies etc. Yesterday I heard of EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques for the first time (Thanks Curly Martin of Achievement Specialists).

What is EFT? Below is a description from Judy Byrne’s website but first have a look at Judy’s elegant description on this video;

Emotional Freedom Techniques or EFT is an energy therapy that is bringing together ancient wisdom and 21st Century advances in our understanding of consciousness to rewrite the conventional wisdom in the therapy textbooks.

Until now, psychologists and psychotherapists have believed that we needed changes in the way we think or behave, or on a chemical level or in our neurology to be able to change the way we feel and how we relate to ourselves and others. That, however, is changing rapidly.

New understandings of consciousness and of the nature of emotional healing, and growing evidence of rapid and amazing change, are building towards a tipping point. We are on the edge of a paradigm shift. The 21st century will be the century when mind and body are no longer seen as connected but as a single system, and of a new understanding of how that system works.

Nowhere is this already more easily evident than in EFT. It works on the understanding that our thoughts about ourselves and our experiences and circumstances can disrupt the energy system in our bodies and that this disruption can cause negative feelings. Rebalance the energy system and the feelings change, often dramatically. Frequently when the feelings are different we spontaneously think about things differently as well.

EFT looks to promise much and I look forward the getting to know the process better.

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