Rebuilding Your Mind and Body With Mindfulness

I’m Linda Miles, Ph.D., and a Mindfulness practitioner for over 30 years. I use mindfulness in my daily life and in my practice as a marriage and family therapist. In this article I will show specific examples of how Mindfulness can be practiced and how it can have positive outcomes in everyday situations to which I hope readers can relate.

The benefits became clear to me 15 years ago when I was struck by a particularly virulent strain of pneumonia. I was weak and frightened but determined to fight it with everything I had. I wanted to live!

As I waited for yet another daily chest X-Ray on my seventh day in the hospital, I knew was dying.My husband is a doctor. Although he couldn’t bring himself to tell me the prognosis, I could read the signs. I felt my consciousness fading as my body began shutting down. I also overheard a conversation among the medical professionals working on me about kidney failure, lack of oxygen and the alarming blood work results they had just received.

Although my body was crashing! I felt a sense of inner peace and gratitude for my life. Fortunately, I was only 51 years old and had maintained good health prior to this bout with this dangerous pneumonia.

It was a long struggle, but eventually I recovered. Despite the medical crisis, I maintained a mental state of inner peace and calm most of the time during my illness. Using a practice of mindfulness, I was able to accept my illness but not give up.

What is mindfulness?

It is a scientific approach to acceptance and inner peace. It was extensively studied by John Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., at the University of Massachusetts. It was viewed as a way to reduce suffering for patients with severe medical illnesses and to help people deal with day-to-day life challenges. His work has contributed to a growing movement of mindfulness into a variety of areas including medicine.

He defines mindfulness as purposely focusing attention in the present moment non-judgmentally.

WHY MINDFULNESS: REWRITING YOUR THOUGHTS?

“You can’t stop the waves but you can learn to surf.” John Kabat-Zinn

Although this was an extreme situation, my practice of mindfulness and rewriting my thoughts had prepared me to accept what was real in the present moment. This prevented me from comparing myself to those who were healthy and productive. I learned that when I compared myself to people that I had set up as ideals, I rejected myself. I believe that my practice helped save my life because I avoided the anxiety of the situation and concentrated on healing. Do not view acceptance as giving up, because it is often the opposite. My acceptance of my illness saved my energy so I could meet my situation head on.

During my illness, I could have watched my condition deteriorate. I could have told myself powerful stories about impending death or attacked myself for weakness. However, I didn’t dwell on the worst possible outcome because what I knew from mindfulness training was that these were merely movies in my mind.

These negative movies were damaging and would only make my symptoms much worse. I was on oxygen and needed several visits a day from a respiratory therapist just to survive. In this case, more rapid respiration and a stress response would have been extremely harmful to my health.

“In the brain practice makes permanent.” Says Dr. Wane Drevets, a neuroscientist.

As my body was fighting for survival, I chose to focus my energy on healing, using positive and loving thoughts. I deliberately asked about the lives of my nurses and doctors and worked at connecting with others in a deliberate way.

I thought about my family and friends with appreciation and loving-kindness and these thoughts triggered the release of calming and healing chemicals into my bloodstream. I was not thinking clearly enough to reason WHY I was thinking and behaving with thoughts of loving-kindness. The thoughts and behaviors were an automatic response to threat based on my years of practice of mindfulness. Although my previous daily practice of mindfulness was under less stressful circumstances, it had prepared me well for my health crisis. A practice of loving-kindness toward self and others generates positive chemical such as dopamine and oxytocin that help you remain calm so that the body can heal. These are the thoughts I used in loving-kindness meditation:

May I be healed

May I be at peace

May you be healed

May you be at peace

You do not need to be a prisoner of your thoughts. Let go of worn-out thinking and replace it with a new storyline based on a practice of loving-kindness.

Author Viktor Frankl faced circumstances far more dire that my own.

Despite the degradation and misery of a Nazi concentration camp during World War II, Viktor Frankl was able to utilize his most important freedom–the freedom to control his inner life. He realized that although the Nazis could subjugate him and his fellow prisoners, they did not have access to his inner life. They could not dehumanize his inner existence. He made a decision to focus on his love for his wife and have conversations with her in his head to help find the strength to stay alive.

After the war he wrote a book about his experiences and survival strategy entitled, Man’s Search for Meaning. Human beings are wired for connection and a practice of loving-kindness is healthy for you and others.