Mindfulness Meditation: How Can This Help?

The spread of alternative medicine through the West in the early 2000s brought a lot of Eastern practice along with it, and mindfulness meditation is one of the pieces that stuck. People now turn to it for a wide range of troubles, spiritual and emotional and physical alike, with depression and anxiety near the top of that list. The practice itself is old. Early Buddhist communities were doing versions of it centuries ago.

Like almost everything else, it has gone global. You don't have to be Buddhist to practice it, either. Someone from any of the three monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, can meditate mindfully while centering their attention on the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the one God their tradition teaches. The object of focus shifts, but the underlying aim stays the same: to settle, to find balance, and to rest your attention on what is happening right now.

Think about what depression and anxiety actually are. Anxiety runs on fear, and most of that fear points forward, toward a future nobody can be sure of. Depression tends to point the other way, tied to something that already happened, often a painful event in the person's past. Set it out like that and you can see why anchoring yourself in the present might loosen the grip of both. The effect is clearest with anxiety, since its whole engine is worry about what hasn't come yet. Depression often rides along with anxiety as a kind of side effect of it.

Where real trauma is involved, meditation is not a cure on its own. A depressed person may still need counseling, talk therapy, and in some cases medication. Mindfulness can teach that person to stay centered, which helps, but it is not a substitute for the drugs a doctor has prescribed. Keep taking what you're told to take. The practice is meant to work alongside conventional treatment, adding to it rather than replacing it.

For most of its history this was a purely spiritual pursuit. That changed when Jon Kabat-Zinn built a secular version of it, his Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction program, and began teaching it to people who had no religious interest in meditation at all. He runs seminars on it around the country. Companies picked up the method to help staff cope with the pressure of long, demanding days in a competitive economy, and the reach went well past business. Schools, hospitals, and other public institutions use the same techniques in the name of health and wellness.

The daily commitment is modest, roughly twenty minutes set aside for some gentle stretching and slow, deep breathing. The point is to quiet the mind, loosen up, and stay planted in the present instead of being dragged around by whatever the day is demanding. Many people fold in positive affirmations or elements of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which can genuinely reshape the way the brain operates. Human beings are wired to lean negative, which is part of why the news skews so grim and why there are so many ads for psychotropic medication keeping the pharmaceutical industry fed.

None of that makes the drugs themselves the enemy. They have a role in healing. The argument is that they work better paired with therapy, especially given the long term side effects that come with a lot of what's on the market. Anxiety responds to the same approach. A centered person can clear the mind and stop circling their fears, and from that steadier place they can begin to face those fears directly, which is CBT's Exposure Therapy at work. So many of our fears live only in the head anyway.

There's an old way of spelling out irrational fear: False Evidence Appearing Real. Ask around and most people will admit their worst-case scenarios almost never arrive. Training the mind to confront fear and stay oriented toward the positive, one of the things mindfulness builds, leads some practitioners toward what gets called the Law of Attraction. The claim is that staying positive pushes negativity away and pulls more good thoughts, feelings, and situations toward you. It fits the Eastern idea that the world is energy, the sort of energy our own thinking can shape. Energy can be turned to good or to harm, depending on who's doing the shaping.

Since the core of depression really is negative thinking, teaching the brain to think positively by grounding yourself in the present can turn your whole view of life around. You start to appreciate that the brain is the most powerful organ you have. It's a shame we tap only about ten percent of it, even the sharpest people among us. Picture what the world might look like if everyone were using the whole thing. - Erwin Bishop