REVA SETH

Reva Seth is a bestselling author and the founder of The Optima Living Lab, an initiative making the case for public investment in the personal infrastructure of individuals.

Pro athletes, celebrities, Fortune 100 CEOs and Silicon Valley billionaires have rhapsodized on how meditation and mindfulness are the most effective tools for health, personal performance and well-being since, well, exercise. Like yoga and running before it, mindfulness tools and meditation programs are now big business – with popular apps like Headspace, the Mindfulness App and Buddhify receiving tens of millions of downloads.

Mindfulness and meditation are simply about regularly exercising the ability to be, deliberately and calmly, fully in the moment. This requires an individual to still his or her mind, control emotions and breathe regularly and deeply. It's a simple habit that produces incredible (data-based) results – which is why leading global companies such as Google, Target and General Mills are incorporating it into their organizations.

Research shows regular practice reduces both physical and mental-health costs and improves emotional quotient (essential for social cohesion and success in a knowledge economy) and resilience to stress, as well as employee focus, concentration and productivity.

Researchers from John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., found that meditation and mindfulness reduce anxiety, depression and pain.

Similarly, a study in the Journal of Health Psychology found that meditation and mindfulness lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

Scientists at the University of Oregon found that meditation techniques actually result in physical brain changes that protect against mental illness by increasing the signalling connection in the brain and the density of protective tissue.

From a public-health perspective, Canada should be experimenting and implementing what research suggests is a cost-effective, non-invasive means of helping to address our national mental-health crisis.

Mental illness and addiction affects one in five Canadians in their lifetime. Canada is also the second highest per capita consumer of opioids in the world – and, according to the International Narcotics Control Board, these numbers are rising.

Data show that Canada's youth are also suffering from rising levels of anxiety, stress, depression and suicide. A large-scale 2016 study tracking Ontario students for the past 20 years found that one-third had moderate to severe symptoms of psychological distress – an increase from two years earlier.

The economic costs of these numbers are significant. Mental illness broadly costs the Canadian economy more than $50-billion (from health care, social services and income support) and Canadian businesses lose $6-billion annually as a result of lost productivity, absenteeism and turnover.

Even more staggering is the ripple effect that our national mental-health crisis is having on our families, workplaces and communities. Statistics Canada in 2012 found that approximately 11 million Canadians had a family member with a mental-health or addiction problem. More than one-third reported that their own lives had been directly and adversely affected by their family members' mental issues.

The traditional frame of reactive acute care is no longer sufficient or optimal.

It's time for public-health officials, policy makers and the public to get behind a commitment to scaling up access to meditation and mindfulness programs. These practices shouldn't remain the stronghold of the affluent who have the time and resources to invest in cultivating stronger mental wellness. Information and opportunities to practice meditation should be available to all Canadians – with schools, hospitals, workplaces and even public transport or the CBC as possible points of delivery.

Successful models that could be scaled up are already operating across the country, and the first step should be to survey these existing success stories for templates that could be nimbly offered more widely. For instance, in the Toronto District School Board, the Dr. Norman Bethune Collegiate Institute introduced lessons in mindfulness with six workshops over two months. Similarly, the Vancouver School Board offers teachers mindfulness training through the MindUp program.

This is not a replacement for better medical care, improved social services or pharmaceutical intervention – it's a supplement or augmentation to existing treatments and a pro-active means of strengthening the ability of more individuals to personally invest effectively in their mental and emotional wellness.

A national strategy and commitment to promoting mindfulness and meditation would also positively nudge forward our collective ability to better navigate other social and health priorities. For instance, meditation has been shown to alleviate loneliness among seniors, reduce stress among caregivers and help promote focus and reduce anxiety among youth.

Much like ParticipAction was launched by the Canadian government to promote healthy living and physical fitness (and to battle exorbitant health-care costs), the next frontier is to do the same with our country's mental well-being by publicly scaling up education, understanding and access to meditation and mindfulness.

1/4 of student (1200/3600 undergraduate students have taken a  new course at Yale University

This is a episode of the CBC's the current from Feb 20 2018

Click on the URL below to listen on your computer or smart phone

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/popup/audio/listen.html?autoPlay=true&mediaIds=1165603907532

Start listening at 22:31

Techno-zombies, listen up

Put your device down. Lee Elliott needs to give you a piece of his mindfulness

What is the role of mindfulness in the modern age?

Going for a walk anywhere these days is a practice in dodging distracted people. Headsets in and eyes lowered, people are walking about without paying any attention to what is going on around them. It is amusing to watch two techno-zombies bump into each other, upset with being interrupted from their screen. I have seen two people with their heads down trying to avoid each other, fail by bumping into each other, and, still with their eyes glued to their devices, both try to go the same direction and collide again.

The distraction doesn't just affect in a harmless, comical way either. Where I live in Ontario, the provincial police reported in 2016 that three of the previous four years set records for the number of pedestrian fatalities. It is possible that a combination of distracted drivers and distracted pedestrians have led to this increase.

My grandmother used to call the television the "idiot box," but I think we may have a new contender for that moniker. People are so focused on the tiny screen in front of them that they do not take the time to look around, pay attention to their surroundings or enjoy the moment they are in.

Mindfulness is the practice of focusing your attention on the present moment, where you are and what you are doing. It is a chance to look at the people, the scenery, the world around you. When you are with friends, be with them. Not paying attention to the world around you has consequences. Not only for you but for others as well.

In Toronto, my friend watched as a mother, with her face immersed in her device, rushed off the subway train and left her toddler behind. Whatever was on the phone was more important than her child. My friend saw what happened and got off at the next stop with the little guy and brought him to the subway agent. The agent told him this is not the first time she had seen this happen!

How often have you been at a dinner where the people you are eating with are on their screens instead of conversing and connecting with the others at the table? Is it more important to brag about the fun time you are having as opposed to actually having a fun time? Do we really need a play-by-play of time you are spending with others while we are not there?

All the electronic devices in our lives allow us to respond from anywhere at any time, yet we use them to respond all the time. Far from making things more convenient, they have taken away the easy aspects and replaced them with stress.

When will we learn that multitasking really isn't – multitasking really means doing several things poorly instead of one thing really well. Many mistakenly believe they can multitask effectively, but study after study has shown that the human brain is simply not able to juggle so many balls at once. I've been in far too many meetings where one or several people are typing away on their computer or fiddling on their device and they grind the meeting to a halt when asked a question.

"Sorry, can you repeat that?" they say when what they should admit is: "Sorry, I wasn't paying any attention to what you were talking about because I was distracted with something I think is more important than all of you, so please indulge me and repeat everything you have been saying again while I waste even more time."

And how often do you hear, "I need to respond to this right now"; "What did he post today?" or "Just let me read this one thing." The device seems to demand your time at this instant. But does it really need to be answered right away?

This need for instant gratification and connection has even manifested into a psychological phenomenon. "Phantom vibration syndrome" has been much studied by researchers with data published in medical journals such as the BMJ. Phantom vibration syndrome is the feeling that your device is vibrating in your pocket even when it isn't there.

But once you learn to leave the device alone or only check it at certain times, you will naturally be more present and relaxed. The best part of mindfulness practice is the peace of mind it brings.

Over the past several months, I have stopped checking my phone all the time. I have put the electronics away and spent time with people. I have become more in the moment. It can't be coincidental that my stress level has decreased and my happiness has increased.

When I first started my mindful practice, I thought it was going to be some jive hippie stuff or some pseudo-religious ceremony, but it really wasn't either of those things. Taking some time each day to be in the moment was actually more freeing than I had expected.

We all have busy lives juggling work, family, friends, health, hobbies and a myriad of other tasks. So how can you find time to be mindful? Put the phone down. Focus on your breath for five to 10 minutes just as you wake up or go to sleep. Simply be part of the world around you.

You don't have to stop and smell the roses, but you can at least notice that they are there.

Globe and Mail Wednesday Oct 25 2017

Lee Elliott lives in Bolton, Ont.

Why has the concept of mindfulness settled so firmly in the spotlight? One author points to the science. The application of mindfulness in a clinical context has given rise to studies and research that back up its positive benefits.

MIAMI — You don't have to be particularly mindful to notice that these days that you can't escape mindfulness.

It's no longer tucked away in your local yoga studio. It's in public spaces. It's in books and online videos, on apps you can download on iTunes. Your kids start their school days with mindful exercises — so do some of their teachers — and fitness instructors incorporate it into their classes. It's a popular subject at law conferences around the country. If lawyers can benefit by being mindful, can't we all?

So why has the concept settled so firmly into the spotlight?

"If you were to point to one thing that explains the boom in interest in mindfulness, it's science," says Rohan Gunatillake, creator of the buddhify app and author of the book "Modern Mindfulness: How to Be More Relaxed, Focused and Kind While Living in a Fast, Digital, Always-On World."

"In the last couple of decades, we have had the world of health care get interested in using mindfulness to help people with a range of issues such as stress, anxiety and chronic pain. And when you're looking to use something like mindfulness in a clinical context, in treatment or therapy, you need the evidence and science to back it up."

Research has made a compelling case for mindfulness. The National Institutes of Health reports that meditation can ease anxiety and depression, lower blood pressure, combat insomnia and offer relief to cancer and dementia patients. A 2015 Harvard study reported that participants in an eight-week mind-body relaxation program used 43 per cent fewer medical services than they had the year before.

"We know the practice of mindfulness is associated with functional and structural changes to the regions of the brain that are connected to focus and concentration and regulation of emotion," says Scott Rogers, founder and director of the Mindfulness and Law Program at the University of Miami School of Law. "That's pretty startling. The structure of your brain changes. When I was in college, that was not recognized as even possible."

Co-founder of UMindfulness, the university's interdisciplinary collaboration that marries research to training, Rogers explains that mindfulness and meditation are two different things, particularly in his law courses: He teaches mindfulness as a form of meditative practice. He leads workshops for the public — one recently at the Lowe Art Museum on the UM campus — and was part of a panel on mindfulness at the Southern District of Florida Bench and Bar Conference this month at the Diplomat Hotel, discussing its implications with more than 700 attorneys and judges.

In his courses, he teaches law students about "the nature of the mind and its tendency to wander and the consequence of a wandering mind. Learning how to marshal the extraordinary resources of our attention can be a game-changer," Rogers says. "Mindfulness isn't about stopping the mind from wandering or even calming down. It's being more aware, and that is the important fork in the road that can lead one to a steadier state physically, emotionally and mentally."

Rogers says a basic practice his students learn is a simple practice used by anyone who has ever tried to meditate: Concentrate on an object, and when your mind wanders bring your attention back to the object (Rogers calls this "exercising the muscle of attention"). Students then apply that concept to talking to a witness on the stand or answering a judge's question. The idea is that an attentive attorney understands his or her own reactions more fully and thus is able to communicate more effectively in court.

But mindfulness training can start far earlier than law school. The nonprofit group Mindful Kids Miami aims to bring mindfulness practice to Miami-Dade students K-12. The organization offers two-part training sessions for teachers: The first program focuses on the teachers themselves, while the second offers methods of implementing mindfulness into the classroom.

Marlem Diaz-Brown, who teaches Grade 4 at Sunset Elementary, completed both programs and has incorporated mindful activities into her class. Her students start their days with concentrating on breathing, short body scans to focus their attention and a clapping game in which the students sit in a circle and send out positive wishes to the world and their community.

The result? Students who weren't so anxious at test time.

"With kids, you break it down. You can't do a one-hour meditation to start the school day, but you can start with 10 minutes," Diaz-Brown says. "I was gung ho about making sure we took 10 minutes a day in my class, whether or not I finished the lesson plans. We get caught up in saying 'I have to finish this page.' But I took a step back and decided I was going to carry this out through the year. The kids did phenomenal at test time. It teaches them to take a moment when they're anxious."

Such positive results are why Miami fitness instructor and health coach Mireya Pinzon, who teaches Pilates and other classes at Equinox and L.A. Fitness, ends her classes with a moment of meditation, sometimes dabbing a touch of lavender oil on the wrists of those in her class.

"It's important to take a few minutes to relax and think about the work we do," she says. "We scan the body, feel the energy, the blood, the adrenalin, the heart pumping. When we're relaxed we catch all the information on the work we just did."

Roberto Koltun,Miami Herald

How to be more mindful

Scott Rogers, founder and director of the Mindfulness and Law Program at the University of Miami School of Law, has these tips for incorporating mindfulness into your life:

• Read a good book on the subject. Rogers recommends "Mindfulness for Beginners" by Jon Kabat-Zinn or "Real Happiness" by Sharon Salzberg.
• Practice with a guided recording online or via an app. "That way, you can take what you've read and bring it to life," Rogers says.
• Attend a training session. "There are more and more trainings one can attend for hours or for a whole weekend, so you can take it to a deeper level of understanding and practice."
• Bring mindfulness into your day. "Don't see it as something reserved for a quiet room in the early morning."

Meditation apps today offer stress relief for vacationers, be they walking through an airport, sitting on a plane or train, or strolling on a busy city street. Travelers can plug in and be mindfully guided to their final destination. Credit Gaby D'Alessandro

Having long tried to virtually transport listeners to beaches, rain forests and other dreamy respites, meditation apps today are also trying to appeal to people who are actually traveling to such places.

Several apps — including Buddhify, Calm, OMG. I Can Meditate! and Simple Habit — offer specialty meditation sessions for travelers on planes, trains and city streets, making their way across oceans or simply across town, be it “Waiting at the Airport” or “Commuting: A Mindful Journey.”

On my first trips of 2017, I tried several such apps, including some veterans, to see if they could alleviate the stress of long lines, crowded planes and busy streets. Meditation is personal — the teacher’s voice, words and methods, affect each of us in different ways — so I didn’t rank the apps. Instead, I’ve highlighted certain features, and to whom they may or may not appeal.

Research began at Newark Liberty International Airport, where my plane was being de-iced. I put in earbuds and tapped the “Prepare for Travel” session from Simple Habit, an app with meditations for situations as varied as remedying procrastination and easing PMS. Users can choose from sessions that span the vacation process, from “Waiting at the Airport” to “Just Landed” to “Relaxing on Vacation” and “After Vacation.” To gain access to all of Simple Habit’s sessions (including those that don’t pertain to travel), you need a subscription ($3.99 for seven days; $11.99 for one month; $99.99 for a year on iOS). As with other app subscriptions, you can cancel through iTunes (I used an iPhone, but the apps are also available for Android).

From my plane seat I tapped the “Prepare for Travel” session. “Oops, low internet connection,” the app said. “Please check your network.” I kept trying. I opened a couple of other meditation apps; they worked just fine. I gave up and revisited the “Prepare for Travel” session later, days after a trip to Puerto Rico.

“Travel can sometimes be a tumultuous experience,” a male voice said. It instructed me to let the tension in my neck, shoulders and jaw dissolve. A tense traveler might wonder: But how? The voice encouraged me to repeat the words, “Just this breath. Just this moment.”

“You just got your seat on the plane?” the voice said. “Just this breath. Just this moment.”

“It’s a way for you to come back to what’s here, right now,” the voice added. If you want brief, basic lessons about controlling your breathing, you may enjoy these sessions, more minilectures than silky-voiced meditations. (If you don’t find mantras effective, you may like Buddhify, which has a different technique for bringing you back to the present. More on that momentarily.)

Another app, OMG. I Can Meditate! (access to all sessions, $12.99 a month; $89.99 a year on iOS), offers sessions like “Mindful Walking,” “Waiting in Lines,” “Public Places” and “Mindful Eating,” which I selected during breakfast.

“Notice all the different colors, textures, shades, different food types,” a female voice said. The travel-related meditations on this app may appeal if you’re beginning to practice mindfulness and want step-by-step instructions. The eating session, for instance, asks listeners to rate their hunger from 1 to 10 to help them learn when they are full. “A lot of us eat because we’re nervous or bored,” the voice said. Other users, however, may find such sessions too much like pedestrian self-help audiobooks.

Simple Habit is an app in which users can choose from sessions that span the vacation process, from “Waiting at the Airport” to “Just Landed.”

One morning, I tried Calm (the company’s website offers lovely, free nature sounds and scenes, perfect for office workers seeking to drown out ambient chatter). The app (access to all sessions, $12.99 a month; $59.99 a year on iOS) has multiday programs such as “Seven Days of Calming Anxiety,” as well as meditations including “Calm Kids,” “Deep Sleep,” “Commuting” and “Emergency Calm.” I tried “Walking Meditation,” during which a female voice asks you to notice how you’re moving and what you’re seeing. The commuting and walking meditations were the only travel meditations in the app. If you’re a beginner and want the blithe cadence of certain yoga teachers, you may enjoy these sessions. If sing-songy voices make you think of the sleep teachings used to brainwash children in “Brave New World,” you may not.

The Pause app incorporates touch as well as sound. Move your finger and the blob grows while your ears are bathed with birdsong and breaking waves.

On the plane at Newark I also tested Pause, a simple, low-cost app ($1.99) with a surprising payoff. Unlike other stress-relief apps that try to keep you in the here and now, this one incorporates touch as well as sound. While it isn’t travel-specific, its ease of use makes it a nifty on-the-go solution. You put the tip of your finger on a small blob and slowly move it around the screen of your phone, like pushing a desktop sandbox with a little rake. (The creators of Pause say it uses principles of Tai Chi.) Move your finger and the blob grows while your ears are bathed with birdsong and breaking waves. As passengers jockeyed for overhead bin space, I guided the blob this way and that. Words appeared. “Go anywhere.”

At first, the idea of Pause seemed as silly as a mood ring. But there is something about slowly guiding your hand to the sound of lapping waves that has you radiating calm before you even set foot on a beach. If you want a quick, surreptitious way to refresh your mind without someone instructing you to tune into your breath, this could be the app for you.

Buddhify has a rainbow wheel with a question in the center. Users can select slices of the wheel with sessions like “Walking in City.”

Experienced meditators may want to try an oldie but goodie: Buddhify ($4.99 for iOS and $2.99 for Android), which has a rainbow wheel with a question in the center: “What are you doing?” Users can select slices of the wheel with sessions like “Walking in City.” I tapped one that said “Traveling” and up came options like “Connecting with stillness in a busy place” and “A unique meditation for when you’re on a plane.”

The latter is about 10 minutes. A soft male voice asks you to notice the sounds of the plane, and the people within. To help you stay present, the voice suggests that when your thoughts drift to the past, you say to yourself the name of the city from which you’re departing. If your thoughts drag you into the future, you say the city where you’re headed. Simple but effective in gently guiding the mind.

“Did one of the cities feature more often than the other?” the voice asked. “Just that little observation can teach us a lot about where our mind tends to wander, whether to the past or to the future. And the more our mind learns about itself, the stronger it becomes.”

Here’s hoping.

A version of this article appears in print on January 29, 2017, on Page TR3 of the New York edition with the headline: Meditation for Travelers on the Go.

At first, work and meditation were separate activities for Golbie Kamarei. These days, she is a poster girl for combining them, after the meditation classes she started at BlackRock, the powerful New York-based investment firm where she worked, grew to 1,500 participants. She recently decided to leave the firm to advise companies interested in starting such programs of their own and to coach top executives in mindfulness.

It all started in 2011, when she decided to immerse herself in a five-day mindfulness meditation retreat at an ashram in the Caribbean. She had done yoga on and off since college and figured if this new experience didn’t work out, she could always spend the rest of her vacation on the beach. But she didn’t get much sun in.

“That’s when everything shifted. In the first meditation I had an experience that showed the power of this practice,” she recalled in an interview.

A Stanford psychology graduate, she has an intellectual understanding of the mind. But in meditation, she experienced it directly, observing how her mind wandered and how it served as a filter by which the world is experienced. She began to devote her weekends and vacations to meditation retreats, finding it healing. And the barrier between this private activity and work started to dissolve as colleagues asked her about her passion and whether she could lead some guided meditation for them.

By 2013, she was vice-chairwoman of the people and culture committee at BlackRock’s New York office and mentioned the possibility at a meeting. An e-mail was sent to 2,500 people and 60 people showed interest, with 30 joining at the first session. She committed to be present each week, except during vacations, calling in when on business trips.

Word spread, a unique grassroots initiative, and folks in other offices wanted in, until employees in 31 cities were taking part by calling in from their desks or sitting together in a conference room if they couldn’t be at the New York session. It had the largest participation rate of any employee-led initiative in the company, as people told their colleagues and an article on the Intranet site also sparked interest.

She delineates four different motivators that drew participants: Reducing stress; increasing focus and attention; interest in techniques to build emotional awareness; and experiencing the health advantages of meditation. The program expanded to two 30-minute sessions a week, one morning and one afternoon, during work hours. Sessions were also recorded so that people could dip in at lunch hour or in the evenings.

Many people have an interest in meditation or other activities that might help provide balance in their lives. But the difficulty is finding time, in a complicated, busy life. Her goal was to remove inhibitors and make it easy to explore this avenue, and having sessions at work during business hours was particularly helpful. “The only limitation was for them to make time for it,” she said.

Not everyone bought in but she enjoyed talking to the skeptics and challenging their preconceptions. Some people felt it might make them weak, less able to compete in a dog-eat-dog world. Others felt it simply didn’t belong in the workplace.

Although the company sanctioned the activity by allowing it to be held at work, meditation and work were still separate in her personal time budget. She was not being paid, after all, to run meditation classes. She still had a demanding regular job as a global program manager within the client business division, and the meditation classes were a voluntary activity. Some weeks she might devote 20 hours of personal time to the program but gradually a group of volunteers sprung up to share the organizational burden.

Now based in San Francisco, she is taking the practice to other interested firms. “Most companies don’t maximize the potential of their human capital,” she said. She believes meditation can boost energy and focus, and help people to collaborate better.

But before jumping into such a program, companies must be clear on the expected outcome. For some, a collaborative culture might be the goal, for others a more innovative team. They also must be clear on why they are doing it. “If the why is not coming from a place of service – helping others – it won’t have the impact it should have and won’t be sustainable,” she said.

That doesn’t mean, however, the programs can’t be promoted as helping performance. After all, the audience is interested in increasing their productivity and that might bring them to the table. “The practice changes you. So I don’t get upset if someone says ‘I want this to improve my performance,’” she said.

Companies need to identify who will design and lead the program, whether internally or externally. Although she brought in outside facilitators for her own program to show other approaches, often they had difficulty making the transition to a corporate audience. But as mediation becomes more mainstream, that will be less of a barrier.

There must also be an internal champion with influence who embodies the practice and serves as a conduit for keeping top management on board and persuading employees to give mindfulness a try.

After all, meditation and work need not be separate.

Harvey Schachter

Special to The Globe and Mail

Published Thursday, Aug. 27, 2015 5:00PM EDT

Harvey Schachter is a Kingston, Ont.-based writer specializing in management issues. He writes Monday Morning Manager and management book reviews for the print edition of Report on Business and an online work-life column Balance. E-mail Harvey Schachter