Science Forums 2

[sigh.ko.blah.grr]

In working with various meditation techniques for the sake of anger management, impulse control, anxiety management and what-have-you, I discovered that simple attentiveness to body sensations would reliably speed up the process of autonomic nervous system function (in the parasympathetic side of the sympathetic-parasympathetic equation).

I think the guy who originally either discovered or just wrote about this was Kabat-Zinn, and he called it "mindfulness meditation." I call it the "drop drill" (probably because I had to do -that- in school when I was a kid).

In any event, MM or DD appears to displace affective (emotional and body sensation) "white noise" so sufficiently that it also reduces the impulse to think in symbolic language to mask off the uncomfortable emotions.

There's an excellent description of the 30-second (or so) process on page 280 in Paine-Gernee & Hunt's Emotional Healing: A Program for Emotional Sobriety, but essentially, I'm just talking about a very quick, focus of consciousness on a body inventory that can easily be done by nonpathological and neurotic-level people. One does not need to learn a bunch of "Eastern religious hocus-pocus" to do this.

Borderline-level patients can be taught to do it, usually via repeated experience with Benson's "relaxation response" or Perls' "guided meditation." Psychotic-level patients have a very hard time with it, unless they are effectively brought up to the borderline level with medications.