on Mental Health

If you’ve been following recent news in the mindfulness world, you may have heard about a recent study by David Creswell out of Carnegie Mellon University that showed the wonderful effects of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) as a reduction on perceived loneliness in healthy older adults age 55-85.

Loneliness is something that most of us experience from time to time, caused and exacerbated by stress, anxiety, depression, addiction and trauma, but you may not have known how staggering the statistics truly are. A recent survey taken from the AARP showed more than 44 million people are lonely and longing to connect with another living, breathing human being.

Mindful.org's "On Mental Health" blogger, Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D., has recently published a book—The Now Effect: How This Moment Can Change the Rest of Your Life. Read Dr. Susan Albers's review of it here on The Huffington Post. The following is an excerpt adapted from The Now Effect.

Dr. Christopher Germer is a friend and colleague of mine who grew up with a great fear of speaking. It wasn’t always easy, but over time he began to cultivate an awareness of the feeling of fear as it arose and practiced systematically relating to it with greater mindfulness and compassion. Chris trained his brain to have what I call “The Mindful Instinct.” What actually happened?

In a chapter titled “Compassion is a Verb” from my new book, The Now Effect, I share how this practice led to an experience that changed Chris’ relationship to his fear of speaking: