Mindfulness Training - Skillfully Healing Emotions

     "In his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin reports the following experiment on himself at the London Zoo reptile house. 

        'I put my face to the thick glass-plate in front of a puff adder in the Zoological Gardens, with the firm determination of not starting back if the snake struck at me; but as soon as the blow was struck, my resolution went for nothing, and I jumped a yard or two backward with astonishing rapidity. My will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced.' 
     ... emotions evolved long before hominids roamed the planet. We can easily see that bottom-up reactivity to threats and losses provides a good explanation of why emotions in animals and humans switch on. It does not do such a good job of explaining why emotions in humans are maintained. For this, we need to look at how humans evolved the capacity to build mental models and symbolic processing that released them from sensitivity to current contingencies. Although such symbolic representations of past and future give humans great advantages in problem-solving capabilities, it is this same capacity to work 'off-line' that means emotions do not switch off. For current low mood can reactivate recollections of past loss and humiliation, and anxiety can simulate future terrors. Problems arise when our 'simulations' are treated by the evolutionary primitive neural pathways as real threats & real losses to be dealt with now and with a high degree of priority. 

      Failure to switch off emotion is due to the activation of mental representations of present, past, and future that are created independently of external contingencies.

     Mindfulness training can be seen as one way to teach people to discriminate such 'simulations' from objects & contingencies as they actually are. (Research) shows how even brief laboratory training can have effects on processing affective stimuli; that long-term meditation practitioners show distinct reactions to pain; that longer meditation training is associated with differences in brain structure; that 8 weeks’ mindfulness practice brings about changes in the way emotion is processed showing that participants can learn to uncouple the sensory, directly experienced self from the 'narrative' self; that mindfulness training can affect working memory capacity, and enhance the ability of participants to talk about past crises in a way that enables them to remain specific and yet not be overwhelmed."

       Williams JM. Mindfulness and psychological process. Emotion 2010; 10(1): 1-7.