Silva Method and the Ultimate Mind

People who are usually happy, enthusiastic and content are less likely to develop heart disease than those who tend not to be happy, according to a major new study published today (Thursday 18 February).

The authors believe that the study, published in the Europe’s leading cardiology journal, the European Heart Journal [1], is the first to show such an independent relationship between positive emotions and coronary heart disease.

Dr Karina Davidson, who led the research, said that although this was an observational study, her study did suggest that it might be possible to help prevent heart disease by enhancing people’s positive emotions. However, she cautioned that it would be premature to make clinical recommendations without clinical trials to investigate the findings further.

“We desperately need rigorous clinical trials in this area. If the trials support our findings, then these results will be incredibly important in describing specifically what clinicians and/or patients could do to improve health,” said Dr Davidson, who is the Herbert Irving Associate Professor of Medicine & Psychiatry and Director of the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University Medical Center (New York, USA).

Over a period of ten years, Dr Davidson and her colleagues followed 1,739 healthy adults (862 men and 877 women) who were participating in the 1995 Nova Scotia Health Survey. At the start of the study, trained nurses assessed the participants’ risk of heart disease and, with both self-reporting and clinical assessment, they measured symptoms of depression, hostility, anxiety and the degree of expression of positive emotions, which is known as “positive affect”.

Positive affect is defined as the experience of pleasurable emotions such as joy, happiness, excitement, enthusiasm and contentment. These feelings can be transient, but they are usually stable and trait-like, particularly in adulthood. Positive affect is largely independent of negative affect, so that someone who is generally a happy, contented person can also be occasionally anxious, angry or depressed.

Read more about Don’t worry, be happy! Positive emotions protect against heart diseasehere.

(Via EurekAlert!.)

Penn neuroscientists examine the protective effects of mindfulness training

PHILADELPHIA –- A University of Pennsylvania-led study in which training was provided to a high-stress U.S. military group preparing for deployment to Iraq has demonstrated a positive link between mindfulness training, or MT, and improvements in mood and working memory. Mindfulness is the ability to be aware and attentive of the present moment without emotional reactivity or volatility.

The study found that the more time participants spent engaging in daily mindfulness exercises the better their mood and working memory, the cognitive term for complex thought, problem solving and cognitive control of emotions. The study also suggests that sufficient MT practice may protect against functional impairments associated with high-stress challenges that require a tremendous amount of cognitive control, self-awareness, situational awareness and emotional regulation.

To study the protective effects of mindfulness training on psychological health in individuals about to experience extreme stress, cognitive neuroscientist Amishi Jha of the Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Penn and Elizabeth A. Stanley of Georgetown University provided mindfulness training for the first time to U.S. Marines before deployment. Jha and her research team investigated working memory capacity and affective experience in individuals participating in a training program developed and delivered by Stanley, a former U.S. Army officer and security-studies professor with extensive experience in mindfulness techniques.

The program, called Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT™), aims to cultivate greater psychological resilience or “mental armor” by bolstering mindfulness.

Read more about Building fit minds under stress here.

(Via EurekAlert.)

I’ve always been fascinated, well that’s a strong word, at least interested in mind reading probably like many of Silva Method practitioners. So when I found this article from ScienceDaily I wanted to share it with you. It’s a different twist because it discusses also the law.

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ScienceDaily (Jan. 24, 2010) — What if a jury could decide a man’s guilt through mind reading? What if reading a defendant’s memory could betray their guilt? And what constitutes ‘intent’ to commit murder? These are just some of the issues debated and reviewed in the inaugural issue of WIREs Cognitive Science, the latest interdisciplinary project from Wiley-Blackwell, which for registered institutions will be free for the first two years.

In the article “Neurolaw,” in the inaugural issue of WIREs Cognitive Science, co-authors Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Annabelle Belcher assess the potential for the latest cognitive science research to revolutionize the legal system.

Neurolaw, also known as legal neuroscience, builds upon the research of cognitive, psychological, and social neuroscience by considering the implications for these disciplines within a legal framework. Each of these disciplinary collaborations has been ground-breaking in increasing our knowledge of the way the human brain operates, and now neurolaw continues this trend.

Read more about Mind Reading, Brain Fingerprinting and the Law

(Via ScienceDaily.)

I received this email from Wild Divine today and I want to share it with you because it is a great explanation of the purpose for meditation. So read on and enjoy!

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Meditation is a way in which you can get acquainted with virtue in your mind so that you can have a calmer and more peaceful feeling. Having a peaceful mind is beneficial in helping you become free of your worries.

This is not to say that you won’t worry about things, but you develop a more effective way of dealing with stressful situations in your daily life. You will be able to understand them in a different light and be able to see them for what they really are. When your mind is not at peace, it is hard to be happy even under pleasant circumstances.In some forms of meditation, you can analyze the thought processes that pass through your mind. When you concentrate deeply on the thoughts and situations of your life, you can reach the point at which you find your own answers to your problems.

Today many types of meditation are recommended by health care professionals as a way of cleansing the mind and emotions of negative thoughts. By meditating, you can benefit from improved concentration and memory. It also helps to help you develop a greater understanding of stressful situations in your daily life so that you can have a greater understanding of the real cause of the problem. This helps you approach your problems with less stress because you do not impulsively become angry. This, in turn, helps you get along with others much better.

Your body also benefits from meditation. When your mind is clear, you are better able to bring healing to the parts of your body that are ill. Meditating helps to improve the overall functioning of your immune system so that your body can fight off disease. As your body becomes more relaxed, your blood pressure lowers and your heart can pump the blood to the organs of the body.

The aim of meditation is to give you a sense of inner peace that you will use throughout your day in all your dealings. This is why it is recommended that you meditate in the morning as soon as you awake. The positive feelings that you bring into your mind and body will then help you cope with your day.

Best Regards,
Wild Divine Team

Those of you who have taken my Silva Method classes remember the images I use to show illusions created by the brain. Depending on whether that day you are more right brain or left brain, you see the pictures with a different angle. Nothing wrong with that, as sometimes we are more of one than the other. Luckily with the Silva Method relaxation techniques, you quickly get back into a right brain state.

So what’s the difference. The left brain is logical and detail oriented. It’s the computer in us that stores all data, sorts it and analyzes it to deduct strategies and actions to follow.

The right brain is the emotional side of us; it understands and acts on feelings; it uses imagination to create a world by itself; it creates the vision of our desires. While the right side works with big picture, the left side fills in the details to reach it.

I found this article in the Herald Sun of Australia that uses an illusion to prove the point about our right and left brains. Check it out here:

Right Brain vs Left Brain

Thank you and have a wonderful day,
Jay Feuillet
Silva Method of Florida

Have you ever accidentally pulled your headphone socket out while listening to music? What happens when the music stops? Psychologists believe that our brains continuously predict what is going to happen next in a piece of music. So, when the music stops, your brain may still have expectations about what should happen next. A new paper published in NeuroImage predicts that these expectations should be different for people with different musical experience and sheds light on the brain mechanisms involved.

Research by Marcus Pearce Geraint Wiggins, Joydeep Bhattacharya and their colleagues at Goldsmiths, University of London has shown that expectations are likely to be based on learning through experience with music. Music has a grammar, which, like language, consists of rules that specify which notes can follow which other notes in a piece of music. According to Pearce: “the question is whether the rules are hard-wired into the auditory system or learned through experience of listening to music and recording, unconsciously, which notes tend to follow others.”

The researchers asked 40 people to listen to hymn melodies (without lyrics) and state how expected or unexpected they found particular notes. They simulated a human mind listening to music with two computational models. The first model uses hard-wired rules to predict the next note in a melody. The second model learns through experience of real music which notes tend to follow others, statistically speaking, and uses this knowledge to predict the next note.

Read more here.

(Via Medical News Today.)

I’d like to share with you a beautiful visual meditation lead by Deepak Chopra for Wild Divine on the Vimeo network. Also, below are several other links or options for you:

Vimeo interactive site, or download in
Flash version, in
Quicktime format, or watch on YouTube
here.

You can also get the full benefits of relaxation through biofeedback with the Healing Rhythms program.

Enjoy your day.
Jay Feuillet

The Silva Method is still evolving 50 years after being introduced in America. With the leadership of Laura Silva, the esteemed daughter of José Silva, founder and creator of the Silva Method, we have now access to an incredible amount of knowledge about ourselves and the power of our Mind.

So it was just a matter of time for this blog to change also. The time is right. You noticed that the list of links and products on this blog is much smaller and to the point. Don’t get me wrong, they were all very good products. I would never recommend you something that I did not use myself.

Today, the Silva Method is experiencing a renewal of sort. Laura Silva has introduced a series of new products to help us all to learn the how-to of lifelong changes. Below are the banners and links of these new products. Check them out for yourself, test them and see how real changes affect your Mind and Body, and all else around you. Enjoy!

Silva Life System

Silva Peaks

Silva Mind and Body Healing

Take the time to enjoy your life and family, live well and focus on the important things in your life,

Jay Feuillet
Silva Method Instructor and Coach

[ From HowStuffWorks ] The brain is one of the most amazing organs in the human body, but it’s also one of the most mysterious. Even with the best neuroscientists, psychologists and psychiatrists on the case, there’s still a lot we don’t know about our brains. And the things that we do know may turn out to be untrue, as there are many myths about this incredible organ. Think you can separate fact from fiction?

Take this quiz on brain myths and find out.

(Via How Stuff Works.)

Have you ever pulled an all-nighter to study for a test or get a project done for work? How about doing it 11 days in a row? A man in Cornwall, England, actually went 11 consecutive days without a wink of sleep.

On May 24, 2007, Tony Wright, a 42-year-old horticulturalist, claimed to have beaten the record of 264 hours (exactly 11 days) set in 1964 by 17-year-old American Randy Gardner. Wright had some practice: he had already been through more than 100 sleep deprivation experiments, the longest one lasting eight days. He also employed a unique raw-food diet. Wright claims that his regimen of salads, avocados, bananas, pineapples, nuts, seeds, carrot juice and herbal tea helped his brain stay awake. He also says that it allowed him to “switch” from one side of his brain to the other when he got tired. (Whales and dolphins are known to employ similar brain-switching techniques, which allow one part of their brain to rest while the other focuses on breathing and other basic functions.)

In order to chronicle his attempt, Wright confined himself to a live-music venue called Studio Bar in Penzance, Cornwall, and allowed a Webcam to monitor him the entire time. He also kept a blog for the BBC, though he stopped blogging on the tenth day because he found it too difficult to write coherently. The public visited Wright at the Studio Bar or kept track of him through his Webcam.

Read more here

(Via How Stuff Works?.)