Whenever I teach my annual Mindfulness Immersion for Writers, we’re always looking to see what areas we most need to attend to with our mindfulness practice.
This year, I finally found a reliable quiz you can take and I offer it here as a way to help you assess what next best steps you can take to be more present for this go around of life.
As Mary Oliver said, "Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
Devotion to….what? Ah, that’s what you’ll find out the more you awaken.
Let's see where you're at with your mindfulness, shall we?
The Quiz
Here is the questionnaire, called the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire. It was developed by Ruth Baer, a professor and mindfulness researcher based at the Kentucky University. The purpose of this quiz is to measure the elements that help us be mindful in the course of our daily lives. The small things we do to be present.
Print it out and take it when you have some quiet time, perhaps with a nice cup of tea, a cat on your lap, and a cozy blanket at hand.
Here's a great article on what the questionnaire is all about.
Scoring Your Mindfulness Assessment
Okay, maybe I'm just not good with numbers (true story), but I found scoring this to be really really confusing. So I figured it out (actually the Zen Master aka Husband figured it out) and here's what you do:
After you take the test, you'll see a key on the back. We're scoring each of the five facets of mindfulness. For each number in each section you just add up what number you put.
BUT! For the ones with an "R" you reverse the number. Anything you marked a 3 stays a three. But if you marked a 4, then you only give yourself 2 points (2 is the reverse fo 4, according to this scale). Or, if you marked a 2, then you would give yourself 4 points. The same applies to number 5 and number 1 on the scale.
Here's an example:
For question #12, which is the first one with a reverse scoring, I put the number 1 on the scale to answer the question. But I don't give myself 1 point here, because it's reversed. I give myself 5 points.
Now, while it's very frustrating that there is no answer key here to tell us what the score means, the basic idea is: the higher your score in an area, the more mindfulness you have in that area.
40 is the highest mindfulness score in each area. The closer you are to 40, the more mindful you are in that area.
This is great data for us, because you can clearly identify what areas you might need to work on. And if we have a call coming up, we can dig into these results.
I also recommend taking this call periodically, to see where if there are any shifts as you dig into the mindfulness practices of your choice.
Your Brain on Meditation / Neurological Benefits
This article is a good one, though it's over 10 years old. Below are a few of my favorite bits:
In a study published in the journal Neuro Image in 2009, Luders and her colleagues compared the brains of 22 meditators and 22 age-matched non-meditators and found that the meditators (who practiced a wide range of traditions and had between five and 46 years of meditation experience) had more gray matter in regions of the brain that are important for attention, emotion regulation, and mental flexibility. Increased gray matter typically makes an area of the brain more efficient or powerful at processing information. Luders believes that the increased gray matter in the meditators’ brains should make them better at controlling their attention, managing their emotions, and making mindful choices....
Like anything else that requires practice, meditation is a training program for the brain. “Regular use may strengthen the connections between neurons and can also make new connections,” Luders explains. “These tiny changes, in thousands of connections, can lead to visible changes in the structure of the brain.” Those structural changes, in turn, create a brain that is better at doing whatever you’ve asked it to do. Musicians’ brains could get better at analyzing and creating music...
Over the past decade, researchers have found that if you practice focusing attention on your breath, the brain will restructure itself to make concentration easier. If you practice calm acceptance during meditation, you will develop a brain that is more resilient to stress. And if you meditate while cultivating feelings of love and compassion, your brain will develop in such a way that you spontaneously feel more connected to others...
...concentration meditation, in which the meditator focuses complete attention on one thing, such as counting the breath or gazing at an object, activates regions of the brain that are critical for controlling attention. This is true even among novice meditators who receive only brief training. Experienced meditators show even stronger activation in these regions. This you would expect, if meditation trains the brain to pay attention...
After the mindfulness intervention, participants have greater activity in a brain network associated with processing information when they reflect on negative self-statements. In other words, they pay more attention to the negative statements than they did before the intervention. And yet, they also show decreased activation in the amygdala—a region associated with stress and anxiety. Most important, the participants suffered less. “They reported less anxiety and worrying,” Goldin says. “They put themselves down less, and their self-esteem improved.”
Goldin’s interpretation of the findings is that mindfulness meditation teaches people with anxiety how to handle distressing thoughts and emotions without being overpowered by them. Most people either push away unpleasant thoughts or obsess over them—both of which give anxiety more power. “The goal of meditation is not to get rid of thoughts or emotions. The goal is to become more aware of your thoughts and emotions and learn how to move through them without getting stuck.” The brain scans suggest that the anxiety sufferers were learning to witness negative thoughts without going into a full-blown anxiety response.
Quickie For Your Brain on Meditation
This article in Forbes has a quick run-down with linked medical studies that is useful to scan, as well.
Why We Need To Keep Meditating (Neuroplasticity, yo!)
This is a great article from Psychology Today that gets specifically into the brain science. I love how she talks about the body and increased empathy - so key for us as writers!
But I appreciate even more how she gets into WHY we need to keep up this practice:
However, to maintain your gains, you have to keep meditating. Why? Because the brain can very easily revert back to its old ways if you are not vigilant (I’m referencing the idea of neuroplasticity here). This means you have to keep meditating to ensure that the new neural pathways you worked so hard to form stay strong.
To me, this amazing brain science and the very real rewards gained from meditation combine to form a compelling argument for developing and/or maintaining a daily practice. It definitely motivates me on those days I don’t “feel” like sitting. So, try to remind yourself that meditating every day, even if it’s only 15 minutes, will keep those newly formed connections strong and those unhelpful ones of the past at bay.
Help Is Here
These are my free resources for mindfulness and meditation.
But if you’re up for it, schedule a call with me or, if I have a meditation or mindfulness course, I’d love for those offerings to be of use to you.
All my free resources for writing etc. can be found on this page.
Here’s to attention and devotion!
This Weekend
Breathe. Write. Repeat.
“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.”
— William H. Gass, A Temple of Texts
