Listen to Your Heart - Go with It

Sometimes you hear your heartbeat. you can almost always take a pulse reading and the chest strap with wrist display wireless fitness equipment does an excellent job of collecting data and displaying an array of information. For about $20 in parts this receiver (exploded view) allows headphone, earbud, or other audio connection monitoring of each heartbeat.

This is the most powerful feedback tool I have experienced. It is a surprizing advance in a pursuit. The following text was posted earlier at QuantifiedSelf:

RE: suggestions for simple data vizualization tools?

Keep it simple and real time, except for long term trends on more complex questions or issues. Sonification of HRV is my target. Got interested before cardiac ablation resolved atrial fibrillation and continue exploring with a simple Polar monitor and attachments based upon the Polar Heart Rate Module - RMCM01.

SuperCollider programming is still developing, but my real-time heart beat in my ears turned out to be a terrific feedback instrument. Never much for exercise groups or formal equipment, going with the flow of the tick of my heartbeat lets me explore movement in new ways. Walking down the street now has dance elements woven into the internal visualization of body and mind state. Bliss is remarkably easy to recognize and propagate - shifts in attention are markers for a drifting state that is absorbing on many levels. Having this tool allows for lots of tiny experiments with interesing results.

This is a much smaller second version. The first had two AAA batteries. With 6 hours on the battery I'm considering slimming down the other unit. The other end of the plastic plumbing fitting can take a larger battery.

Update 9/20/11
Wore a Polar Chest Transmitter and display watch to a dental appointment. Encouraged by a NuCalm System experience, noise isolating earbuds were used with the audio pulse unit. No science here, but I've had pain, panic, and problematic dentistry and relaxing was never this easy. I neared sleep twice. There was a mouth block disabling jaw movement witb a dam and local numbing for a root canal. Not bliss, but focused calm with a reminder pace.

Mindfulness Rules

With mindfulness there is greater awareness. With practice, the need for gear to monitor being or doing becomes superficial. You have the best possible sensors, processing power, and limitless memory capacity for storage and reflection. Why bother with biofeedback?

OK, you need a few hints. Download the free .pdf, study the text and prosper.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/w931n733l4575424/

So is guidance inb the exploration of the benefits of of mindfulness available for curious individuals? Yes.

www.urbandharma.org/pdf/mindfulness_in_plain_english.pdf

But wait, there's more, a whole page of links to ebooks such as:
 

Anapanasati - Mindfulness of Breathing

Loving-kindness Meditation

Meditation on a Coke Can

Long-Term Meditators Self-Induce high-Amplitude Gamma Synchrony


http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma5/ebooks.html 

Brief Guides to Better Being

Brief Guide to BetterBeing:
less TV, more reading
less shopping, more outdoors
less clutter, more space
less rush, more slowness
less consuming, more creating
less junk, more real food
less busywork, more impact
less driving, more walking
less noise, more solitude
less focus on the future, more on the present
less work, more play
less worry, more smiles
breathe

Briefer Guide to Better Being:
Eat better, move more, avoid unhealthy substances and connect with others in healthy ways.

Briefest Guide to Better Being:
Smile, Breathe, Go Slowly, enjoy.

Briefer from http://5healthytowns.org/ , brief and briefest from http://zenhabits.net/

Financial Times Takes a Look at Self-Monitoring

Maybe it is narcissism but preparing for the increasingly rapid rate of change especially with the Senior Bubble and Health Care Bubbles make strategic choices for self-management possible. Lots of examples of current uses, devices, and pipeline development make it a worthwhile read.

Financial Times Article: Invasion of the Body Hackers

Radical Change or New Age?

If you think it they will come:

The Electricity of Touch: Detection and Measurement of Cardiac Energy Exchange Between People R. McCraty, M. Atkinson, D. Tomasino, W.A. Tiller In: K. H. Pribram, ed. Brain and Values: Is a Biological Science of Values Possible. Proceedings of the Fifth Appalachian Conference on Behavioral Neurodynamics. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1998: 359-379.

Download the complete paper.

Mindfulness and Subjectivity

Mindfulness and awareness develop and change and are deeply connected to learning and development. The .pdf appears to be the Practice and Theory from a book named Mindfulness and Subjectivity. Scanned once the content caught my attention both because it was on my mind and in the text and the stated feminist connection helps with a continuing conversation with my daughter who completed a college course introduction to meditation.

Mindfulness and Subjectivity.pdf


This never made it as a post but seems to fit perfectly:

Self-Determination and the Neurology of Mindfulness

1. David Ryback

Abstract

Self-actualization is one of the keystones of humanistic psychology which, as a reaction to the reductionist values of behaviorism and psychoanalysis, also silently ignored brain research, subsuming it under the same rubric. Now comes mindfulness, a fairly new movement, with its openness to brain research and such cutting-edge notions as the adaptive unconscious—“thin slicing” unconscious perceptions for immediate decision making. The integration of mindfulness with emerging brain research leads to the possibility of modifying brain structure through conscious awareness, thereby restoring self-determination to its proper role. Another incipient movement in humanistic psychotherapy, deep empathy, is explained in terms of mindful human connection and limbic brain function. Just as emotion, thought, and brain structure mutually affect one another, so do therapist and client. Mindfulness, emotional connection, and deep empathy all contribute to mental well-being and a physiologically nurtured brain and help us transcend the numbing “consensus trance” that blinds us to the deeper aspects of life. Mindfulness and the new awareness of mind-brain interaction bring us back to the self-actualization values of the beginnings of humanistic psychology.

Self-Determination and the Neurology of Mindfulness

1. David Ryback

Abstract

Self-actualization is one of the keystones of humanistic psychology which, as a reaction to the reductionist values of behaviorism and psychoanalysis, also silently ignored brain research, subsuming it under the same rubric. Now comes mindfulness, a fairly new movement, with its openness to brain research and such cutting-edge notions as the adaptive unconscious—"thin slicing" unconscious perceptions for immediate decision making. The integration of mindfulness with emerging brain research leads to the possibility of modifying brain structure through conscious awareness, thereby restoring self-determination to its proper role. Another incipient movement in humanistic psychotherapy, deep empathy, is explained in terms of mindful human connection and limbic brain function. Just as emotion, thought, and brain structure mutually affect one another, so do therapist and client. Mindfulness, emotional connection, and deep empathy all contribute to mental well-being and a physiologically nurtured brain and help us transcend the numbing "consensus trance" that blinds us to the deeper aspects of life. Mindfulness and the new awareness of mind-brain interaction bring us back to the self-actualization values of the beginnings of humanistic psychology.