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How Mindfulness Changes Your Brain
Updated On September 19, 2020
Mindfulness has a solid neuronal basis and there is increasing evidence of its salutary effect on emotional health and behavior.
Mindfulness, even when inadvertent, can have powerful effects on your brain. I know because it happened to me. Let me tell you the story.
A while back, I was having breakfast in the backyard, reading the “newspaper” on my laptop. (Actually, there was no paper and very little real news.) I was simultaneously listening to music on my favorite classical music station, KDFC out of San Francisco.
They were playing some sweet piano music (a nocturne by Chopin). It was so enchantingly beautiful that I closed my eyes, savoring it. And, then something strange happened.
At one with the music
It can’t be fully described in words, except to say that I felt “one with the music.” All of my attention was focused on it, on every note, every nuance in the almost imperceptible changes in tempo and loudness.
I had known and loved this piece for many years, but it was that morning, at that very moment that I discovered the tonality of it-the way Chopin arranged the composition around a central note.
