Mubarakah Ibrahim has a new buzzword on the brain: mindfulness.
It started when she came across studies that showed that mindfulness — learning how to be conscious and in the present — help control anxiety and depression in teens and adults. Days later, she was in Anne Dutton’s class on mindfulness-based stress reduction, learning how to bring the practice to things like brushing her teeth, washing her hands, and daily prayer. Now, she finds time to practice it every day — and she thinks other New Haveners should too.
“It’s the practice of bringing your attention to the present moment in a systematic and disciplined way,” said Dutton, a guest on Ibrahim’s “Mornings with Mubarakah” on WNHH radio. “We spend a lot of our time fighting against reality … if we can come into better relationship with that, so we’re not struggling so much, we’ll be more peaceful.”
Lucy Gellman Photos
Mindfulness, she and fellow guest Ather Ali shared, isn’t just woo-woo science either. “Mindfulness training effects markers associated with aging in the body,” shared Ali, an associate researcher in pediatrics and practitioner of integrated medicine at Yale Medical Group.
To hear more about what Ibrahim thinks of as “some kind of agnostic meditation,” which also includes diagnostic criteria for conditions like Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and Fibromyalgia, you can click on the audio above or find the show in iTunes or any podcatcher under “WNHH Community Radio.”
