My pagey-flake

As you should have figured, based on the random bibliographies I've been posting, I am writing a research paper on some aspect of meditation and its usefulness in therapy. I created a page on pageflakes to cumulate all kinds of research in one place. If you click the link and check out my page, brilliantly entitled Paper 2, the first thing you might notice is the lovely blue sky-and-clouds theme, which is intended to create a light, happy, relaxing atmosphere. Seems appropriate for the topic, right? Now that I've put you in a good mood, hopefully you'll enjoy the actual content of the page.

My page is organized into two columns. The first flake in the first column is called BIBLIOGRAPHY FLAKE, which contains my complete bibliography plus annotations. I chose books and scholarly articles about the use of the mindfulness approach in therapies. Mindfulness means being aware of and detached from your thoughts, so you can pay attention to them but not allow them to control your feelings. It is a type of meditation that some therapists incorporate into their interventions to treat clients with mood disorders. I included sources that provide information on different aspects and applications of mindfulness-integrated therapies. Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy for Depression confirms the effectiveness of mindfulness training in preventing recurring episodes of depression. Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy and Self-Discrepancy in Recovered Depressed Patients with a History of Depression and Suicidality assesses its ability to help people with depression or who exhibit suicidal ideation and behaviors based on the self-discrepancy theory of depression, while Letting Go: Mindfulness and Negative Automatic Thinking bases its assessment on the theory that depression is caused and maintained by negative automatic thoughts. All of these sources describe mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), but Mindfulness and Acceptance considers behavior therapy as well. All of my sources have something unique to offer.

The next flake in the column is the rss feed to emmarlyb's delicious bookmarks, which I wrote about in my bookmarking soulmate post, followed by my own bookmarks on diigo. The next two are universal web search and universal blog search. The universal web search is already loaded with the results for "meditation psychology brain." I tried out a lot of different search terms to get the best possible results. "Meditation" by itself was definitely too general, so I tried "meditation psychology," which came up with some good things, but most were irrelevant. "meditation brain" yielded a lot of articles about the brain's activity during meditation, but not enough explained the benefits of these processes. "meditation therapy" provided some interesting articles about therapies and meditation, but very few of them actually had anything to do with the use of meditation in therapies to treat mental disorders. It turns out that searching for "meditation psychology brain" comes up with the largest number of relevant sources, which describe clinical applications of meditation and how meditation brings about positive health effects. I tried using the same search terms in the Universal Blog Search, but the results were completely useless. After trying out some different terms and combinations of terms, I ended with "mindfulness therapy."

All of the flakes in the second column are rss feeds. They come from websites where I found useful information on my topic, and they are updated regularly with new stories, articles, and so on. Some of the websites might seem irrelevant. f you are looking at it now you might be wondering, how can drug-resistant gonorrhea possibly have anything to do with meditation? And the answer is, it doesn't (at least as far as I know). But it comes from the Life section of New Scientist, which actually has some informative stories about meditation and its benefits. It's hard to find sites that emphasize the clinical use of meditation, but there are some sites on spirituality in general that are useful. My favorite is Yogic Trance, which I made a flake for, and about which I've written a profile post. Other sites that I've made flakes for are about physiology, science, or the brain. They are useful because they consider meditation from a biological perspective.

Anyway, I am hoping that organizing all these feeds and internet sources on one page will simplify my research. I have added a wide variety of sources on physiology, the brain, spirituality, etc. to get lots of different perspectives on my specific topic: mindfulness-based therapies. Hope you find that my flakes feed your interests as well!