Natalie Bell offers a free 30-minute “drop in” mindfulness meditation on the fourth Wednesday of every month at 6 p.m. in the Palisades Branch Library community room, 861 Alma Real. The Highlands resident offers the same service the first and third Wednesday at the Santa Monica branch library on Montana Avenue. Each session includes an introduction to mindfulness, followed by a guided meditation and then a question-and-answer period.
“People can gain a sense of well-being and have more control over stress in dealing with how they interact with family and co-workers,” said Bell, who studied neuropsychology at UC Santa Barbara and has practiced 17 years as a physical therapist. She is currently a teaching assistant at UCLA for the Mindfulness Practice and Theory class, Psychiatry 175.
According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, two-thirds of office visits to family doctors are for stress-related symptoms, Bell noted. Stress can cause chronic fatigue, digestive upsets, headaches and back pain, and can affect the blood cells that help fight off infection. Stress can also make an asthma attack worse, may lead to diminished sexual desire and can trigger behaviors that contribute to death and disability, such as smoking, alcoholism, drug abuse and overeating.
Meditation is becoming more widely accepted as a way to deal with and reduce stress, Bell said. “You needn’t have done meditation for a long time to start to start seeing positive effects.”
In studies, the National Center for Biotechnology Information found that “mindfulness meditation produces demonstrable effects on brain and immune function. These findings suggest that meditation may change brain and immune function in positive ways.”
At Bell’s first library session on June 26, she led four people through the steps until they were in meditation. The practice centers around being aware and in the “now.” Those present were asked to try to quiet their minds, put thoughts aside and keep the mind from wandering to things that needed to be done (future) or to think of events that had happened during the day (past).
Bell, who has practiced numerous forms of meditation, such as concentrative, transcendent and Vipassana meditation, and lived in an ashram for a year in 1989 where she dedicated herself to meditation, said that mindfulness is unique because it’s simple and practical.
“It can be done anywhere. We can each gain more control over our mental and emotional well-being, and our health, by opening to our inner experiences with kind attention. Many people see that these benefits extend to the lives of those around them in improved communication, healthier habits and more consideration of others in our community.”
Visit: nataliebell.com
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