This is how to cultivate your mind's positive aspects when your person is navigating dementia-related brain changes
Dementia-related brain changes present specific shades of grief, loss, and stress that can overtake the family members who are providing care. An adult child, for example, might face unprecedented triggers, old conditioning, and guilt as they support a parent who is navigating Alzheimer’s.
Self-compassion might prove elusive when a Care Partner’s inner monologue is critical — harshly relaying looping stories of failure and shortcomings.
This is exactly why doctor and meditation instructor Lezlie Laws loves her work with this population. The mindfulness, gratitude, and meditation practices she teaches transform her students, which, in turn, directly impacts the person living with dementia.
“We often see people fighting against the condition that their person is in,” Laws says. “But the energy that you exhume when you are sitting by them in a state of total acceptance — that gets communicated to them.”
Your softness allows your person to relax, too.
“One of the reasons we suffer so much in life is we resist reality,” Laws says. “You can resist reality all you want, but you will never win that battle. Reality always wins.”
That’s why she begins her Mindfulness & Meditation class, offered through the Alzheimer’s & Dementia Resource Center, with a talk about acceptance, and the very real, valid emotions her students are navigating. Laws makes a distinction between the things we cannot control (the disease) and the things we can (our minds, our response).
The group, which meets the first Monday of each month via Zoom, is then led through a guided meditation and a question and answer period. Participants are encouraged to share their experiences and discuss obstacles to cultivating a practice.
“The daily practices that we have in our lives are the core things that make us feel better,” she says.
Most people are misguided about the time required to see benefits. You need two minutes to meditate, not two hours, research shows.
Laws suggests that students preface their meditation with a quick, two-minute gratitude list.
“You don’t have to sit down and journal for pages and pages and pages,” she says.
Start with five things — it doesn’t matter if you write the same five things every day, either.
“The research on gratitude shows that it doesn’t matter what you put on your list,” she says. “Doing it is the benefit.”
This process softens the heart, as it’s impossible to feel thankful and angry simultaneously, Laws notes.
Then, set your timer for another two minutes, close your eyes and breathe. She says it’s imperative that her beginning students stick to the two-minute meditation clock.
“You leave feeling like you could have done more,” she said.
In this way, practitioners build their self-care routine the same way they would a bicep muscle.
The two-minute gratitude reflection coupled with the two-minute meditation means you really only need four minutes total to begin shifting the brain.
“Caregivers really are stretched in so many ways,” Laws says. “Bringing this kind of equanimity into your life doesn’t change time but it gives you a kind of clarity and equipoise that allows you to move through your events with calm or ease.”
And that is its own blessing. The simple act of sitting in a doctor’s office or standing in line becomes its a mindfulness practice.
Laws, who has been meditating nearly six decades, is guided by her lifelong study of ancient wisdom traditions, the big existential questions, and her deep desire to see lifestyles, governments, and systems that center compassion and wellbeing for all.
When she was 55, at the pinnacle of her university career, Laws discovered ashtanga yoga, which completely changed her.
“I found a system that was kind of like an umbrella for all the different things I had been working on in my life,” she said.
She became a certified yoga instructor, went on several retreats, and diligently studied the eight limbs of yoga, ultimately creating Life Art Studio, to teach clients what she had learned.
“I just feel so grateful that I am 76 years old, and I’m still as excited about my work as I was when I started teaching at 22,” she says. “My friends all said you’re too old to do yoga, but 21 years later, I’m still doing yoga, I’m still on the path. I’m still feeling good and energized and most importantly I feel purposeful. I have a mission, a calling, and I want to do everything I can to support that work.”
That includes designing a journal for her students that strengthens their mindfulness practices. Called TIA (Thank, Intend, Ask), there is space for a gratitude list, daily intentions, and surrender.
“So much of the suffering we have is from the carelessness that we have in constructing our days,” she says.
Her teachings offer a simple, though not always easy, fix. The urgency that Care Partners face to be all things to all people might make self-care seem secondary.
But that stress, when unchecked, means we can’t possibly give our best.
“If I can give myself that little bit of silence, it lets me move through my day with ease,” she says.
All it takes is two minutes for gratitude, and two minutes for meditation — a self-care routine that requires less than five minutes altogether.
Laws also emphasizes the importance of seeking out a regular sangha, or community, where you can ask questions and connect.
These groups help attendees embrace their mind’s positive aspects and disarm the negative aspects, Laws says. The conversations are critical.
Students start to notice the spontaneous joyful or contented feelings when they arise unattached to any specific story or event.
We all could use a little extra support in cultivating our inclination toward positivity, and the Mindfulness & Meditation class that Laws offers through ADRC is a great starting point.
Visit adrccares.org or orlandoinsightmeditation.org to learn more
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