Mudita Journal

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Taking time to smell the butter

November 17, 2011  ·  Category: Health

Earlier this month I relocated to Malta, chiefly for its English-speaking culture, beautiful sights, and sunny weather — ranked #1 in the world for its desirable climate per International Living. I'm liking it a lot so far, though I've scarcely begun to explore the island properly. Among other things, living in a new country always entails discovering new brands of my favorite ingredients — which can be good or bad, depending on what I find. Presently I have three different brands of butter in my fridge. Lately I eat a lot of butter because it's better for your brain as well ...

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Treating chronic pain through radical acceptance

June 7, 2011  ·  Category: Adyashanti, Buddhism, Eckhart Tolle, Health, Meditation, Mindfulness, Witness Consciousness

A new friend asked for my advice about using meditation to treat chronic pain. I would assume that, like me, you have consulted many doctors and they aren't able to do much to help. In this case, one of the most powerful therapies is what we might call "radical acceptance." The basic premise is that we often don't realize how much of our suffering is of our own creation, created by how we react to the pain in our body. Sometimes the core of pain itself can be like a grain of sand in an oyster; but through our irritated reaction, it ...

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Dutchman Wim Hof uses meditation to control parts of his autonomic nervous system

May 23, 2011  ·  Category: Current Events, Health, Meditation

Since I use meditation as part of my regimen to manage chronic facial pain, this story caught my attention. A key difference, though, is that while I use meditation to manage my body's reaction to the primary pain -- i.e., to reduce the tension and anxiety and subsequent pain -- this guy uses meditation to alter the body's own primary functions: heart-rate, cortisol levels, body temperature, etc. I'd love to learn more about how he does it. ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) - The sun beams down on a warm Dutch spring morning, and the Iceman's students look wary as they watch him dump ...

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Meditation makes your brain bigger, prevents natural age-related thinning of the cortex

May 9, 2011  ·  Category: Health, Meditation, Mindfulness

A 2006 Harvard Gazette story "Meditation found to increase brain size" begins: People who meditate grow bigger brains than those who don’t. Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of our brains. Brain scans they conducted reveal that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input. In one area of gray matter, the thickening turns out to be more pronounced in older than in younger people. That’s intriguing because those sections of the human cortex, or thinking ...

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Think nuclear power is dangerous? Try anything else.

March 19, 2011  ·  Category: Current Events, Health, Politics

See the article "How to make a nuclear reactor that can't have a meltdown" for fascinating information about how nuclear power generators can be built -- and have been built -- that have zero chance of a meltdown, even in the worst case scenario. This part is particularly relevant to our conversations today about the dangers of nuclear power: To put it in perspective, in 2008 Next Big Future calculated how many people are killed per terawatt-hour of electricity generated. On average, there are 161 fatalities related to energy generation from coal for each one of those terawatt-hours, which comprise a quarter ...

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Dietary research: Good calories, bad calories

January 10, 2010  ·  Category: Health, Personal

My friend Thomas Ryan Stone has posted an interesting article on his site about the dietary research he and his wife conducted this past year, the low-carb lifestyle they adopted as a result, and the changes they noticed because of it. I was particularly intrigued by this summary of the ten key conclusions in Gary Taubes's book Good Calories, Bad Calories. Based on other information I've gleaned over the years, and what I've observed in my own dietary changes, I'm inclined to agree with these. 1. Dietary fat, whether saturated or not, is not a cause of obesity, heart disease, or any ...

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Nathaniel Branden is highly recommending the Lifebook program by Jon Butcher

October 23, 2009  ·  Category: Health, Intellectual, Objectivism

Nathaniel Branden sent the following message to members of his announcement list: It is my great pleasure to introduce to you a man and a program of stunning originality and practical results. The man is Jon Butcher and his program is Lifebook. Lifebook launches you into its world by inviting you to deeply examine 12 separate aspects of your life that, in reality, are not separate at all. In each category you are stimulated and inspired to clarify your beliefs, identify your goals and define what needs to be done to actualize them. You capture and document your thoughts and feelings along the ...

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The ‘Fat Head’ movie looks good

August 14, 2009  ·  Category: Health, Humor

I haven't seen the Fat Head movie yet, but now I want to. Because these videos are great stuff. Bonus points for the libertarian anti-nanny-state themes that seem to run throughout. Thanks to Kirez for the tip.

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The Valhalla weight rack

February 6, 2009  ·  Category: Health, Personal

My friend Kirez made a video to demonstrate the use of a new product he's designed, the Valhalla weight rack. I was impressed not only with what he made -- a weight rack that's both more ergonomic and more safe than what you find in gyms today -- but also with his idea of making a video to demonstrate its use. I'm just starting to climb aboard the video-marketing revolution myself, so it's timely for me. Valhalla weight rack from Kirez Reynolds on Vimeo. But really, who wouldn't trust a man in knee-pads and flip-flops?

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When mindfulness hurts

May 27, 2008  ·  Category: Buddhism, Health, Meditation, Mindfulness

A friend pointed me to the very interesting article "Lotus Therapy" in today's NY Times, which discusses the current state of the research, pro and con, on mindfulness as a clinical intervention. Criticisms of mindfulness are particularly interesting to me, partly because I experience mindfulness, at root, to be a simple increase in awareness -- and not even at the "synthetic" level of thought, but rather at the even more basic level of perception. Since the practice of mindfulness is virtually synonymous with an increase in perception, or elementary awareness, I often find myself wondering, "How on earth can raising awareness be ...

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