Meditation Archive

Harvard Gazette: Eight weeks to a better brain, through mindfulness meditation

January 5, 2012 · Category: Meditation, Mindfulness

From The Harvard Gazette: Participating in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress. In a study that will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, a team led by Harvard-affiliated researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) reported the results of their study, the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain’s gray matter. “Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist ...

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Teachers: How to incorporate meditation in the classroom

December 20, 2011 · Category: Meditation, Mindfulness, Parenting

I just stumbled across a reader comment from early last year by a teacher in Massachusetts, Camille Napier Bernstein, who begins each day with a "stillness" exercise for the first few minutes each day in her classroom. The students are not only receptive, but sometimes enthusiastic about how valuable it has become to them. She has written about her successes with the practice. An excerpt: I teach in a public school. You might wonder if the practice has caused controversy. Certainly, my first two years were fraught with worry that a student might misinterpret the practice to his parents, and I doggedly ...

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Living daylight

September 12, 2011 · Category: Buddhism, Meditation, Mindfulness

A quote that really struck me today, from the Almaasary of quotes from A.H. Almaas: What determines whether a soul has basic trust? Basic trust is the effect on the soul of a particular aspect or quality of Being that we call Living Daylight. We call it this because if one's perception is subtle enough to visually see and kinesthetically feel the substance of one's consciousness, it actually looks like daylight, and is felt as an alive consciousness. It is experienced as something boundless, in the sense that it is not bounded by one's body but rather is experienced as something ...

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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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Mudita Forum is now at Google Groups

March 18, 2009 · Category: Buddhism, Eckhart Tolle, FLOW, Individualism, Integral, Intellectual, Meditation, Mindfulness, Mudita Forum, Objectivism, Witness Consciousness

Check out the new Mudita Forum, if you think you might be interested. The purpose of Mudita Forum is to provide a stimulating, thoughtful environment for discussing Eastern consciousness-raising practices — such as meditation, mindfulness, and the cultivation of presence — while using Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism as a basic philosophical frame-of-reference. The old group got lost when I was changing servers a couple years ago, but recently I've been contacted by new people wishing to join. My hope for the new group is that it will be much like the old one: low-volume, high-quality, and stimulating on many levels. I sent invites ...

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You are not your emotions, except when “you” disappears

March 14, 2009 · Category: Meditation, Mindfulness, Personal, Witness Consciousness

A friend published a friends-only LiveJournal post titled "What makes you... you?" in which she says "I know (or think I know) intellectually that the feelings I have do not make me the person I am. But when I dig a little deeper I'm not totally sure" -- and elaborates, very articulately, about what this experience is like, the fears it evokes, and the personal-intellectual challenges it poses. Below is my response. The most valuable skill I've acquired through meditation is the ability to experience the sense in which I am not the same as my emotions. We have a ...

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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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Jon Bernie: To awaken is to dissolve

May 24, 2008 · Category: Adyashanti, Buddhism, Meditation, Mindfulness, Witness Consciousness

As many of you know, over the past couple years I've become increasingly interested in the teachings of Adyashanti, Jed McKenna, and the like. Jon Bernie is one of Adya's friends and colleagues. I met him briefly and attended one of his satsangs (sitting & teaching events) last time I was in San Francisco. Below is a brief teaching he sent out to his an announcement list. (Thanks to Marsh for the forward.) I think it's a well-expressed encapsulation of this perspective. You might find it worth contemplating if you're open to this sort of thing. For ...

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