Mindfulness

"Only that day dawns to which we are awake."   
- Thoreau

"And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started      
and to know the place for the first time." 
- T. S. Eliot 

“When we are in touch with our true mind,
the source of understanding and compassion will spring out."
- Thich Nhat Hanh

"From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state
every moment a special moment."
- Jon Kabat-Zinn 

“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mindfulness is about waking up to life and what it means to be fully human. The practice of mindfulness is marked by openness and curiosity toward your experience.  Mindfulness meditation develops awareness and compassion, which are essential to living skillfully.  Compassionate attention helps develop many qualities and abilities such as focus, clarity, insight, love, compassion, and joy.  These translate into reduced stress and anxiety, improvements in health and mental wellbeing, and greater adaptability and appreciation in life.  Mindfulness practice helps us to take care of ourselves and thus transform the suffering and stress in our lives and in our society.

source:  http://livingmindfully.org/

changes brain structures in 8 weeks

Monday, February 07, 2011 by: Sherry Baker, Health Sciences Editor
See all articles by this author
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/031228_meditation_brain.html#ixzz1mmuDvnih

Meditation is just a way to relax and maybe calm you down for the moment, right? Wrong. Not only will most regular meditators tell you that meditation makes them feel better emotionally and physically, but now there is also scientific evidence that regular meditation literally changes the body -- specifically, it changes the brain in ways that appear to be beneficial.

In a study published in the January 30 edition of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers concluded that an eight week mindful meditation practice produced measurable changes in participants' brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. This is the first study to document meditation-produced changes in the brain's grey matter over time.

"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 throughout the day," Sara Lazar, PhD, of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program, the study's senior author, said in a media statement. "This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing."

Previous research has documented structural differences between the brains of experienced mediation practitioners and individuals with no history of meditation. These brain changes included thickening of the cerebral cortex in areas associated with the integration of emotions and attention. However, earlier studies were unable to document that those brain differences were actually caused by meditation.

So for the new study, MR images were taken of the brain structures of 16 study participants two weeks before and two after they participated in the 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Program at the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness. Besides attending weekly practice sessions featuring mindfulness meditation (which focuses on nonjudgmental awareness of sensations, feelings and state of mind) the research subjects also used audio recordings for guided meditation practice and were asked to keep track of how much time they meditated daily, too. MR brain scans were also taken of a group of non-meditators over a similar time interval to serve as a control.

The meditators reported spending about 27 minutes a day practicing mindfulness exercises. The MR images, which focused on areas where meditation-associated changes were noted in earlier studies, showed increased grey-matter density in the hippocampus (an area of the brain known to be important for learning and memory) and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion and introspection.

Participants' answers to a mindfulness questionnaire indicated significant improvements in the meditators' stress levels compared with pre-participation responses -- and reductions in stress also were correlated with decreased grey-matter density in the amygdala, part of the brain which is known to play an important role in anxiety and stress. None of these changes were seen in the control group.

"It is fascinating to see the brain's plasticity and that, by practicing meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can increase our well-being and quality of life," Britta Holzel, PhD, first author of the paper and a research fellow at MGH and Giessen University in Germany, said in the press statement. "Other studies in different patient populations have shown that meditation can make significant improvements in a variety of symptoms, and we are now investigating the underlying mechanisms in the brain that facilitate this change."

For more information:
http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/~lazar/

About the author

Sherry Baker is a widely published writer whose work has appeared in Newsweek, Health, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Yoga Journal, Optometry, Atlanta, Arthritis Today, Natural Healing Newsletter, OMNI, UCLA's "Healthy Years" newsletter, Mount Sinai School of Medicine's "Focus on Health Aging" newsletter, the Cleveland Clinic's "Men's Health Advisor" newsletter and many others.

Explore Mindful Living’s 8-week Mindfulness Meditation Course:

http://livingmindfully.org/MBSR_course.html

http://livingmindfully.org/About_Mindfulness.html

Buddhist wisdom and questions of science

Buddhist wisdom and questions of science | The Japan Times Online

Buddhist wisdom and questions of science

By JOSEPH S. O'LEARY

Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic: 

A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice, 

by B. Alan Wallace. Columbia University Press, 2011, 304 pp.

This book is a stirring attack on the hubris and blind spots of the scientific establishment, combined with an engaging presentation of Buddhist wisdom as the antidote.

B. Alan Wallace upholds the full panoply of classical Buddhist teachings, as taught in Tibet, and does not shy away from a frontal conflict with the dogmatic presuppositions of contemporary science.

He shows that materialist dogma keeps scientists from any understanding of human consciousness and freedom, and leads them into absurdities...

Coming to his positive proposals, Wallace first confronts us with the unpleasant doctrine of reincarnation: Death is not the end of our woes, but it consigns us to a new chapter in the endless round of painful rebirths, perhaps as animals — unless we are so privileged as to attain nirvana. This, he thinks, can be scientifically established: Young children remember their previous existence, and the Buddha had clear recall of all his past lives.

Wallace makes the claim that Buddhism can found a new science of consciousness and of the physical universe.

The International Shamatha Project, newly launched with the blessing of the Dalai Lama (www.shamatha.org), lays the basis for this scientific revolution by having people meditate in retreat centers for six hours a day, so as to attain the state of quiescence known as shamatha and thence proceed to clear insight into the fabric of existence.

 

The meditator sees the ultimate emptiness of everything that claims to have stable, substantial identity, and discovers the role of subjective fabrication in the creation of what appears as an objective, physical world.

Many scientists would agree that their discourse is a set of conventions, not a direct transcription of the way things really are. Quantum physics, which Wallace plays off against barren scientific materialism, shows that at the subatomic level it is impossible to separate the roles of observer and observed.

Extending this to the whole universe, he claims that "the past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present," and our decisions about what to observe determine "what kind of a universe emerges in our experience as being objectively real" (p. 85).

Can Buddhist wisdom, even with the alleged support of quantum physics, shake the security of scientific fact and logic?

Science, at its canniest, goes part of the way to meet Buddhist awareness of conventionality, relativism and mind-based interpretation of reality, but it cannot go the whole way.

 Read More: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fb20120408a2.html

Joseph S. O'Leary, professor of English literature at Sophia University, is an Irish theologian.

His 2011 Etienne Gilson lectures on Western philosophy and Buddhist concepts have been published by Presses Universitaires de France.

Gratitude

“We pray for our daily bread; bread gives us the strength to do so. ”
 

-- R.H. Blyth 

 

“If the only prayer you say your entire life is 'thank you' that would suffice.”
 

-- Meister Eckhart 

Source:

http://www.todoinstitute.org/gratitude.html

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Zen


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Zen stories and sayings. Zen is a school of Mahna Buddhism, translated from the Chinese word Chán. This word is in turn derived from the Sanskrit dhyna, which means zen particularly realized form meditation,The attainment of enlightenment. As such, it theoretical knowledge in favor of direct, experiential realization through meditation and dharma practice.