Heart Strengthening Meditation

November 28th, 2009 By: Brittany

Take a few minutes to synchronize your breath with your beat to reduce stress instantly. Susanna Bair, cofounder of the Institute for Applied Meditation in Tucson, Arizona, and coauthor of “Energize Your Heart,” designed this meditation to invigorate the heart with conscious breathing and loving intention. “I’ve worked with people who have lowered their own blood pressure just by doing this exercise,” Bair says.

How to Do It
Adopt a Noble Stance
Sit upright, chest forward, shoulders back, spine straight, and head level.

Hone Your Focus
Close your eyes and become aware of your breath flowing in and out. You can put your hands on your heart or rest them by your sides.

Listen for Your Heartbeat
Draw in a deep breath and hold it for a moment. Become aware of your heart pulsing inside you (this may take some practice); then exhale. If you can’t hear your heartbeat, feel for your pulse in your chest or on the inside of your wrist.

Synchronize Your Breath
Allow your breath to fall in sync with your heart. Try inhaling for eight heartbeats and then exhaling for eight. Continue this for five to 10 minutes.

Repeat
Try this meditation once in the morning to energize you and again in the evening to clear tension and create a renewed calm.

Source: Whole Living

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Transcendental Meditation Research

November 22nd, 2009 By: Brittany

The National Institutes of Health has granted more than $24 million over the past 20 years to study the effects of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) program and other related programs on cardiovascular disease. The following is a summary of findings of the published research as well as a listing of universities where recent studies have been conducted.

Reduced Blood Pressure. The treatments employed included simple biofeedback, relaxation-assisted biofeedback, progressive muscle relaxation, stress management training, and the Transcendental Meditation program.  The results of statistical analysis showed that none of the first 4 treatment approaches demonstrated statistically significant reductions in elevated blood pressure, while the Transcendental Meditation program showed both significant clinical and statistical reductions in blood pressure.

Improved Quality of Life for Congestive Heart Failure Patients. This study examined the effects of conventional health education and the practice of the Transcendental Meditation technique on measures of heart failure severity and quality of life in a randomized controlled trial of twenty-three older African American men and women with congestive heart failure (CHF). The results indicate that the use of the TM technique may be effective in improving the quality of life and functional capacity of heart failure patients.

Enhanced Longevity. This study was a first-of-its-kind, long-term, randomized trial. It evaluated the death rates of 202 men and women, average age 71, who had mildly elevated blood pressure. Subjects in the study participated in the Transcendental Meditation program; behavioral techniques, such as mindfulness or progressive muscle relaxation; or health education. The study tracked subjects for up to 18 years. The study found that the TM program reduced death rates by 23%.

Reduced Atherosclerosis. In the study, 57 adults were randomly assigned into three treatment groups. After one year, the ceratoid intima-media thickness decreased significantly more in the subjects who were randomly assigned to the TM group.

To read more go to National Institute of Health

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Help Fight Fibromyalgia Pain With Meditation

November 20th, 2009 By: Brittany

Meditation helps fibromyalgia pain

Research now shows that meditation can help ease the depression associated with and the pain of fibromyalgia a condition marked by chronic joint and muscle pain, fatigue, and, in some cases, poor memory and thinking. While meditation doesn’t make the pain disappear, it appears to help patients refocus their attention and feel better.

Fibromyalgia is difficult to treat. Doctors normally recommend a combination of exercise and psychosocial interventions, such as learning how to relax. In addition, medications like antidepressants, anti-inflammatories and sleeping pills are often prescribed. The cause of fibromyalgia is unclear, but symptoms often begin after a traumatic experience and worsen during times of stress, said Sandy Sephton, a research psychologist at the University of Louisville. Fibromyalgia effects up to 4 percent of the population of the United States and other industrialized countries.

Source: MSN Health

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Using Meditation To Heal

November 14th, 2009 By: Brittany

Meditation can help most people feel less anxious and more in control. The awareness that meditation brings can also be a source of personal insight and self-understanding.

Handling Repressed Memories and Enjoying Life:

Dr. Borysenko notes that “meditation may lead to a breakdown of screen memories so that early childhood abuse episodes and other traumas suddenly flood the mind, making the patient temporarily more anxious until these traumas are healed. Many so-called meditation exercises are actually forms of imagery and visualization that are extraordinarily useful in healing old traumas, confronting death anxieties, finishing ‘old business’, learning to forgive, and enhancing self-esteem.”

“Meditation frees persons from tenacious preoccupation with the past and future and allows them to fully experience life’s precious moments”, says Daeja Napier, founder of the Insight Meditation Center and lay dharma teacher of insight meditation in suburban Boston.

“Many men and women tend to live in a state of perpetual motion and expectation that prevents them from appreciating the gifts that each moment gives us,” says Napier. “We live life in a state of insufficiency, waiting for a mother to love us, for a father to be kind to us, for the perfect job or home, for Prince Charming to come along or to become a perfect person. It’s a mythology that keeps us from being whole.

“Meditation is a humble process that gently returns us to the now of our lives and allows us to wake up and re-evaluate the way that we live our lives,” says Napier. “We realize that the only thing missing is mindfulness, and that’s what we practice.”

Depression:

Feelings of helplessness, hopelessness and isolation are hallmarks of depression-the nation’s most prevalent mental health problem. Meditation increases self-confidence and feelings of connection to others. Many studies have shown that depressed people feel much better after eliciting the relaxation response.

Panic attacks:

Sometimes anxiety becomes paralyzing and people feel (wrongly) that they are about to suffer some horrible fate. Panic attacks are often treated with drugs, but studies by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester and director of the medical center’s Stress Reduction Clinic, show that if people who are prone to panic attacks begin focused, meditative breathing the instant they feel the first signs of an episode, they are less likely to have a full-blown panic attack.

Source: Holistic Online

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The Science Of Miracles By Greg Braden

October 30th, 2009 By: Brittany

This video is by Greg Braden, internationally renowned as a pioneer in bridging science and spirituality. As someone who uses both the scientific and the spiritual side in relation to my work I find his discoveries and his wisdom very empowering.

Source: Greg Braden

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Meditation May Make You More Empathic

October 28th, 2009 By: Brittany

I think that the greatest part of continuing a meditation practice is the fact that it changes how to interact with people. Empathy is not something this is common in today’s society. Meditation does make you more in tune with others and your self. General it raises you awareness and this is why you may feel the emotion of empathy. This is good research!

Previous brain studies have shown that when a person witnesses someone else in an emotional state—such as disgust or pain—similar activity is seen in both people’s brains. This shows a physiological base for empathy, defined as the ability to understand and share another person’s experience. Now research at the University of Wisconsin has used advanced brain images (fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging) to show that compassion meditation—a specific form of Buddhist meditation—may increase the human capacity for empathy.

In the study, researchers compared brain activity in meditation experts with that of subjects just learning the technique (16 in each group). They measured brain activity, during meditation and at rest, in response to sounds—a woman in distress, a baby laughing, and a busy restaurant—designed to evoke a negative, positive, or neutral emotional response. [ continue reading ]

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Meditation Helps Brain Development

October 10th, 2009 By: Brittany

Brain research is beginning to produce concrete evidence for something that Buddhist practitioners of meditation have maintained for centuries: Mental discipline and meditative practice can change the workings of the brain and allow people to achieve different levels of awareness.

Those transformed states have traditionally been understood in transcendent terms, as something outside the world of physical measurement and objective evaluation. But over the past few years, researchers at the University of Wisconsin working with Tibetan monks have been able to translate those mental experiences into the scientific language of high-frequency gamma waves and brain synchrony, or coordination. And they have pinpointed the left prefrontal cortex, an area just behind the left forehead, as the place where brain activity associated with meditation is especially intense.

Davidson says his newest results from the meditation study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in November, take the concept of neuroplasticity a step further by showing that mental training through meditation (and presumably other disciplines) can itself change the inner workings and circuitry of the brain.

The new findings are the result of a long, if unlikely, collaboration between Davidson and Tibet’s Dalai Lama, the world’s best-known practitioner of Buddhism. The Dalai Lama first invited Davidson to his home in Dharamsala, India, in 1992 after learning about Davidson’s innovative research into the neuroscience of emotions. The Tibetans have a centuries-old tradition of intensive meditation and, from the start, the Dalai Lama was interested in having Davidson scientifically explore the workings of his monks’ meditating minds. Three years ago, the Dalai Lama spent two days visiting Davidson’s lab.

The Dalai Lama ultimately dispatched eight of his most accomplished practitioners to Davidson’s lab to have them hooked up for electroencephalograph (EEG) testing and brain scanning. The Buddhist practitioners in the experiment had undergone training in the Tibetan Nyingmapa and Kagyupa traditions of meditation for an estimated 10,000 to 50,000 hours, over time periods of 15 to 40 years. As a control, 10 student volunteers with no previous meditation experience were also tested after one week of training. [ continue reading ]

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