Joshua Philipp & Zachary Stieber, Epoch Times: Something unique happened on Times Square on Saturday. From the morning until late afternoon, it became calm. Beneath the flashing billboards and amidst the bustling of tourists, hundreds of people sat in meditation while soft Chinese music played above low voices.

The event was one of several throughout the city marking the 20th year since Falun Gong was introduced to the public in China. Meditation lasted through the easy afternoon, and turned to music and Chinese dance as the day drew on.

And although this was a celebration, people standing on corners with fliers for …

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A new study from the University of Sydney is the latest to highlight possible links between meditation and improved mental and physical health.

Rsearchers surveyed 343 long-term Sahaja yoga meditation practitioners and compared their results to the general population.

“We found that the health and wellbeing profile of people who had meditated for at least two years was significantly higher in the majority of health and wellbeing categories when compared to the Australian population,” Sydney Morning Herald quoted research leader Dr Ramesh Manocha, from the university’s psychiatry discipline.

The study highlighted Sahaja yoga meditation as it focuses on achieving “mental silence”, the closest practice to the “log” definition which was found by the researchers in old texts.

Dr Manocha asserted that the study …

John Hanc, New York Times: In 1969, Katherine Splain, then a student at the College of New Rochelle, saw the dark side of drug use among her peers. So she sought a different — and legal — path on her inward journey.

“I had read that meditation was actually another way of achieving the kind of ‘high’ that you might experience if you did drugs,” said Ms. Splain, who is now 63.

She heard about a class in meditation being offered near the school, decided to visit and was impressed with the students she met. “There wasn’t a lot of peace in the world in 1969 …

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Jhaneel Lockhart and Melanie Hicken, Business Insider: CEOs have stressful jobs, and some have taken to intense hobbies to find solace from the daily grind.

Some practice meditation—or even Transcendental Meditation, a mantra-based technique derived about 50 years ago from ancient Indian practices.
We’ve compiled a list of leaders who say that meditating gives them an edge in the competitive business world. Some have even built it into their company’s culture.

Hedge fund manager Ray Dalio uses Transcendental Meditation to check his ego

Dalio — founder and CEO of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund — has built many of the TM principles …

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The practice of mindfulness may help to relieve chronic or recurrent headache, according to Galway-based scientists seeking recruits to test the theory.

The Centre for Pain Research at NUI Galway is recruiting people with chronic or recurrent daily headaches to take part in an online pain management programme.

The study offers individuals with chronic daily headache the opportunity to avail of six online sessions of mindfulness training tailored specifically for headache pain by Dr Jonathan Egan, Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, NUI Galway.

The sessions, which are free of charge, will focus on active self-management, instruction in a range of relaxation techniques, coping skills and cognitive behavioural therapy techniques (CBT) to help identify negative thinking and coping patterns. The overall technique being used is …

Xinhua: The ruins of a Buddhist temple dating back 1,500 years ago have been discovered in China’s largest desert, offering valuable research material for historians studying Buddhism’s spread from India to China.

The temple’s main hall, with a rare structure based around three square-shaped corridors and a huge Buddha statue, has been uncovered after two months of hard work in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, Dr. Wu Xinhua, the leading archaeologist of the excavation project, said Monday.

“The hall is the largest of its kind found in the Taklimakan Desert since the first archaeologist came to work in the area in the 20th century,” said Wu, also head of the Xinjiang archeological team of the Chinese Academy of Social Science.

The ruins are located …

Matt Bowen: Silence dominates here.

It’s noon in room two at St Paul’s Catholic School and noise is everywhere else – the four walls are ablaze with colour, art and slogans; outside, the Ngaruawahia sun is laced with the din of schoolyard kids in play.

Inside though, not a sound – the children are meditating.

The class of 14 six-year-olds is sitting in a close circle on the carpet with teacher Judy Craven the centrepiece on a chair.

Her eyes are closed, too.

The kids sit cross-legged – hands rest either on knees with thumb and forefinger touching or in laps with fingers interlocked …

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Steve Vogel: Seeking new ways to treat post-traumatic stress, the Department of Veterans Affairs is studying the use of transcendental meditation to help returning veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Veterans Affairs’ $5.9 billion system for mental-health care is under sharp criticism, particularly after the release of an inspector general’s report last month that found that the department has greatly overstated how quickly it treats veterans seeking mental-health care.

VA has a “huge investment” in mental-health care but is seeking alternatives to conventional psychiatric treatment, said W. Scott Gould, deputy secretary of veterans affairs.

“The reality is, not all individuals we see are treatable by …

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Researchers in Spain have found that at least some of the individuals claiming to see the so-called aura of people actually have the neuropsychological phenomenon known as “synesthesia” (specifically, “emotional synesthesia”). This might be a scientific explanation of their alleged ability.

In synesthetes, the brain regions responsible for the processing of each type of sensory stimuli are intensely interconnected. Synesthetes can see or taste a sound, feel a taste, or associate people or letters with a particular color.

The study was conducted by the University of Granada Department of Experimental Psychology Óscar Iborra, Luis Pastor and Emilio Gómez Milán, and has been published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition. This is the first …

Adam Yauch, one of the founders of the hip-hop group the Beastie Boys, has died of cancer at the age of 47.

Yauch, who went by the name MCA, had been battling cancer since 2009.

Yauch was a practicing Buddhist, who actively supported Tibetan causes.

In 1994, he established the Milarepa Fund — an organization dedicated to the promotion of nonviolence — and became a leader of the movement to liberate Tibet from Chinese occupation. The fund was named after the 11th century Tibetan singer-yogi Milarepa, and was originally intended to distribute royalties from Yauch’s Beastie Boys’ 1994 songs “Shambhala” and “Bodhisattva Vow,” which had sampled the chanting of Tibetan monks, to …