Zen Buddhism focuses on gaining enlightenment through meditation. Zen is a means to reaching enlightenment. Zen declines the study of scriptures, devotional practices and any religious rites (Source: Encyclopedia Britannica). Some of the key beliefs of Zen focus on The Four Noble Truths and The Noble Eightfold Path:

• First Noble Truth: The observation that suffering (dukkha) is pervasive in life. Second Noble Truth: The cause of suffering is because of craving. Third Noble Truth: Suffering can be ended by ending the craving. Fourth Noble Truth: Follow the Noble Eightfold Path.
• The Noble Path: Right views, right understanding of the mind, right speech, right conduct, right vocation, right effort in meditation, right awareness in meditation and right contemplation to achieve complete meditation.

ZEN AT WORK: The New York Zen Center is the first Buddhist organization to provide chaplaincy to a mainstream hospital — Beth Israel Medical Center. The Contemplative Care Program consists of student chaplains visiting staff and patients and conducting weekly group meditations. Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City is taking advantage of those services and offering Zen at work for employees and patients who may be under stress.

OTHER STRESS RELIEVERS: According to Forbes Magazine, the top 10 best stress relievers are: acupressure, exercise, hobbies, staying hydrated, massages, meditation, sex, sleep, therapy and maintaining a nutritious diet. There are also prescription hypnotics, antidepressants, beta-blockers and sedatives that may relieve some stress. Some people relieve stress by volunteering, playing with pets, keeping a journal, breathing and practicing self-hypnosis. (Source: The American Institute of Stress)

For More Information, Contact:

Elizabeth Dowling
Beth Israel Medical Center
New York, NY
(212) 523-7772
http://www.zencare.org/partnership/index.html

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Researchers say the findings, published in the journal Pain, offer support for the idea that yoga-style breathing exercises and meditation can help ease chronic pain.

The study gauged pain responses among 27 women with the chronic pain condition fibromyalgia and 25 healthy women the same age.

Researchers found that when they had the women perform slow breathing, it dampened their reactions to a moderately painful stimulus — brief pulses of heat from a probe placed on the palm. Overall, the women rated the pain intensity as lower and reported less emotional discomfort when they slowed their normal breathing rate down by half.

The benefit was greater and more consistent among the healthy study participants than those with fibromyalgia.

However, the findings suggest that breathing techniques could offer an additional way to deal with fibromyalgia or other types of chronic pain, according to lead researcher Dr. Alex J. Zautra, a psychology professor at Arizona State University in Tempe.

“What’s really valuable is that we were able…

Read the rest of this article…

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Srimati is a freelance spiritual teacher, writer and co-founder of Thrivecraft Coaching, and a former member of the Western Buddhist Order.

She is currently engaged in publishing her whole body of work via books, articles, CDs, films, and the internet. Her aim is to contribute accessible and relevant spiritual intelligence to mainstream modern life and business. Srimati’s CD, Answers: Finding Wisdom from Within, is now available from her website, Thrivecraft.

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He continued: “One of the things that impressed me so much about TM when I finally learned it was its simplicity. It’s a simple practice that calms the mind… and the thing that won me over about TM, apart from having my hero David Lynch as its vocal practitioner, was its effectiveness. Nothing else helped me quiet my mind and go to a calm, centred place. The thing that makes it effective is you don’t have to do all that much, and, as a profoundly lazy person, I appreciate that”.

CMU Music News

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“I think we were a little surprised, honestly, because we expected to see, if anything, a little bit of a protective effect,” said senior investigator Dr Donald Lloyd-Jones (Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, IL). “I would caution a little bit about the events data because it was only about four years of follow-up. It’s a relatively short-term study, and we should revisit it when more time has passed. But if you look at the estimates, if anything, people with the highest religious participation and spirituality actually had a few more events, and even though it wasn’t statistically significant, it was in the wrong direction. It might take quite a bit to turn that around. We certainly didn’t see any signal that this was protective, but neither could we say that it was risky.”

The study is published online January 25, 2010 in Circulation.

Improved overall health among religious and spiritual

Speaking with heartwire, Lloyd-Jones said that religious involvement has been consistently associated with improved health habits and outcomes, with different studies showing lower smoking and mortality rates among people who attend religious services frequently. Overall, self-reported health is better among the religious, and some smaller investigations have hinted that greater religiosity is associated with improved cardiovascular morbidity and mortality.

Read the rest of this article (free registration required)…

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Devoted yogis often extol the virtues of their practice, from better sleep and improved fitness to what only the most devoted call “yoga butt.”

Now researchers at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre want to study if yoga, combined with meditation, can help lower blood pressure and prevent the onset of hypertension.

Dr. Sheldon Tobe and his team have begun the search for 70 patients to participate in the study, which will involve up to a 10-month commitment.

According to Tobe, participants in the study, dubbed HARMONY (Hypertension Analysis of Stress Reduction using Meditation & Yoga) will learn skills for decreasing stress, which is associated with elevated cardiovascular risk. Stress management is already a recommended treatment for patients with high blood pressure, which increases the risk of heart disease.

“My hope is that this may lead to the day when physicians can refer patients with high blood pressure to trained health practitioners who can deliver standardized, effective lifestyle therapy,” Dr. Tobe said in a statement.

For the study, participants will learn a form of relaxation therapy known as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which includes meditation and yoga.

During the study period, subjects will participate in nine MBSR group sessions over a period of nine weeks, as well as one full-day retreat. Participants will also have to practice MBSR at home.

Researchers will also monitor participants’ blood pressure during monthly visits.

The study follows other research that confirms the health benefits of yoga and meditation:

• A study published last year in the journal Lancet Oncology found that one hour per day of relaxation or meditation, combined with a specific diet and exercise regimen, may delay aging and increase life expectancy.
• University of Montreal research published last February found that practitioners of Zen meditation are less susceptible to pain, and appear to use their training to maintain steady breath.
• Dr. Nicole Culos-Reed of Calgary’s Tom Baker Cancer Centre founded a therapeutic yoga program tailored to each patient’s physical and mental needs. The program has been so successful it is expanding across Alberta and into B.C., Saskatchewan and Ontario.

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The New University Union was the site for a group of students surrounding a saffron sofa and speakers blasting Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches on Jan. 27, all in an effort to introduce Binghamton University’s Sitting Club.

The Sitting Club is a Student Association-chartered club that began last semester with the goal of encouraging students to take time to just sit in meditation.

The club meets Mondays at 7:30 p.m. above the Susquehanna Room, where each member participates in guided meditation and relaxation exercises.

“There is the satisfaction of knowing that people might find peace by coming to this group or begin to find their spiritual path. It is a great gift to give yourself,” Deirdre Arsenault, vice president and co-founder of the club, said of the club’s aim.

When asked about the interesting name choice, junior club member Michael Bush said that associating the club with a specific religious or philosophical idea would put the club “in a container.”

“What we are is something else. When I think of the Sitting Club, it makes a difference,” Bush said. “Students can just stop and sit and be something else.”

Wednesday’s couch event was, in part, a reflection of celebration of King following his birthday, but president and co-founder Julian Goetz said it was also a tribute to King’s close friend Thich Nhat Hanh, a peace activist and Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk who followed teachings of meditation.

When listening to King, it is “hard not to be inspired,” Goetz explained. Goetz, the owner of the couch, brought it from his house to campus early Wednesday morning and set up the couch and speakers outside of Lecture Hall. From the speakers, tracks from King’s “In Search of Freedom” album played.

Goetz said that the club did not receive official permission before the event to set up the couch. The group began outside of Lecture Hall, but, shortly after, campus police relocated the group to the New University Union because of sound complaints. They continued the sit there throughout the day.

“We really let freedom ring,” Goetz said, speaking of the number of students who throughout the day stopped and joined the Sitting Club outside the New University Union.

“It was a very creative program,” said SA Executive Vice President Jared Kirschenbaum. “A great way for people who are just passing by to take a few seconds to remember the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.”

The club is planning further events for the remaining of the semester, including guest speakers and more couch sit-outs on campus.

“Show up if you want to feel serenity,” Arsenault claims.

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When I went to my first San Francisco Yoga Journal conference in 2009, I mostly found myself wandering around the Hyatt confused, frustrated, physically exhausted, and waiting for lunch. This year, I returned with a strategy, a curriculum of sorts. I’d barely do any physical yoga at all; with that, I’ve become all too familiar. Instead, I’d begin my journey into yoga’s subtler aspects, its deeper mysteries. It was time for an introduction to Tantra.

Most people, if they’ve heard of Tantra at all, would say, “Oh, yeah, that’s that thing Sting and his wife do before they fuck.” Until pretty recently, I’d have said the exact same thing. And now, though I know far less about Tantra than I do about, say, the mechanics of the NBA Draft Lottery, I’ve begun to acquaint myself with some basic facts.

Essentially, Tantrism is a school of yoga that began to emerge around 800 A.D. in reaction to certain facets of Vedic orthodoxy. Yoga at that time had grown quite practical, rigid, and exclusionary, and Tantrism brought a mystical element to the proceedings, the possibility that yoga could be practiced by anyone, including, shockingly, women. Tantric practitioners saw yoga as a way to tap into the “divine energy” of the universe. Sometimes this was achieved through identification with traditional Hindu deities, but, since many of its practitioners were Buddhist, that pantheon didn’t always apply. Alternate paths to the divine included meditation, scholarship, mantra (either recited privately or sung with a group), and other, more complex “secret practices” that probably cost a lot of money.

The popular Western yoga form that most closely resembles traditional Tantric practice is kundalini, what with its chanting and its coiled-snake energies and all. But Tantra is actually a complex, variegated body of spiritual work that has only really begun to leach its way into contemporary yogic study. You’re more likely to find a class about paganism than one about Tantric yoga.

But at the Yoga Journal conference, which caters largely to extreme yoga weirdoes like me, Tantra can carry the day, as it seemed to this year. There were lectures in Tantric philosophy, courses on Tantric history, and intimations of larger things to come. I tuned in to some of those, and also took a class called The Art Of Tantric Meditation.

The class leader, Sally Kempton, was (and is) an extremely advanced meditation teacher, which either made it totally ironic or completely appropriate that the class took place in a thin-walled basement conference room in the middle of the convention’s noisy and crowded Yoga Marketplace. From the crackling walkie-talkies and guys who occasionally walked through the room whistling and wearing beige work shirts, I gauged that we were also directly adjacent to some sort of maintenance closet. It was noisy in there. We sat in straight-backed conference chairs, the color and consistency of old puke, and attempted to connect with the divine.

As any master teacher worth his or her cushion would, Sally Kempton told us to ignore the sounds. More accurately, she asked us to let the sounds penetrate our consciousness, notice them, meditate on them, and then let them go. The sounds were, like our breath, or bodies, our thoughts, and everything around us, part of a greater cosmic energy. I found myself somewhat distracted by the extraordinarily hot woman sitting to my left, so close that our knees were almost touching, though the distraction had less to do with the fact of her extraordinary hotness than with the fact that she kept fidgeting with her cell phone by pulling it in and out of a plastic Bakugan backpack. Why, I wondered, did this woman have such a backpack, and how could I incorporate the backpack into the Tantric idea that all physical things are really just a condensed form of “divine light”, or sound vibration? This was a difficult question that our teacher wouldn’t be able to answer, because there was no way in hell I would ask.

In any case, we did many different meditations over the course of two hours, including one where Kempton taught us an interesting technique to intensify and then expel negative emotions. Then arrived the moment of truth, the money shot, so to speak. The teacher announced that we would now do a sexual energy meditation.

In traditional Tantrism, sexual-energy rites were practiced by obscure sects as a kind of clan initiation, and had very little to do with mainstream belief. In contemporary interpretations, they’re a way for middle-aged hipsters to blend their Shiva and Shakti energies together into a series of million-dollar orgasms. What we did in that basement conference room was neither obscure nor wealth generating, but it definitely felt good.

The teacher said: Imagine something extremely sexually arousing. I initially thought of Lynda Carter, circa 1976, but that seemed like kind of a cliché, so instead I concocted a few other scenarios that I won’t share with you right now. Regardless, as she instructed, a warm feeling, almost like intense light, began to emanate from my genital center. No, it wasn’t a boner. Don’t be perverted. This was a higher sensation that transcended mere sexual pleasure.

Then she told us to take that divine feeling and move it through our bodies, starting in our toes, and then into our ankles, and then our calves, and then our legs, and then our thighs, and traveling upward through various meridians and chakras. Getting to such a place wasn’t so hard, really. I’d been meditating all morning, even all weekend, and my mind was primed. As I sat there in that shitty chair in that shitty room with its shitty carpet, a strange kind of semi-ecstasy permeated my every pore. My body began to involuntarily shudder with pleasure.

Next to me, the hot woman with the Bakugan backpack went “OHHHHHHHHHH!” Then the woman sitting next to me on the other side, in a slightly lower tone, went, “MMMMMMMMM!” Not wanting to be left out, I murmured a deep, low, “AHHHHHHHH!” The room had reached a state of Samadhi, where our individual selves had dissolved into a greater cosmic consciousness, probably fueled (though not in my case, I swear), by fantasies of having sex with George Clooney.

Then it was over, and our teacher released us into a room where entrepreneurs were selling stretchy pants and massage balls. A few hours later, after I’d gone to The Ferry Building to quite wisely invest $3.50 on a mixed “meat cone” from Boccalone, I returned to the conference to attend a lecture on the future of Tantra in the West. On the way there, I ran into the woman who’d been seated to my left.

“So, that workshop…” I said.

“Yeah, that was kinda weird,” she said, without looking me in the eye. “What’s up?”

And then she walked away, spastically and hurriedly, carrying the secrets of the Tantra in her Bakugan backpack.

Follow Neal Pollack on Twitter

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The Dalai Lama often describes Buddhism as being, above all, a science of the mind. That is not surprising, because the Buddhist texts put particular emphasis on the fact that all spiritual practices – whether mental, physical or oral – are directly or indirectly intended to transform the mind.

So it wasn’t surprising that when a meeting was held in 2000 with some of the leading specialists in human emotions – psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers – they spent an entire week in discussion with the Dalai Lama at his home in Dharamsala, India. Later we agreed to launch a research programme on the short and long-term effects of mind training – “meditation” in other words.

What have we discovered about meditation and the human brain?

Experiments have indicated that the region of the brain associated with emotions such as compassion shows considerably higher activity in those with long-term meditative experience. These discoveries suggest that basic human qualities can be deliberately cultivated through mental training. The study of the influence of mental states on health, which was once considered fanciful, is now an increasing part of the scientific research agenda.

Do you have to be highly skilled to experience the benefits of meditation?

No, one does not have to be a highly trained: 20 minutes of daily practice can contribute significantly to a reduction of anxiety and stress, the tendency to become angry and the risk of relapse in cases of severe depression. Thirty minutes a day over the course of eight weeks results in a considerable strengthening of the immune system and of one’s capacity for concentration. It also speeds up the healing of psoriasis and decreases arterial tension in people suffering from hypertension.

Tell us about your new book, The Art of Meditation.

The book tackles the question: why should we bother to meditate? The answer is that we all have the potential for positive change, which largely remains untapped. That’s a great pity, because we know the virtue of training and learning. We spend years going to school and training in things like sports, but for some strange reason we don’t think that the same need applies to developing and optimising our human qualities.

Tell us about the Mind and Life meeting that will discuss compassion in economic systems.

At the conference – in Zurich in April – will be some bold economists who can demonstrate that altruists are able to influence global markets. In the past, such studies were often refuted by sceptical financial analysts. However, someone like Ernst Fehr, the famous Swiss economist, will show that if altruists make the rules and it is in the interests of selfish people to cooperate, then society can function in a more cooperative way.

Profile

Matthieu Ricard is a French Buddhist monk with a PhD in molecular biology. He has participated in numerous experiments into the effects of meditation on the human brain

New Scientist

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Inmates in the central state of Madhya Pradesh will have up to 15 days taken off their sentences for every three months that they do yoga. The offer is being extended even to the hardest cases, including murderers serving life terms, in a startling vote of confidence in the calming effects of stretching routines, deep breathing exercises and chants of “Om”.

“We’ve seen that meditation and yoga work our inmates into good shape physically, mentally and spiritually,” Sanjay Mane, the region’s inspector-general of prisons, who oversees more than 100 jails and 50,000 inmates, told The Times.

“Since we began the project last month we have seen their behaviour change . . . prisoners are learning to manage their emotions. The ambience in the jails is improving.”

Inmates have to complete an hour of yoga every morning to qualify for early release. About 4,000 have signed up and several have claimed that it has rehabilitative effects.

Narayan Sharma, an inmate at Gwalior central jail who wants to become a yoga instructor, said that the sessions had helped to banish the “angry thoughts” in his head.

“It was these thoughts that made me commit crimes,” he said. “I hope that after we are released, we can use what we have learnt and promote yoga in society so that people no longer commit crimes.”

A strategy to cut tension levels in India’s prisons — institutions that could have been designed to plant “angry thoughts” into the most placid of minds — was overdue. Most jails are overcrowded, underfunded and filthy. About two thirds of the 350,000 inmates are awaiting trial for minor crimes.

For those awaiting trial, the state of the Indian legal system is enough to trigger a deep existential despair. The High Court in Delhi is so behind that it would take up to 466 years to clear the backlog, it was revealed last year.

Prisoner yoga has precedent. During his eight spells in prison under British rule, the first of which was in 1921, Jawaharlal Nehru, who became India’s first Prime Minister, improved his yogic skills.

The Indian Army found in trials that giving meditation precedence over physical drills produces a deadlier fighting force. A prison in Norway found, however, that some prisoners became more aggressive after being offered yoga classes.

Times Online

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