Also available online at http://www.wildmind.org/newsletter/200511.html

November 2005

Dear Wildmind Subscriber,

Welcome to our latest newsletter. As usual, we bring you a round-up of the latest international news on meditation -- including an article about Wildmind's work -- as well as news of Wildmind's meditation courses. Enjoy!

In this issue:

• Meditation in the news
• Three new translations of our site now available
• Support our translation project
• Review
• Quote of the month

Our next online meditation courses start next Monday, November 7.

Meditating has been shown in clinical studies to improve both mental and physical health. If you've ever been curious to find out more about meditation's powerful potential for reducing stress, staying healthy, and for encouraging conscious relaxation, sign up for one of our convenient online meditation courses.

These four-week courses offer a content-rich experience and interactive experience, with online readings, guided meditations in MP3 and RealAudio format that you can download to your computer, a discussion forum, and personal attention in your online journal. And you have access to all these things 24/7.

Our courses are suitable for anyone from complete beginners to more experienced practitioners. You'll learn powerful techniques for reducing stress and developing patience, relaxation, and calmness in a friendly and supportive environment.

Our September courses will be led by Sinhendra, an accomplished teacher who is part of the team at Dharmavastu Buddhist Study Center in northwest England. Sinhendra has a background in theatre arts, and has done post-graduate study in the history of ideas.

Sinhendra

Our next online meditation courses -- from all levels from beginners onwards -- start Monday, November 6. Make sure you book your place now.

Meditation in the News

Oct 31 Putting meditation to work (Montreal Gazette).
Now mainstream. Professionals learn to quiet their minds, balance their lives

Oct 27 Neuroscience meeting draws fire over Dalai Lama lecture (Nature).

Oct 26 Dalai Lama to discuss clinical benefits of meditation (Dominican Today, dominican Republic). Conference addresses western medicine & society's embrace of meditation.

Oct 26 transcendental Meditation (Star tribune, Minnesota). transcendental meditation (TM) is a mental technique for increasing awareness in two 20-minute meditation periods a day.

Oct 26 With Meditation Yoga, stress is all in the mind (The Moscow Times). If Moscow is stressing you out, the Sahaja Yoga meditation group has a solution.

Oct 26 Meditation can make workplaces safer (National Nine News, Australia). Just 10 minutes a day of intensive meditation could make workers more productive and workplaces safer, a meditation company says.

Oct 26 Scientists boycott Dalai Lama (Stanford Daily). Critics say that a religious leader has no place at a scientific conference.

Oct 25 Meditation room promotes workplace wellness (The Chronicle-Journal, Canada). Confederation College students and staff have a new place to escape noise, stress and even the ever-present cellphone.

Oct 24 Meditation centre opens at college (Thunder Bay's Source, Ontario). A new initiative was unveiled Monday at Confederation College aimed at helping staff and students find serenity.

Oct 24 Meditation in the midst of mayhem (The Spectator, Wisconsin)
Massages, learning ways to relax helpful in combating stress that can affect students' health

Oct 22 Local researcher stands by Dalai Lama (The Capital Times, Wisconsin). A University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher is defending a speaking invitation extended to the Dalai Lama to a convention of neuroscientists.

Oct 20 Dalai Lama's planned meditation talk upsets scientists (Bangkok Post). Plans by the Dalai Lama to talk about Buddhist meditation have triggered a protest by scientists.

Oct 20 Some MHCC staffers open their minds to meditation (The Oregonian). Mt. Hood Community College teachers and staff meet to meditate twice weekly.

Oct 19 Yogic flyers plan palace (Globe and Mail, Toronto). The spiritual guru who taught the Beatles the art of transcendental meditation is planning an international peace palace on two islands off Nova Scotia, where followers will practice yogic flying to promote global peace.

Oct 18 Scientists bridle at lecture plan for Dalai Lama (NY Times). The Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibet who is revered as a spiritual teacher, is at the center of a scientific controversy.

Oct 18 Meditation for the masses (Portsmouth Herald, NH). "Bodhipaksa, a Buddhist teacher and author, runs a Web-based Buddhist meditation site, www.wildmind.org."

Oct 13 Breathing technique helps relieve stress (The Daily, Washington). Suffering from headaches, upset stomachs, insomnia? No guarantee, but change the way you breathe, and it might spell "relief."

Oct 10 From Twin Peaks to inner peace (Globe and Mail, Toronto). American filmmaker David Lynch, best known for creating anxiously entertaining rides through the darker recesses of human psychology, is in the midst of a university tour across the United States to promote the calming benefits of transcendental Meditation.

Oct 10 Meditation that comes with a kick (Telegraph, UK). It's the latest fitness craze among the Hollywood A-list, and helped Jennifer Aniston through her divorce.

Oct 7 Weezer's reluctant star had to be pushed to make hit CD (The Plain Dealer). Group's star practices vipassana meditation.

Oct 4 Right to peace and quiet for meditation (The National). A complaint about a noisy evangelical church.

Oct 2 David Lynch to speak at the Majestic Theatre (Berkeley Beacon). Director of Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive will lecture on creativity and mediation

Oct 1 Attachment and meditation (Scoop, New Zealand). Meditation cannot truly begin until the mind/brain lets go of everything.

Oct 1 Lying down on the job (News.com.au, Australia). Taking the time to chill out in your busy working day can reap multiple benefits for workers and their employers.

Three new translations of our site now available

We're delighted to announce that two Chinese translations (in simplified and traditional text) and a Russian translation are now available. The generous contributions of donors to our translation fund have helped to make this possible. The new sites are at:

http://chinese.wildmind.org
http://tw.wildmind.org
http://russian.wildmind.org

Thank you to everyone who has helped to make this possible. We will be adding more material to the Russian and Chinese sites over the next few weeks.

MP3's available on our online store

We're pleased to announce that all of our CDs are available as MP3 downloads in our meditation supplies store, either as individual tracks or as complete CD downloads.

We even have available Bodhipaksa's new CD, Guided Meditations for Busy People. It's available right now!

Support our translation project

Our mission is to benefit the world by promoting awareness and compassion through the practice of meditation.

Join our list of benefactors! If you've benefited from our site and would like to give something back, then making a donation can help us enormously. You can give as little as a dollar, but of course feel free to give as much as you want!

All contributions (which are tax deductible) go to our translation fund, which aims to help us translate Wildmind into other languages in order to help people around the world develop mindfulness and compassion. We now have French and Spanish versions of the site online, and Chinese, Polish, and Russian versions are in preparation.

Quote of the Month

"If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, whom would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?"
Stephen Levine

When we're caught up in the busyness of everyday life, it's all too easy -- inevitable, really -- that we'll lose touch with our deeper values. Levine's statement is a clever way of penetrating the fog of quotidian concerns in order to see what really matters to us.

What if you were going to die soon? How would that knowledge change your life? What in your life matters so much now but would no longer matter at all if death was imminent? What have you been putting off or avoiding that would suddenly seem crucially important if death were close?

Impermanence is something that Buddhist teachings encourage us to reflect on. In fact the Buddha said that reflecting on the inevitability of sickness, death, and of separation from all that if familar to us is something that everyone should think about frequently. This isn't something we should be obsessive about. If we spent every minute of every day thinking about the inevitability of our death we'd probably end up feeling depressed. But if we never think about it at all, we're most certainly going to end up with a skewed sense of priorities. Living with a consciousness that our life is short can help us to see what it is that we truly value, and can help us to live by those values.

Book Review

Guided Meditations for Children: Journey into the Elements , by Chitra Sukhu.

There are far too few resources for teaching children to meditate, and for that reason Chitra Sukhu's CD is to be welcomed. In essence, "Journey into the Elements" is an exercise in imaginative storytelling, and therefore not at all alien or unusual (in other words, parents needn't be worried about what kind of "meditation" their children are doing) and in addition the guided journeys are accompanied by natural sound effects and very pleasant music, which is not at all childlike.

Sukhu guides us through various realms in which we are guided by the King of the Gnomes, a mermaid, the Sun King, and other characters. In each case the guide leads us (or the child) into the magical realm, and simply leaves us with an opportunity to simply enjoy the music and to use our imaginations. At the end of each meditation, the actor and director Mario van Peebles (who is Sukhu's partner) gives us an ecological message of interconnectedness.

The meditations are designed to be used at nap or bed-time, with the child lying comfortably in bed. For younger children, caregivers will probably have to explain what the words "inhale" and "exhale" mean. This is very lightweight meditation to be sure, but appropriate for most children of storytelling age, and encourages relaxation, calm, focusing, and creative imagination.