Alisa Bowman, The Morning Call: Do you wish you could love every luscious bite of food and still lose weight — without dieting? Who doesn’t? While loving what you eat and losing pounds while you do it might sound mutually exclusive, it’s not.

The solution, say researchers at the University of California at San Francisco, is a simple one: Taste what you eat.

When researchers there taught women mindful eating and stress reduction techniques, the women were able to hold the line on weight gain or even to drop a few pounds, even though none of the women were dieting.

“You’re training the …

Read the original article »

Yoga classes have positive psychological effects for high-school students, according to a pilot study in the April Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics.

Since mental health disorders commonly develop in the teenage years, “Yoga may serve a preventive role in adolescent mental health,” according to the new study, led by Jessica Noggle, PhD, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston.

Fifty-one 11th- and 12th-grade students registered for physical education (PE) at a Massachusetts high school were randomly assigned to yoga or regular PE classes. (Two-thirds were assigned to yoga.) Based on Kripalu yoga, the classes consisted of physical yoga postures together with breathing exercises, relaxation, and meditation. …

Saturday, Apr 7 10:30 am to 12:00 noon, at West Valley College, Saratoga, CA.

Price: $12

Phone: (408) 702-2319

Join UCLA behavioral research scientist, Dara Ghahremani & National Director of the Art of Meditation, Rajshree Patel as they explore how we can tune back into ourselves despite the daily demands in a stressful environment.

Rajshree Patel, known for her intellect, humor and dynamism, will share insights on how to handle mental chatter through meditation. As a former Los Angeles district attorney she accidentally walked into a meditation workshop. After she started her meditation practice, she discovered that she could handle twice the number of cases as compared to her peers in lesser amount of time and was much more productive. Dara Ghahremani with his …

Denise Dador, KABC: Over the years, numerous studies have shown how meditation can be a great way to manage and alleviate stress. Now local researchers say there appears to be physical proof that shows years of meditation may change the brain.

Meditation trainer Julianna Raye of Hollywood is guiding a mindfulness exercise. She’s been practicing for 17 years and says it’s made her mind stronger.

“It’s like training at the gym,” said Raye. “You’re training your mind. You’re improving your concentration. And that’s a skill that you need to develop.”

Raye may be using building muscles …

Read the original article »

Dorothy Brown reviews The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards, by William J. Broad.

If practicing yoga is a right-brain experience, involving meditation, movement, and a detachment from the everyday, then reading The Science of Yoga is a jolt to the other side of the brain: analytical, historical, scientific, and sobering.
But to underscore the proven value of yoga, considered so wifty by so many, New York Times science writer William J. Broad has brought an arsenal of data.

At the front of the book, he lists 68 “main characters,” devotees of yoga and the science of yoga many of whom have …

Read the original article »

Hannah Tepper, Salon: At the end of his second year of Harvard graduate school, neuroscientist and bestselling author Richard Davidson did something his colleagues suspected would mark the end of his academic career: He skipped town and went to India and Sri Lanka for three months to “study meditation.”

In the ’70s, just as today, people tended to lump meditation into the new-age category, along with things like astrology, crystals, tantra and herbal “remedies.”

But contrary to what his skeptics presumed, not only did Davidson return to resume his studies at Harvard, his trip also marked the beginning of Davidson’s most spectacular body of …

Read the original article »

A forthcoming article in the Journal of Consumer Research by Professor Michel Tuan Pham and Leonard Lee of Columbia Business School, and Andrew Stephen of the University of Pittsburgh, finds that a higher trust in feelings may result in more accurate predictions about a variety of future events. The research will also be featured in Columbia Business School’s Ideas at Work in late February 2012. In the research, the researchers conducted a series of eight studies in which their participants were asked to predict various future outcomes, including the 2008 U.S. Democratic presidential nominee, the box-office success of different movies, the winner of American Idol, movements of the Dow Jones Index, …

Sarah Berry, Northern Argus, Australia: When Subhana Barzaghi was a midwife she taught breathing and meditation techniques to relieve the pain caused by contractions.

“Most of us have a habitual reaction to pain – an aversion that we react against,” Subhana, who is now a meditation teacher at North Sydney’s Bluegum Sangha, explains.

“Meditation teaches us to observe rather than get caught up in the strong sensations we are experiencing. We learn to stop labeling and therefore stop reacting. In this way, instead of tightening up against it and resisting, which causes further tension, we start to soften into it. As we do this …

Read the original article »

Erica Crompton, Daily Mail: Meditation is sitting around trying to think about nothing and letting out the occasional ‘ommmm’.

They do lots of it in India and in parts of Islington where they eat granola, too. OK, those are sweeping statements but you catch my drift.

I’m open-minded, but if you had asked me a few years ago whether I believed meditation could be an effective treatment for serious mental illness, I would have laughed. However, that is exactly what some of Britain’s mental health experts now believe.

It has been almost a decade since I was first diagnosed with paranoid psychosis, a …

Read the original article »

I’m a science geek as well as a Buddhist geek, and recently when I was leading a retreat on how to bring more joy into our lives I found myself making a lot of references to an article published in Yes magazine, which touched on ten things that have been shown by science to make us happier. It seemed natural to draw upon the article because so much of the research that was described resonated with Buddhist teachings.

So I thought it would be interesting to take the main points of the article and flesh them out with a little Buddhism.

1. Be generous
“Make altruism and giving part of …