Our Community-Supported Meditation Initiative: An Update

Wildmind Meditation News

We’re making excellent progress toward the goal of Wildmind becoming a Community-Supported Meditation Initiative. In this new model Wildmind’s teaching will be supported by sponsors contributing as little as $4 each month.

Sponsors will of course gain a number of benefits. All of the new courses I develop will be available only for them. They’ll also have exclusive access to a monthly article and meditation download, as well as an online forum.

There are 1,500 shares available. Right now almost 40% of them have been sponsored. It’s taken only three weeks to get to that point, which is wonderful! Initially I thought it might take up to a year to reach our goal. Now it …

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Get daily meditation guidance on your iPhone

Wildmind Meditation News

Version 2 of the Bodhi Mind app includes a unique feature called Sitting With Bodhi. Each day you have the opportunity to be guided in your meditation practice by Bodhipaksa, who has been meditating for 36 years.

Before you Sit With Bodhi, first choose how long you want to meditate. You can sit for 12 minutes, or 20, or 40. It’s your choice. Bodhipaksa will then guide you for the first ten minutes, leaving you with a suggestion that you can put into practice in the remainder of the time you chose. The meditation concludes with a gentle bell.

The next day, there will be another guided meditation, and another opportunity to Sit With Bodhi. …

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Arriving Jan 29: Version 2 of the Bodhi Mind app!

Wildmind Meditation News

The Bodhi Mind app was launched just over a year ago, bringing you a library of Bodhipaksa’s guided meditations. At the moment there are over 300 meditations, covering everything from basic mindfulness of the breathing, to lovingkindness and compassion meditations, to practices for awakening insight. Now it’s time for the next step.

Arriving Jan 29!

Version 2 of the app (which is for iPhone and iPad, includes a series of daily meditations to help support your practice in a deeper, more intimate way. It’s called Sitting With Bodhi, which reflects that each day you have the opportunity to sit in meditation, receiving guidance that comes from Bodhipaksa’s 36 years of practice.

Each meditation starts with …

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Developing the evidence base for mindfulness therapies

Wildmind Meditation News

Rick Nauert PhD, PsychCentral: Therapeutic mindfulness interventions have grown in popularity over the past two decades. But some of the field’s leading researchers are concerned that the evidence base for such practices is not yet robust enough.

A new study from Brown University shows how a rigorous approach to studying mindfulness-based interventions can help ensure that claims are backed by science.

Researchers say that an analysis of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) is complicated as the therapies sometimes blend practices, which makes it difficult to measure how each of those components affects participants.

To address that issue, the …

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Buddhist monastery site uncovered in China

Wildmind Meditation News

Archaeology: An excavation in northwest China has uncovered a 1,000-year-old ceramic box containing cremated human remains said to have belonged to Siddh?rtha Gautama, also known as the Buddha, according to a report in Live Science.

An inscription on the box explains that two monks, named Yunjiang and Zhiming, of the Mañju?r? Temple of the Longxing Monastery collected the more than 2,000 pieces of cremated remains, including teeth and bones, over a period of 20 years, and buried them in the temple on June 22, 1013, as a way to practice and promote Buddhism. More than 260 Buddhist statues, and the remains …

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Mindfulness and meditation need more rigorous study to identify impacts

Wildmind Meditation News

Dependable scientific evidence has lagged worrisomely behind the rapid and widespread adoption of mindfulness and meditation for pursuing an array of mental and physical wellness goals, wrote a group of 15 experts in a new article in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The article offers a “critical evaluation and prescriptive agenda” to help the burgeoning mindfulness industry replace ambiguous hype with rigor in its research and clinical implementations.

Recent years have seen a huge surge not only in media and scientific articles about mindfulness and meditation, the authors wrote, but also in the implementation of medical interventions for everything from depression to addiction, pain and stress. The …

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Mental training changes brain structure and reduces social stress

Wildmind Meditation News

Medical Xpress: Meditation is beneficial for our well-being. This ancient wisdom has been supported by scientific studies focusing on the practice of mindfulness. However, the words “mindfulness” and “meditation” denote a variety of mental training techniques that aim at the cultivation of various different competencies. In other words, despite growing interest in meditation research, it remains unclear which type of mental practice is particularly useful for improving either attention and mindfulness or social competencies, such as compassion and perspective-taking.

Other open questions are, for example, whether such practices can induce structural brain …

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Don’t believe the multi-tasking hype: train your brain to focus better

Wildmind Meditation News

Daniel Goleman, The Big Think: By now, everyone knows that mindfulness meditation is good for you—but what’s still surprising scientists is just how quickly it works. Ten minutes of meditation won’t make you a better mutlitasker—there’s no such thing, as psychologist and science journalist Daniel Goleman explains—but it will make you more adept at switching tasks and returning to a deep level of concentration more quickly after a distraction.

Every time you practice meditation, you’re strengthening the neural circuitry for focus and training your brain away from mind-wandering. Beyond the need …

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Meditation for recovery: program adapts Buddhist practice to fight addiction

Wildmind Meditation News

EmmaJean Holley, Valley News: It’s 9 on a Tuesday morning, and Larry Lowndes is setting out the cushions.

Lowndes is the assistant director of the Second Wind Foundation, which operates an addiction recovery center in Wilder that serves as a space for a number of recovery groups, including Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step meetings. But Lowndes has recently introduced a new, less conventional program at Turning Point: Refuge Recovery, a peer-to-peer, mindfulness-based recovery group, grounded in Buddhist principles.

Some of the participants in the group have been practicing meditation, and sobriety, for …

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Quick ‘mindfulness’ fix may help curb drinking

Wildmind Meditation News

Lisa Rapaport, Reuters: Heavy drinkers may be able to cut back after brief mindfulness training exercises that involve helping them focus on what’s happening in the present moment, a small experiment in the UK suggests.

Researchers recruited 68 heavy drinkers who weren’t alcoholics for the test. They randomly assigned participants to receive either a training session in relaxation strategies or an 11-minute training session in mindfulness techniques to help them recognize cravings without acting on them.

Over the next week, people who received mindfulness training drank significantly less than they had during the week before the study …

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