“Looking In, Looking Out: Exploring Art, World, and Self”

Bodhipaksa

I’m really looking forward to co-leading “Looking In, Looking Out: Exploring Art, World, and Self” — a course on art and meditation — with the very talented artist and teacher, Lena Levin. The course starts Feb 1.

A couple of years ago I took an online course with Lena and was impressed by how skillfully she was able to teach us to see in new ways. It was quite mind-blowing to see the extent to which what we see isn’t what’s there, but our mind’s approximation of what’s there. I felt, in some ways, that I was seeing for the first time. Also I was struck by the parallels between the techniques …

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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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Bodhi Mind meditation app now available for free download

Bodhipaksa

The Bodhi Mind app for iPhone and iPad is now available for download on the app store. Our app offers a library of well over 200 guided meditations, and the number will keep on growing. We intend that Bodhi Mind will be Wildmind’s main publishing platform from this point on.

You’ll find all the guided meditations from my CDs and meditation courses, plus materials that I’ve recorded for other purposes. Some live recordings from retreats and workshops have been added, with more on the way!

The app is free to download. Go get it now!

All of the meditations are available for a two week trial. After that you’ll have access to a …

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Bodhi Mind meditation app is coming soon!

Bodhipaksa

Bodhi Mind meditation app for iPhoneAfter some last-minute tweaks the Bodhi Mind app has now been submitted to the app store.

This free app (for iPhone and iPad) will offer access to a large library of my guided meditation recordings. It allows you to create a favorites list and you can also download recordings for offline play.

All going well, Bodhi Mind will go live in the app store in one to two weeks. At the moment there are about 150 meditations available, but more will have been added by the time the app is available. The app is looking gorgeous and working flawlessly.

We’d like to thank all those who supported our Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, which made this possible. …

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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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