::How To Meditate I - What is Meditation ::

The Art of Living: Vipassana Meditation
The following text is based upon a talk given by Mr. S.N. Goenka in Berne, Switzerland.
Everyone seeks peace and harmony, because this is what we lack in our lives. From time to time we all experience agitation, irritation, disharmony. And when we suffer from these miseries, we don't keep them to ourselves; we often distribute them to others as well. Unhappiness permeates the atmosphere around someone who is miserable, and those who come in contact with such a person also become affected. Certainly this is not a skillful way to live.

We ought to live at peace with ourselves, and at peace with others. After all, human beings are social beings, having to live in society and deal with each other. But how are we to live peacefully? How are we to remain harmonious within, and maintain peace and harmony around us, so that others can also live peacefully and harmoniously?

In order to be relieved of our misery, we have to know the basic reason for it, the cause of the suffering. If we investigate the problem, it becomes clear that whenever we start generating any negativity or impurity in the mind, we are bound to become unhappy. A negativity in the mind, a mental defilement or impurity, cannot coexist with peace and harmony.

How do we start generating negativity? Again, by investigation, it becomes clear. We become unhappy when we find someone behaving in a way that we don't like, or when we find something happening which we don't like. Unwanted things happen and we create tension within. Wanted things do not happen, some obstacle comes in the way, and again we create tension within; we start tying knots within. And throughout life, unwanted things keep on happening, wanted things may or may not happen, and this process of reaction, of tying knots—Gordian knots—makes the entire mental and physical structure so tense, so full of negativity, that life becomes miserable.

Now, one way to solve this problem is to arrange that nothing unwanted happens in life, that everything keeps on happening exactly as we desire. Either we must develop the power, or somebody else who will come to our aid must have the power, to see that unwanted things do not happen and that everything we want happens. But this is impossible. There is no one in the world whose desires are always fulfilled, in whose life everything happens according to his or her wishes, without anything unwanted happening. Things constantly occur that are contrary to our desires and wishes. So the question arises: how can we stop reacting blindly when confronted with things that we don't like? How can we stop creating tension and remain peaceful and harmonious?

In India, as well as in other countries, wise saintly persons of the past studied this problem—the problem of human suffering—and found a solution: if something unwanted happens and you start to react by generating anger, fear or any negativity, then, as soon as possible, you should divert your attention to something else. For example, get up, take a glass of water, start drinking—your anger won't multiply; on the other hand, it'll begin to subside. Or start counting: one, two, three, four. Or start repeating a word, or a phrase, or some mantra, perhaps the name of a god or saintly person towards whom you have devotion; the mind is diverted, and to some extent you'll be free of the negativity, free of the anger.

This solution was helpful; it worked. It still works. Responding like this, the mind feels free from agitation. However, the solution works only at the conscious level. In fact, by diverting the attention you push the negativity deep into the unconscious, and there you continue to generate and multiply the same defilement. On the surface there is a layer of peace and harmony, but in the depths of the mind there is a sleeping volcano of suppressed negativity which sooner or later may erupt in a violent explosion.

Other explorers of inner truth went still further in their search and, by experiencing the reality of mind and matter within themselves, recognized that diverting the attention is only running away from the problem. Escape is no solution; you have to face the problem. Whenever negativity arises in the mind, just observe it, face it. As soon as you start to observe a mental impurity, it begins to lose its strength and slowly withers away.

A good solution; it avoids both extremes—suppression and expression. Burying the negativity in the unconscious will not eradicate it, and allowing it to manifest as unwholesome physical or vocal actions will only create more problems. But if you just observe, then the defilement passes away and you are free of it.

This sounds wonderful, but is it really practical? It's not easy to face one's own impurities. When anger arises, it so quickly overwhelms us that we don't even notice. Then, overpowered by anger, we perform physical or vocal actions which harm ourselves and others. Later, when the anger has passed, we start crying and repenting, begging pardon from this or that person or from God: “Oh, I made a mistake, please excuse me!” But the next time we are in a similar situation, we again react in the same way. This continual repenting doesn't help at all.

The difficulty is that we are not aware when negativity starts. It begins deep in the unconscious mind, and by the time it reaches the conscious level it has gained so much strength that it overwhelms us, and we cannot observe it.

Suppose that I employ a private secretary, so that whenever anger arises he says to me, “Look, anger is starting!” Since I cannot know when this anger will start, I'll need to hire three private secretaries for three shifts, around the clock! Let's say I can afford it, and anger begins to arise. At once my secretary tells me, “Oh look—anger has started!” The first thing I'll do is rebuke him: “You fool! You think you're paid to teach me?” I'm so overpowered by anger that good advice won't help.

Suppose wisdom does prevail and I don't scold him. Instead, I say, “Thank you very much. Now I must sit down and observe my anger.” Yet, is it possible? As soon as I close my eyes and try to observe anger, the object of the anger immediately comes into my mind—the person or incident which initiated the anger. Then I'm not observing the anger itself; I'm merely observing the external stimulus of that emotion. This will only serve to multiply the anger, and is therefore no solution. It is very difficult to observe any abstract negativity, abstract emotion, divorced from the external object which originally caused it to arise.

However, someone who reached the ultimate truth found a real solution. He discovered that whenever any impurity arises in the mind, physically two things start happening simultaneously. One is that the breath loses its normal rhythm. We start breathing harder whenever negativity comes into the mind. This is easy to observe. At a subtler level, a biochemical reaction starts in the body, resulting in some sensation. Every impurity will generate some sensation or the other within the body.

This presents a practical solution. An ordinary person cannot observe abstract defilements of the mind—abstract fear, anger or passion. But with proper training and practice it is very easy to observe respiration and body sensations, both of which are directly related to mental defilements.

Respiration and sensations will help in two ways. First, they will be like private secretaries. As soon as a negativity arises in the mind, the breath will lose its normality; it will start shouting, “Look, something has gone wrong!” And we cannot scold the breath; we have to accept the warning. Similarly, the sensations will tell us that something has gone wrong. Then, having been warned, we can start observing the respiration, start observing the sensations, and very quickly we find that the negativity passes away.

This mental-physical phenomenon is like a coin with two sides. On one side are the thoughts and emotions arising in the mind, on the other side are the respiration and sensations in the body. Any thoughts or emotions, any mental impurities that arise manifest themselves in the breath and the sensations of that moment. Thus, by observing the respiration or the sensations, we are in fact observing mental impurities. Instead of running away from the problem, we are facing reality as it is. As a result, we discover that these impurities lose their strength; they no longer overpower us as they did in the past. If we persist, they eventually disappear altogether and we begin to live a peaceful and happy life, a life increasingly free of negativities.

In this way the technique of self-observation shows us reality in its two aspects, inner and outer. Previously we only looked outward, missing the inner truth. We always looked outside for the cause of our unhappiness; we always blamed and tried to change the reality outside. Being ignorant of the inner reality, we never understood that the cause of suffering lies within, in our own blind reactions toward pleasant and unpleasant sensations.

Now, with training, we can see the other side of the coin. We can be aware of our breathing and also of what is happening inside. Whatever it is, breath or sensation, we learn just to observe it without losing our mental balance. We stop reacting and multiplying our misery. Instead, we allow the defilements to manifest and pass away.

The more one practices this technique, the more quickly negativities will dissolve. Gradually the mind becomes free of defilements, becomes pure. A pure mind is always full of love—selfless love for all others, full of compassion for the failings and sufferings of others, full of joy at their success and happiness, full of equanimity in the face of any situation.

When one reaches this stage, the entire pattern of one's life changes. It is no longer possible to do anything vocally or physically which will disturb the peace and happiness of others. Instead, a balanced mind not only becomes peaceful, but the surrounding atmosphere also becomes permeated with peace and harmony, and this will start affecting others, helping others too.

By learning to remain balanced in the face of everything experienced inside, one develops detachment towards all that one encounters in external situations as well. However, this detachment is not escapism or indifference to the problems of the world. Those who regularly practice Vipassana become more sensitive to the sufferings of others, and do their utmost to relieve suffering in whatever way they can—not with any agitation, but with a mind full of love, compassion and equanimity. They learn holy indifference—how to be fully committed, fully involved in helping others, while at the same time maintaining balance of mind. In this way they remain peaceful and happy, while working for the peace and happiness of others.

This is what the Buddha taught: an art of living. He never established or taught any religion, any “ism”. He never instructed those who came to him to practice any rites or rituals, any empty formalities. Instead, he taught them just to observe nature as it is, by observing the reality inside. Out of ignorance we keep reacting in ways which harm ourselves and others. But when wisdom arises—the wisdom of observing reality as it is—this habit of reacting falls away. When we cease to react blindly, then we are capable of real action—action proceeding from a balanced mind, a mind which sees and understands the truth. Such action can only be positive, creative, helpful to ourselves and to others.

What is necessary, then, is to “know thyself”—advice which every wise person has given. We must know ourselves, not just intellectually in the realm of ideas and theories, and not just emotionally or devotionally, simply accepting blindly what we have heard or read. Such knowledge is not enough. Rather, we must know reality experientially. We must experience directly the reality of this mental-physical phenomenon. This alone is what will help us be free of our suffering.

This direct experience of our own inner reality, this technique of self-observation, is what is called Vipassana meditation. In the language of India in the time of the Buddha, passana meant seeing in the ordinary way, with one's eyes open; but vipassana is observing things as they actually are, not just as they appear to be. Apparent truth has to be penetrated, until we reach the ultimate truth of the entire psycho-physical structure. When we experience this truth, then we learn to stop reacting blindly, to stop creating negativities—and naturally the old ones are gradually eradicated. We become liberated from misery and experience true happiness.

There are three steps to the training given in a meditation course. First, one must abstain from any action, physical or vocal, which disturbs the peace and harmony of others. One cannot work to liberate oneself from impurities of the mind while at the same time continuing to perform deeds of body and speech which only multiply them. Therefore, a code of morality is the essential first step of the practice. One undertakes not to kill, not to steal, not to commit sexual misconduct, not to tell lies, and not to use intoxicants. By abstaining from such actions, one allows the mind to quiet down sufficiently in order to proceed further.

The next step is to develop some mastery over this wild mind by training it to remain fixed on a single object, the breath. One tries to keep one's attention on the respiration for as long as possible. This is not a breathing exercise; one does not regulate the breath. Instead, one observes natural respiration as it is, as it comes in, as it goes out. In this way one further calms the mind so that it is no longer overpowered by intense negativities. At the same time, one is concentrating the mind, making it sharp and penetrating, capable of the work of insight.

These first two steps, living a moral life, and controlling the mind, are very necessary and beneficial in themselves, but they will lead to suppression of negativities unless one takes the third step: purifying the mind of defilements by developing insight into one's own nature. This is Vipassana: experiencing one's own reality by the systematic and dispassionate observation within oneself of the ever-changing mind-matter phenomenon manifesting itself as sensations. This is the culmination of the teaching of the Buddha: self-purification by self-observation.

It can be practiced by one and all. Everyone faces the problem of suffering. It is a universal malady which requires a universal remedy, not a sectarian one. When one suffers from anger, it's not Buddhist anger, Hindu anger, or Christian anger. Anger is anger. When one becomes agitated as a result of this anger, this agitation is not Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim. The malady is universal. The remedy must also be universal.

Vipassana is such a remedy. No one will object to a code of living which respects the peace and harmony of others. No one will object to developing control over the mind. No one will object to developing insight into one's own nature, by which it is possible to free the mind of negativities. Vipassana is a universal path.

Observing reality as it is by observing the truth inside—this is knowing oneself directly and experientially. As one practices, one keeps freeing oneself from the misery of mental impurities. From the gross, external, apparent truth, one penetrates to the ultimate truth of mind and matter. Then one transcends that, and experiences a truth which is beyond mind and matter, beyond time and space, beyond the conditioned field of relativity: the truth of total liberation from all defilements, all impurities, all suffering. Whatever name one gives this ultimate truth is irrelevant; it is the final goal of everyone.

May you all experience this ultimate truth. May all people be free from misery. May they enjoy real peace, real harmony, real happiness.


MAY ALL BEINGS BE HAPPY
:- http://www.dhamma.org/en-US/about/art

 

Healing Music, Meditation Music Relax Mind Body, Relaxing Music, Slow Music, ☯3230

YellowBrickCinema - Relaxing Music
Published on Jul 18, 2017

 

Meditation under the microscope
Among the promised psychological and physical benefits of meditation are the elimination or reduction of stress, anxiety and depression, as well as bipolar disorder, eating disorders, diabetes, substance abuse, chronic pain, blood pressure, cancer, autism and schizophrenia. It is a panacea for the individual. There are also apparent interpersonal and collective effects. Mindfulness and other Buddhist-derived meditation techniques, such as compassion and loving-kindness meditation, can perhaps increase prosocial emotions and behaviours, yielding greater social connection and altruism, tampering aggression and prejudice. ‘If every eight-year-old in the world is taught meditation,’ the Dalai Lama purportedly said, ‘the world will be without violence within one generation.’ The quote is widely shared online.
Such a useful activity naturally finds a variety of applications. Meditation techniques have been deployed in the military with the aim of increasing the wellbeing and work effectiveness of soldiers. Snipers are known to meditate in order to disengage emotionally from the act of killing, to steady the hand that takes a life (the element of peacefulness associated with meditation having been rather set aside). Corporations counteract stress and burnout with meditation which, on the surface, is an amiable aim, but it can also help create compliant workers. And in schools, meditation interventions aim to calm children’s minds, offering students the ability to better deal with the pressure of attaining high grades. Here, too, the goal is to reduce misbehaviour and aggression in a bid to increase prosociality and compliance.

Psychological research often upholds this optimism about the efficacy of meditation. Indeed, studies on the prosocial effects of meditation almost always support the power of meditation – the power not only of transforming the individual but of changing society. So it appears well-grounded that meditation might improve socially advantageous behaviour. This brings with it the prospect of applications in a variety of contexts, where it might find its use in social conflicts, such as mitigation of war and terrorism. The problem, however, is with the research that bolsters such claims.

Last year, the experimental psychologists Miguel Farias, Inti A Brazil and I conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis that examined the scientific literature behind the claim that meditation increases prosociality. We looked at randomised controlled studies, where meditators were compared with non-meditating individuals, and reviewed more than 20 studies that evaluated the effect of various types of meditation on prosocial feelings and behaviours such as how compassionate, empathetic or connected individuals felt.

The studies we reviewed used a variety of methodologies and interventions. For example, one used an eight-week meditation intervention called ‘mindfulness-based stress-reduction’. Individuals learned how to conduct mindful breathing and to practise ‘being in the moment’, letting go of their thoughts and feelings. Meanwhile the control group, with which the meditators were compared, engaged in a weekly group discussion about the benefits of compassion. Another study compared guided relaxation (participants listening to an audio recording about deep breathing and unwinding) with a control group that simply did nothing in a waiting room. Most studies required participants to fill in questionnaires about their experience of the meditation intervention, and their levels of compassion towards themselves and others. Some studies also included behavioural measures of compassion, in one case assessed by how willing a person was to give up a chair in a (staged) full waiting room.

Initially, the results were promising. Our meta-analysis indicated that meditation did indeed have a positive, though moderate, impact on prosociality. But digging deeper, the picture became more complicated. While meditation made people feel somewhat more compassionate or empathetic, it did not reduce aggression or prejudice, nor did it improve how socially connected one felt. So the prosocial benefits are not straightforward, but they are apparently measurable. The issue is the way in which those benefits were measured.

 

To fully dissect the studies, we conducted a secondary comparison to see how methodological considerations would change our initial findings. This analysis looked at the use of control groups and whether the teacher of the intervention was also an author of the study, which might be an indication of bias. The results were astounding.

Let’s start with the control groups. The purpose of the control group is to isolate the effects of the intervention (in our case, meditation) and to eliminate unintentional bias. The importance of adequate control conditions was first brought to light by the discovery of the placebo effect in drug trials, which is when a treatment is effective even though no active agent (or drug) is used. To avoid this effect, each group in a drug trial receives identical treatments, except one group receives a placebo (or sugar pill) and the other gets the real drug. Neither the experimenter nor the participants know who is in which trial (this is called a double-blind design), which helps to eliminate unintentional bias. This way they can tell if it’s the active agent that is effective and not something else.

But the use of adequate controls is tricky in studies that look at behavioural change, because it is harder to create a control group (or placebo) when the treatment is not just a pill but an action. The control has to be similar to the intervention but lack some important components that differentiate it from the experimental counterpart. This is known as an active control. A passive control group simply does nothing, compared with the group that has the intervention.

Meditation did indeed improve compassion when the intervention was compared with a passive control group, that is, a group that completed only the questionnaires and surveys but did not engage in any real activity. So participants who undertook eight weeks of loving-kindness meditation were found to have improved compassion following the intervention – compared with a passive waiting-room control group.

Our analysis suggests that meditation per se does not, alas, make the world a more compassionate place

But have we isolated the effects of meditation or are we simply demonstrating that doing something is better than doing nothing? It might be that compassion improved simply because individuals spent eight weeks thinking about being more compassionate, and felt good about having engaged in a new activity. An active control group (eg, participants taking part in a discussion about compassion) is a more effective tool to isolate the effects of the meditation intervention because both groups have now engaged in a new activity that involves cultivating compassion. And here the results of our analysis suggest that meditation per se does not, alas, make the world a more compassionate place.

A well-designed control condition allows studies with a double-blind design. Developing an effective placebo for a meditation intervention is often said to be impossible, but it has in fact been done – and with considerable success. In the heydays of transcendental meditation research in the 1970s, Jonathan C Smith developed a 71-page manual describing the rationale and benefits of a meditation technique. He gave the manual to a research assistant, who was unaware that the technique was completely made-up – therefore, a placebo – and who then proceeded to give a lecture to participants in the control group about the merits of the technique. (When it came to the actual placebo technique, participants were instructed to sit quietly for 20 minutes twice per day in a dark room, and to think of anything they wanted.) The point is, the placebo can work in studying meditation, it’s just not often used.

Double-blind designs can help to eliminate the accidental bias of the participants through the researcher. These biases have a longstanding history in psychology, and are called experimenter biases (when the experimenter inadvertently influences the participant’s behaviour) and demand characteristics (when participants behave in a way that they think will please the experimenter). The importance of avoiding experimenter bias and demand characteristics was discussed as early as the 1960s. Recent work indicates that experimenter biases remain – particularly in the study of meditation.

In light of the discussion around experimenter bias and demand characteristics, it is surprising to find that, in 48 per cent of the studies we looked at, the meditation intervention was taught by one of the study’s authors, often its lead author. More importantly, little attempt was made to control for any potential bias that an enthusiastic teacher and researcher might have had on the participants. Such a bias is often not intentional but stems from subconsciously giving preferential treatment or being particularly enthusiastic to participants in the experimental group. The prevalence of authors as teachers was so great that we decided to look at it statistically in our meta-analysis. We compared studies that had used an author with studies that had used an external teacher or other form of instruction (eg, an audio recording). We found that compassion increased only in those studies where the author was also the teacher of the intervention.

Experimenter bias often goes hand-in-hand with demand characteristics, where participants behave or respond in a way that they think is in line with the expectations of the researcher. For example, participants might respond – regardless of their true feelings – more enthusiastically on a questionnaire about compassion because the researcher herself was enthusiastic about compassion. The media buzz around meditation – which portrays it as a cure for a range of mental-health problems, the key to improved wellbeing and to changing one’s brain for the better – is also very likely to feed back to participants, who will expect to see benefits from a meditation intervention. Yet, almost none of the studies we examined controlled for expectation effects, and this methodological concern is generally absent in the meditation literature.

The prevalence of experimenter bias is only one side of the coin. Another troubling but rarely discussed bias concerns data-analysis and reporting. Interpreting statistical results and choosing what to highlight is challenging. Data do not speak for themselves: they are interpreted by academics whose minds are not blank slates. Academics often tread a thin line between the duty of impartial data-analysis and their own beliefs, desires and expectations. In 2003, Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard Medical School summarised a number of interpretative biases that have become widespread in science reporting: confirmation bias, rescue bias (finding selective fault with an experiment to justify an expectation), and ‘time will tell’ bias (holding on to an expectation discounted by data because additional data might in fact support it), among others. All were overwhelmingly present in the meditation literature we reviewed.

The most common bias we encountered was a ‘confirmation bias’, in which evidence that supports one’s preconceptions is favoured over evidence that challenges these convictions. Confirmation bias was particularly prevalent in the form of an over-reporting of marginally significant results. When using statistical testing, a p-value of 0.05 and below typically indicates that the results are statistically significant in psychological research. But it has become common practice to report results as ‘trends’ or as ‘marginally significant’ if they are close to, but don’t quite reach the desired 0.05 cut-off. The problem is that there is little consensus in psychology as to what might constitute ‘marginal significance’, which in our review ranged from p-values of 0.06 to 0.14 – hardly even marginal. (It is debatable whether p-values are not the most accurate way to conduct science anyway, but we should stick to the rules if we are using this type of testing.)

 

The positive view of meditation and the fight to protect its reputation make it harder to publish negative results

Being liberal with statistical methods that were designed to have clear cut-offs increases the chance of finding an effect when there is none. A further problem with the use of ‘marginal significance’ is reporting it free from bias. For instance, in one study the authors reported a marginally significant difference (p = 0.069) in favour of the meditation intervention relative to the control group. However, on the following page, when the authors reported a different set of results that did not favour the meditation group, they claimed the exact same p-level as non-significant. When the results confirmed their hypothesis, it was ‘significant’ – but only in that case. In fact, the majority of studies in our review discussed the marginally significant as equal to statistically significant.

Confirmation bias is difficult to overcome. Journals rely on reviewers to spot them, but because some of these biases have become standard practice (through the reporting of marginally significant effects, say) they often slip through. Reviewers and authors also face academic pressures that make these biases more likely since journals favour the reporting of positive results. But in the study of meditation there is another complication: many of the researchers, and therefore the reviewers of journal articles, are personally invested in meditation not only as practitioners and enthusiasts but also as providers of meditation programmes from which their institutions or themselves financially profit. The overly positive view of meditation and the fierce fight to protect its untarnished reputation make it harder to publish negative results.

My aim is not to discredit science, but scientists do have a duty to produce an evidence base that aims to be bias-free and aware of its limitations. This is important because the inflated results for the power of meditation fuel magical beliefs about its benefits. Mindfulness websites market it as a ‘happy pill, with no side effects’; it is said it can bring world peace in a generation, if only children would breathe deep and live in the moment. But can we be sure that there are no unexpected outcomes that neither benefit the individual nor society? Is it possible that meditation can fuel dysfunctional environments and indeed itself create a path to mental illness?

The utilization of meditation techniques by large corporations such as Google or Nike has created growing tensions within the wider community of individuals who practise and endorse its benefits. Those of a more traditional bent argue that meditation without the ethical teachings can lead into the wrong kind of meditation (such as the sniper who steadies the killing shot, or the compliant worker who submits to an unhealthy work environment). But what if meditation doesn’t work for you? Or worse, what if it makes you feel depressed, anxious or psychotic? The evidence for such symptoms is predictably scarce in recent literature, but reports from the 1960s and ’70s warn of the dark side of transcendental meditation. There is a danger that those few cases that receive psychiatric attention are discounted by psychologists as having had a predisposition to mental illness.

In The Buddha Pill (2015), Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm take a critical look at the symptoms of depression, anxiety, restlessness, mania and psychosis that are triggered directly by meditation. They argue that the prevalence of adverse effects has not been assessed by the scientific community, and it is easy to think that the few anecdotal cases that might surface are due to an individual’s predisposition to mental-health problems. But a simple search on Google shows that reports of depression, anxiety and mania are not uncommon in meditation forums and blogs. For example, one Buddhist blog features a number of reports on adverse mental-health effects that are framed as ‘dark nights’. One blogger writes:

I’ve had one pretty intense dark night, it lasted for nine months, included misery, despair, panic attacks, inability to concentrate (to the point that it was difficult to do simple tasks), inability to socialise (because of bad feelings, but also because I had a hard time following and understanding what others were saying, due to lack of concentration), loneliness, auditory hallucinations, mild paranoia, treating my friends and family badly, long episodes of nostalgia and regret, obsessive thoughts (usually about death), etc, etc, etc.
In Buddhist circles, these so-called ‘dark nights’ are part of meditation. In an ideal situation, ‘dark nights’ are worked through with an experienced teacher under the framework of Buddhist teachings, but what about those who don’t have such a teacher or who meditate in a secular context?

Those who meditate alone can be left isolated in the claws of mental ill-health

The absence of reported adverse effects in the current literature might be accidental, but it is more likely that those suffering from them believe that such effects are a part of meditation, or they don’t connect them to the practice in the first place. Considering its positive image and the absence of negative reports on meditation, it is easy to think that the problem lies within. In the best-case scenario, one might simply stop meditating, but many webpages and articles often frame these negative or ambivalent feelings as a part of meditation that will go away with practice. Yet continuing to practice can result in a full-blown psychotic episode (at worst), or have more subtle adverse effects. For example, in 1976 the clinical psychologist Arnold A Lazarus reported that a ‘young man found that the benefits he had been promised from transcendental meditation simply did not emerge, and instead of questioning the veracity of the exaggerated claims, he developed a strong sense of failure, futility, and ineptitude’.

In a best-case scenario, individuals will have a psychiatrist or experienced meditation teacher to guide them, but those who practise alone can be left isolated in the claws of mental ill-health. Lazarus warned that meditation is not for everyone, and we need to consider individual differences and be aware of adverse effects in its application in a secular context. ‘One man’s meat is another man’s poison,’ he once said about transcendental meditation. Researchers and therapists need to know both the benefits and the risks of meditation for different kinds of people – it is not unvarnished good news.

In The Buddha Pill, Farias and Wikholm write:

[We] haven’t stopped believing in meditation’s ability to fuel change but [we are] concerned that the science of meditation is promoting a skewed view: meditation wasn’t developed so we could lead less stressful lives or improve our wellbeing. Its primary purpose was more radical – to rupture your idea of who you are; to shake to the core your sense of self so that you realise there is ‘nothing there’. But that’s not how we see meditation courses promoted in the West. Here, meditation has been revamped as a natural pill that will quieten your mind and make you happier.
There must be a more balanced view of meditation, one that understands the limitations of meditation and its adverse effects. One day there will be a more complete picture of this potent and poorly understood practice. For now, our understanding is mostly warped.
:- https://aeon.co/essays/can-meditation-really-make-the-world-a-better-place

 

Our mind is so hard to control
but only you can make it on your own
Buddha teach you the right pathway
It's up to you to see the light of day.

 

Beautiful Relaxing Music: Romantic Piano Music, Violin Music, Cello Music, Guitar Music ★74...3 Hrs.

Soothing Relaxation

Published on Jul 18, 2016

 

Guided Meditation | Ajahn Brahm

Buddhist Society of Western Australia
Published on Oct 13, 2018

 

Meditation and Going Beyond Mindfulness - A Secular Perspective

Mingyur Rinpoche
Published on Aug 29, 2018This public talk from 19 April 2018 was held at the London School of Economics Old Theatre in London, England, UK.

 

Thich Nhat Hanh - The Art of Mindful Living - Part 1

Thich Nhat Hanh - The Art of Mindful Living - Part 2

waves that come and go
Published on Sep 20, 2014
Zen meditation master Thich Nhat Hanh offers his practical teachings about how to bring love and mindful awareness into our daily experience. Kind, purposeful, and illuminating, here is an abundant treasure of traditional gathas (teachings) that unify meditation practice with the challenges we face in today's world. I receive many touching comments on the Thich Nhat Hanh videos and I'm really happy they have managed to reach so many people and I'm able to help spread his timeless and invaluable teachings. However, it is not without some guilt, considering I have uploaded these talks without permission. I hope if they have been inspiring and meaningful for you that you can either buy the original recordings or donate to Plum Village, to help contribute to the beautiful and important work that is being done there. http://plumvillage.org/donate/ Purchase CD here http://tinyurl.com/artofmindfulliving Thank you.

 

You Should Meditate Every Day
Sure, it’s become a wellness fad. But it’s the best way I’ve found to keep digital monsters at bay.

By Farhad Manjoo

Opinion Columnist

• Jan. 9, 2019
  

Because I live in Northern California, where this sort of thing is required by local ordinance, I spent New Year’s Day at a meditation center, surrounded by hundreds of wealthy, well-meaning, Patagonia-clad white people seeking to restore order and balance to their tech-besotted lives.

In the past, I might have mocked such proceedings, but lately I’ve grown fond of performative sincerity in the service of digital balance. It’s the people who haven’t resigned themselves to meditation retreats who now make me most nervous, actually.

Which brings me to my point: It’s 2019. Why haven’t you started meditating, already? Why hasn’t everyone?

[Farhad Manjoo answered questions about his column on Twitter.]

I’ve been a technology journalist for nearly 20 years and a tech devotee even longer. Over that time, I’ve been obsessed with how the digital experience scrambles how we make sense of the real world.
Technology may have liberated us from the old gatekeepers, but it also created a culture of choose-your-own-fact niches, elevated conspiracy thinking to the center of public consciousness and brought the incessant nightmare of high-school-clique drama to every human endeavor.

It also skewed our experience of daily reality. Objectively, the world today is better than ever, but the digital world inevitably makes everyone feel worse. It isn’t just the substance of daily news that unmoors you, but also the speed and volume and oversaturated fakery of it all.

A few years ago, I began to fear that the caustic mechanisms of the internet were eating away at my brain, turning me into an embittered, distracted, reflexively cynical churl. Since then, I’ve done everything I can to detox. I consulted app blockers and screen-time monitors to keep me offline. I even got my news from print newspapers in order to experience a slower, more deliberate presentation of media.

But there are limits to the supposedly life-changing magic of going offline. Smartphones are as central to the economy as cars and credit cards, and a lot of people have little meaningful opportunity to quit.

And the “offline” world is now ruled by what happens online. Escape is impossible. Quips on Twitter are indirectly programming cable news, and whatever lengths you might go to to shield your kid from the dark powers of phones, her social life will still rise and fall according to the inscrutable dynamics of Instagram and Fortnite.
And so, to survive the brain-dissolving internet, I turned to meditation.

Don’t roll your eyes. You’ve heard about the benefits of mindfulness before. Meditation has been rising up the ladder of West Coast wellness fads for several years and is now firmly in the zeitgeist.

It’s the subject of countless books, podcasts, conferences, a million-dollar app war. It’s extolled by C.E.O.s and entertainers and even taught in my kids’ elementary school (again, it’s Northern California). The fad is backed by reams of scientific research showing the benefits of mindfulness for your physical and mental health — how even short-term stints improve your attention span and your ability to focus, your memory, and other cognitive functions.

I knew all of this when I first began meditating a year ago, but I was still surprised at how the practice altered my relationship with the digital world. At first, it wasn’t easy: After decades of swimming in the frenetic digital waters, I found that my mind was often too scrambled to accommodate much focus. Sitting calmly, quietly and attempting to sharpen my thoughts on the present moment was excruciating. For a while, I flitted among several meditation books and apps, trying different ways to be mindful without pain.

Then, about four months ago, I brute-forced it: I made meditation part of my morning routine and made myself stick with it. I started with 10 minutes a day, then built up to 15, 20, then 30. Eventually, something clicked, and the benefits became noticeable, and then remarkable.

The best way I can describe the effect is to liken it to a software upgrade for my brain — an update designed to guard against the terrible way the online world takes over your time and your mind.

Now, even without app blockers, I can stay away from mindless online haunts without worrying that I’m missing out. I can better distinguish what’s important from what’s trivial, and I’m more gracious and empathetic with others online. As far as I know, people are still wrong on the internet, but, amazingly, I don’t really care anymore.

I can anticipate your excuses. First, this is all very old news: As Buddhists have known forever, meditation is really good for you, and The New York Times’s new Op-Ed columnist is On It. And second, it’s all a bit too woo-woo — it sounds promising, but you’re not one to go full Goop.
Still, I hope you give it a try. I hope everyone does. (The Times’s David Gelles has written a great guide for getting started.) I’m not promising meditation will fix everything about how the internet has ruined you.

But what if it does?

Farhad Manjoo became an opinion columnist for The New York Times in 2018. Before that, he wrote The Times’ State of the Art column. He is the author of "True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society."
:- https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/opinion/meditation-internet.html

 

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Are we morally obligated to meditate?

A growing body of neuroscience research shows that meditation can make us better to each other.

By Sigal Samuel Jan 10, 2020, 8:00am EST
Eight weeks ago, I started meditating every day.

I knew I’d be going home to visit my family at the end of December, and well, I have a bad habit of regressing into a 13-year-old whenever I’m around them. All my old immaturities and anxieties get activated. I become a more reactive, less compassionate version of myself.


But this holiday season, I was determined to avoid fighting with my family. I would be kind and even-tempered throughout the visit. I knew that in order to have a chance in hell of achieving this, I’d need a secret weapon.


That’s where the meditation came in.


Starting in 2005, Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar began to publish some mind-blowing findings: Meditation can literally change the structure of your brain, thickening key areas of the cortex that help you control your attention and emotions. Your brain — and possibly, by extension, your behavior — can reap the benefits if you practice meditation for half an hour a day over eight weeks.


Just eight weeks? I thought when I read the research. This seems too good to be true!


I was intrigued, if skeptical. Above all, I was curious to know more. And I wasn’t the only one. By 2014, there had been enough follow-up studies to warrant a meta-analysis, which showed that meditators’ brains tend to be enlarged in a bunch of regions, including the insula (involved in emotional self-awareness), parts of the cingulate cortex and orbitofrontal cortex (involved in self-regulation), and parts of the prefrontal cortex (involved in attention).


A host of other studies showed that meditation can also change your neural circuitry in ways that make you more compassionate, as well as more inclined to have positive feelings toward a victim of suffering and to see things from their perspective.


Further research suggested that meditation can change not only your internal emotional states but also your actual behavior. One study found that people made charitable donations at a higher rate after being trained in meditation for just two weeks. Another study found that people who get that same measly amount of meditation training are about three times more likely than non-meditators to give up their chair when they see someone on crutches and in pain.


Still skeptical, I fell down an internet rabbit hole and soon found many more neuroscientific studies. Looking closely at them, I did find that a fair number are methodologically flawed (more on that below). But there were many others that seemed sound. Taken together, the literature on meditation suggested that the practice can help us get better at relating to one another. It confronted me with evidence that a few weeks of meditation can improve me as a person.


I say “confronted” because the evidence really did feel like a challenge, even a dare. If it takes such a small amount of time and effort to get better at regulating my emotions, paying attention to other people, seeing things from their point of view, and acting altruistically, then … well … am I not morally obligated to do it?


The science behind mindfulness meditation and how we pay attention to others

The word “meditation” actually refers to many different practices. In the West, the most well-known set of practices is “mindfulness meditation.” When people talk about that, they’re typically thinking of a practice for training our attention.


Here’s how Jon Kabat-Zinn, a scientist who helped popularize mindfulness in the West, defines it: “Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.”


And here’s what mindfulness meditation practice often involves: You sit down, close your eyes, and focus on feeling your breath go in and out. When you feel your attention drifting to the thoughts that inevitably arise, you notice, and then gently bring your attention back to your breath.
This combination of attention training and direct observation is the basic practice. Sounds simple, right? But according to some studies, it can have profound effects on your brain.

In a 2012 study, people who were new to meditation underwent eight weeks of mindful attention training, practicing for around four hours each week. Before the training, they got fMRIs, scans that show where brain activity is occurring. While they were in the MRI scanner, they viewed a series of pictures, some of which were upsetting (like a photo of a burn victim). After eight weeks of mindfulness meditation, when they viewed the upsetting pictures in the scanner again, they showed reduced activity in a crucial brain region: the amygdala.

The amygdala is our brain’s threat detector. It scans our environment for danger, and when it perceives a threat, it sets off our fight-flight-freeze response, which includes releasing stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. It glues our attention to the threat, making it hard for us to focus on anything else.

What’s striking about the study is that the reduced amygdala activity lasted even when the participants were in their ordinary baseline state — in other words, not actively practicing mindfulness. This suggests the effects of meditation “may result in enduring changes in mental function,” as the authors wrote. A control group showed no such effects.

In another, similarly designed study, participants showed reduced amygdala activity in response to upsetting pictures after practicing mindfulness for 20 minutes per day over just one week. However, the lessened amygdala reactivity only showed while they were engaged in mindfulness, suggesting we need more continued practice if we want the changes to be permanent.
To see why attention-training can be helpful when it comes to treating others better, think back to a time when you saw someone in distress. Maybe it was a friend who wanted to talk about his painful breakup, or a colleague who was caught in a swirl of anxiety, or a homeless person who needed something to eat.

If you were distracted by your own distressing thoughts — if your amygdala was activating like crazy — you may have had a hard time putting your issues aside long enough to deal with theirs. You may not have even noticed that they needed something from you until it was too late.

But if your mind is undisturbed, you’ll probably have an easier time paying attention to what the present moment asks of you: to help this person who’s in front of you, right here, right now.

 

(cont)
“That’s common sense,” said Thupten Jinpa, a Tibetan Buddhist scholar and the main English translator to the Dalai Lama. “I grew up as a monk, so for me, the most powerful evidence is really the anecdotal evidence in my own personal life.”

But as an academic with a PhD in religion, Jinpa doesn’t rely only on common sense or personal experience — he also works with psychologists on scientific research. In 2015, he co-authored a study titled “A wandering mind is a less caring mind,” which found that reducing mind-wandering through meditation was associated with increased caring behavior, both for oneself and for others.

Although Jinpa believes mindfulness is important, he told me that when it comes to making us more altruistic, there’s another type of practice that’s even more effective: loving-kindness or compassion meditation.

The science behind loving-kindness and compassion meditation and their effects on altruism
Two other meditation practices — loving-kindness meditation and its close cousin, compassion meditation — have interesting science behind them, too. These practices, which involve concentrated attention to cultivate certain qualities, have been growing in popularity in the West over the past couple of decades thanks to American teachers like Sharon Salzberg. And evidence shows they can change your neural circuitry even faster than mindfulness meditation.

The meditation for loving-kindness typically looks like this: You repeat certain phrases in your head, such as “may I be safe,” “may I be healthy,” or “may my life unfold with ease.” After you’ve wished these things for yourself, you widen the circle of caring, wishing the same things for the people you love, then for people you feel neutrally about, and then for all living beings — including those who get on your nerves or have hurt you. (One compassion meditation works much the same way, except instead of wishing that people be safe and healthy and full of ease, you wish that they be free from suffering.)

So, how does loving-kindness or compassion meditation affect the brain, and in turn, affect our behavior?

Before we answer that question, it’s important to note that loving-kindness and compassion meditation — which involve cultivating love for people who are suffering — are not the same thing as empathy, even though we often conflate these concepts.
Empathy is when you share the feelings of other people. If other people are feeling pain, you feel pain, too — literally.

Not so with compassion. In a 2013 study at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, researchers put volunteers in a brain scanner, showed them gruesome videos of people suffering, and asked them to empathize with the sufferers. The fMRI showed activated neural circuits centered around the insula — exactly the circuits that get activated when we’re in pain ourselves.