American Buddhist Net

Meditation exercises could boost mental toughness in soldiers readying for war, keeping them from becoming overly emotional, according to new research.

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"The Mother was in some way guiding me—through a photograph. The pain increased and there were nights when I was lying on the floor surrendering my breath and body to allow whatever was to happen—to let go. It was becoming quite a struggle and finally the only thing that worked was to surrender entirely. One night I simply decide it would be okay if I died. It was clear to me that this was the only way.

This changed my life forever. It was a crisis of the heart. Can I fully love? Can I fully be led by my feelings of trust in something greater than myself? These were the underlying questions. I spent a number of nights needing to reaffirm this surrender until the energy moved steadily upward beyond this testing place. The kundalini was not through working on my heart as there are many levels within the heart that must be opened."

Here is a link to the full text: Learning Meditation, Part Seventeen

This article is the first of two comparing findings of studies of advanced practitioners of Tibetan Buddhist meditation in remote regions of the Himalayas, with established results on long-term practitioners of the Transcendental Meditation programs. Many parallel levels of improvement were found, in sensory acuity, perceptual style and cognitive function, indicating stabilization of aspects of attentional awareness. Together with observed increases in EEG coherence and aspects of brain function, such changes are consistent with growth towards a state of total brain functioning, i.e. development of full mental potential. They are usually accompanied by improved health parameters. How they may be seen to be consistent with growth of enlightenment will be the subject of a second article.

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How did you become involved in the science of meditation?

The Dalai Lama often describes Buddhism as being, above all, a science of the mind. That is not surprising, because the Buddhist texts put particular emphasis on the fact that all spiritual practices - whether mental, physical or oral - are directly or indirectly intended to transform the mind.

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On Sunday, January 24 at 5 p.m., the Northfield community is invited to attend a special Tibetan Buddhist Service of Teaching and Mediation in the Skinner Memorial Chapel at Carleton College. The service will be led by Lama Tsultrim Yeshe and a soup supper will follow the service. This event is free and open to the public.

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2010 could be the year that mindfulness meditation goes mainstream in the UK. It's already endorsed as a treatment for depression by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, and today a major mental health charity is calling for meditation-based courses to be offered much more widely on the NHS.

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Short Zen Poems - Mindfulness, Meditation - Unique collection of over 200 zen poems. Original, insightful, enlightening, full of paradox, wisdom and humor. Subjects include mindfulness, meditation, waking up, realization, etc.

Steve Hagen, head teacher of Dharma Field Zen Meditation Center in Minneapolis, will be in Duluth to give a public talk entitled "Buddhism Plain and Simple," at the Spiritual Deli on December 18th at 7:00pm. Steve will also be providing meditation instruction on December 19th at 8:00am, immediately following the Arrowhead Sangha's weekly zazen meditation period.

Admission Information: Free, Donations gratefully accepted.

Location:
The Spiritual Deli
3 West Superior Street
Duluth, MN 55812

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ST. LOUIS — It was a routine business conference for the judge: Agendas. Handshakes. Business cards.

But then something kind of mystical happened.

David Mason was approached by a man wearing a crisp suit with a neatly pointed kerchief in his breast pocket. In a measured Indian accent, the man said he too was a lawyer and knew all about the judge and his enlightened views on criminal rehabilitation. He wanted to tell him about the power of meditation in prisons.

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The Center for American Buddhist Practice Sutra Study & Meditation: Meditation every week for the first hour and for the second hour we alternate between a Practical Buddhism class and a Sutra Study class.

Classes take place at the Eye of Buddha Store in San Diego on the corner of Park and El Cajon Blvd. The meditation and classes are free and are held every Tuesday starting at 6 pm.

For more information see: http://www.cfabp.org/sdhome.html

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Description: “Transforming the Heart and Healing the Mind,” presented by Mark Nunberg, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Northfield Buddhist Meditation Center, 313 1/2 Division St., above Jenkins Jewelers. Free and open to the public. Includes sitting and walking meditation, guided movement, talks on Buddhist spiritual practice and time for questions and discussion. Please bring a bag lunch. Registration: contact@northfieldmeditation.org.

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Everyone I know is compiling a list of the best films of the aughts, and 2001’s Mulholland Drive seems to be a lock on most (and if it’s not, 2006’s Inland Empire is the more pretentious substitute). But as the decade closes out, I do wish we had seen more “Lynchian” films from David Lynch, who seems occupied with experimental video, his son’s ambitious documentary projects, the advent of Twitter, and exposing as many people/fans to Transcendental Meditation as possible. So, if it’s a tad disappointing that the chain smoking auteur’s next film won’t hinge on creepy dream logic, it doesn’t qualify as a surprise that it will instead be a doc on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The founder and guru of TM died early last year, and true to form, Lynch adds that his doc on the man will “hold a lot of abstractions.”

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...[Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard] and a number of his colleagues meditate, and as they meditate they measure differences in their brainwaves. Right? And I basically said I would predict that those very same things that when you meditate and you have positive brainwave changes would also have an effect on your stem cells. He very graciously, and this is an N of one, let us measure cells in his blood before and after meditation. And what we found was a huge increase in the number of positive stem cells in blood. Largest increase I've ever seen after 15 minutes of meditation.

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You don’t have to meditate to experience enlightenment, but a lot of people do, and it’s probably fair to say that meditation is the most popular technique for getting it done. Yet it struck me recently how I’ve never come across a model for the progress of insight phrased in terms of the development of meditation technique.

I was thinking about this because I’d noticed a couple of important milestones in my practice that I’d never seen listed in any of the classic descriptions of enlightenment. These milestones, I realised, were developments within meditation rather than stages of insight per se. Having understood this, it seemed possible to describe a whole model based on technique, although the model closely follows the contours of the classic Theravada four-path insight model.

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Well-said! ABN

Taiwanese religious sister speaks about the impact of meditation prayer in her life

...This kind of Buddhist association is more common in Taiwan today, but then it was not. We had forward-looking community leaders. There was ongoing dialogue with the Buddhists. We were very early in this kind of dialogue.

Some years ago German sisters founded our congregation. Of course, back then the attention, in prayer, was on words, lots of words. But eventually we began to use our own culture and we began to find ways to use or own prayer traditions.

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B. Alan Wallace

ALL THE GREAT REVO LU T I O N S in science have been catalyzed by sophisticated observations of natural phenomena. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, decades of empirical studies of celestial and terrestrial physical phenomena by Tycho Brahe and Galileo laid the foundation for Newton’s discovery of the laws of classical mechanics. In the nineteenth century, Darwin’s decades of painstaking empirical observations of biological phenomena enabled him to formulate his theory of evolution. In the early twentieth century, physics underwent a second revolution in quantum mechanics and relativity theory that was also based on increasingly precise and sophisticated observations of physical phenomena.

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Please refer to our website to view the new class schedule. There will be a meditation service each Tuesday at 6pm and the Practical Buddhism class and Advanced Sutra Study will alternate at 7pm. Remember to bring your own meditation cushion. Location: Eye of the Buddha (corner of Park Blvd. and El Cajon Blvd).

In October, as it is in many months of the year, a number of Twin Cities' Buddhist meditation centers are offering half- to two-day retreats.

Meditation retreats provide a practical opportunity for modern people to follow the way of life recommended by the historic Buddha Siddhartha Gotama. The early Buddhists spent hours in daily meditation, living humble lives largely supported by charitable contributions. Celibacy freed them from the obligations, and joys, of family relationships. Responsible only to themselves, they supported a modest lifestyle by doing simple work (which included begging), making it easier to practice mindfulness in daily activities. Weekend retreats such as those below give us urban laypeople the experience of extended meditation, of quiet, and of opportunities to practice mindfulness, the fruits of which we may just carry back into our complicated lives.

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The ideals of Buddhism are open to people of all faiths because they teach non-exclusive concepts such as compassion and the wisdom to tell right from wrong, Buddhist teacher and master Her Eminence Mindrolling Jetsun Khandro Rinpoche said during a panel discussion held after the Dalai Lama’s Oct. 10 teachings.

The dialogue, titled “Using Wisdom as the Heart of Change — A Symposium,” took place in Bender Arena as a way to deconstruct and further explain what the Dalai Lama had said at AU earlier. Several experts in Tibetan Buddhism spoke and answered questions regarding the practical application of Buddhist practices to everyday life.

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There is growing amounts of research being done on how hypnosis affects the brain. For example, when patients were hypnotized to experience a paralyzed limb,

“…the work suggests that brain areas normally associated with the intentional inhibition of movement are not active in people with hysterical paralysis nor hypnotized volunteers, suggesting that it really is the case that they cannot, rather than will not, move.”

One common use for hypnosis is pain relief and anesthesia. In April 2006, the British television channel More4 broadcasted a live hernia hypnosurgery operation.

Some individuals are more hypnotizable than others; research seems to suggest that those with a bigger anterior corpus callosum, which is a part of the brain thought to help focus attention, has show to associate with higher hypnotizability.

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Quakers, Buddhists, agnostics, Hindus - they’re all doing it. Over the last few decades, meditation has evolved from a fringe practice to a mainstream stress-reduction technique that might be recommended by your family doctor.

In Washtenaw County, you have your choice of a wide variety of meditation classes and settings, ranging from the Zen Buddhist Temple in Ann Arbor, to a Quaker center in Chelsea to the Washtenaw Community College Health and Fitness Center.

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A seminar on "Happiness and Meditation," led by Buddhist monk Matthiew Ricard, will be held Oct. 18-19 at the Royal Poinciana Chapel and Seagull Cottage, 60 Cocoanut Row, Palm Beach.

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Thursday, October 1, 2009 6:00 pm CDT. Description: Sri Lankan Buddhist monk Bhanti Sathi guides beginners and those with experience in meditation from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the Northfield Buddhist Meditation Center, 313 1/2 Division St. (above Jenkins Jewelers). Free, though donations appreciated.

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Richard Davidson, one of the world’s top brain scientists, believes mental exercise, specifically meditation, can literally change our minds.

“Our data shows mental practice can induce long-lasting changes in the brain,” said Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Of the many, many free or donation-based places to drop in for a beginner's meditation session in San Francisco, one with such a confidently simple title as Buddhist Center seems like a logical choice. Its location just off the Valencia corridor makes it a convenient one as well.

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Har-Prakash Khalsa – Given that, in your own words, “enlightenment is a multi-faceted jewel”, is there a description of enlightenment that you like?

Shinzen Young – In this regard I tend to go towards my Buddhist background. Scholastic Theravada Buddhism says that three things go away at the initial experience of enlightenment. It’s very significant that it’s put in terms of an elimination process; something goes away, rather than an attainment, a “getting” of something. So enlightenment is not yet another thing that you have to get. And meditation as a path to enlightenment could be described as merely setting the stage for Nature/Grace to eliminate from you what needs to be eliminated.

The technical terms in Pali for the three things that go away are “sakkaya-ditthi”, “vicikiccha”, and “silabbata-paramasa”. Sakkaya-ditthi is the most important. Sakkaya-ditthi is the perception that there is an entity, a thing inside us called a self. That goes away.

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Well-worth reading. ABN

Mondo Zen™ is based on Japanese and Chinese Zen, updated for the 21st Century. Mondo Zen™ transcends the hierarchical/authoritarian, gender-biased and constraining monastic aspects of traditional Zen in favor of practical, experiential “in the world” engagement. Relying only on direct personal experience—as taught by the Buddha himself—it does not allow mythic constructs to complicate its philosophical orientation.

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Buddhist meditation: Zen Buddhist meditation classes run 7 to 8:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at White Lotus Dharma Center, 2740 S.W. 17th Circle, Ocala. (237-8311)

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