Meditation alters your grey matter, studies show
February 22, 2011
February 20, 2011
By ADRIANA BARTON,
From Monday’s Globe and Mail
Brain scans of participants in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction training show density changes in key regions
Move over cryptic crosswords and Sudoku, and make way for the ultimate mental workout. It’s called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR for short. Recent neuroscience research shows that novices using the method – developed at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in the 1970s – can get results in just eight weeks.
Read more
7 Ways Meditation Can Save Your Life
February 15, 2011
From The Huffington Post
Ed and Deb Shapiro, Spiritual teachers; award-winning authors, ‘Be the Change’; columnists, Oprah.com
Why do more people drink alcohol than people who meditate? Why do more people eat fast food than get exercise? Smoking is a leading cause of death in the U.S., as are poor diet and alcohol use, so why do we love everything that is bad for us and keep away from things that do us good?
Presumably it’s because we really don’t like ourselves too much. Once the cycle of self-dislike gets started, then it takes a huge amount of determination and effort to make changes. And the mind is a perfect servant, as it will do whatever it’s told, but it’s a terrible master as it fails to help us help ourselves.
Read more
The biggest lie you tell yourself
November 12, 2010
The biggest lie we tell ourselves is that meditating is not a high priority.
First of all, if you don’t realize how much science there is behind meditation, you must be living under a rock. And the book I’m currently kvelling over, The Happiness Advantage, says that meditation, just five minutes a day, is one of the most reliable ways to increase our natural tendency toward happiness.
But I don’t want to sound too girly when I tell you to meditate. So I’m telling you instead that the Marine Corp is using meditation to help troops cope with the stress of warfare. Imagine fifty guys sitting cross-legged, eyes shut, with a rifle in every lap. The marines were totally skeptical at first, of course, but in Men’s Journal (one of my favorite magazines) there’s a great article by Vanessa Gregory about how the soldiers became believers. (This article is not online. Annoying. So here’s a link to Science Daily article about Marines meditating.)
Read more