Category Archives: articles

Get some sleep so you can wake up!

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The quote below caught my attention yesterday as I was reading a post from elephantjournal.com on Facebook. The author is Ricardo das Neves, who is described as a writer on spirituality and humor and a yoga teacher in Seattle, writing about how to fall asleep (both falling asleep and awakening are prerequisites to awakening):

As someone who dips his toes in the meditation pool, I also notice that if I’m lying awake thinking, it’s invariably rehashing the past or planning the future. In the present, there’s only awareness, silence. So to enhance my awareness of thoughts, I locate where in my brain I’m thinking. I notice that it’s mostly top-and-left-of-center, though occasionally it’s back-and-in-and-left. Now I “move” the thoughts over to my right brain. That is, I pretend to feel them coming from the right side of my brain. There’s no question I’m aware of thoughts at this point if I have to push them over to that location. Next, while exhaling slowly, I place short words in my right brain. “Sleep” is a favorite one. It’s not a command; it’s just an exploration of what happens when I say “sleep” every now in my right brain and then perceive all kinds of images that come up out of the blue. That’s the right brain’s language. I notice those random, fleeting images. I keep placing simple words in my right brain. I get images. Words in the right brain. Images. Wordszzzzzzz….

To read the entire article, go here.

I played with this technique this morning at Sunday service at Appamada. We sit for several 30 minute sessions with 10 minute walking sessions in between. Plenty of time to play with your meditation!

Like this: Imagine the word “word” (or pick another word–it doesn’t matter). Imagine it in your mind’s eye as being projected in front of you from your left brain. You get to pick your favorite font. It could be bold, outlined, italic, red, cursive, blocky, whatever you choose. You see a word in front of you coming from your left brain.

Now slide that word over so that in your mind’s eye it is projected from your right brain, and notice what happens.

Do this now before reading on.

For me, the word becomes pure image without meaning, and the letters begin morphing, become covered with fur, or snow. They may change color, dance, unravel and become new shapes. It’s slightly (or majorly) hallucinogenic, and harmless. It’s fun!

This morning during zazen, I also spent time noticing what I saw with my eyes closed. I was facing a window in the zendo (hey, rhyme!), which had morning light flooding through. I let the light in and noticed how my visual centers were stimulated to create vague changing shapes, like phosphorescence. This was fascinating to watch.

Even though I didn’t visualize the word “sleep”, by the time of the reading, I was so deeply relaxed, I caught myself falling into sleep a couple of times. I pulled myself out.

Sit and be still for 30 minutes sometime, if you don’t already. You  may notice that rather than being boring, the opportunities that arise to have fun and be creative are endless!

Zen meditation changes brain, lowers pain threshold

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Here’s a blurb I read in a newsletter from the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe:

Zen and Pain

The world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming it.
—Helen Keller

Zen meditation helps lower sensitivity to pain by thickening a part of the brain that regulates emotion and painful sensations, according to a study published recently.

University of Montreal researchers compared the grey matter thickness of 17 Zen meditators and 18 non-meditators and found evidence that practising the centuries-old discipline can reinforce a central part of the brain called the anterior cingulate. “Through training, Zen meditators appear to thicken certain areas of their cortex and this appears to underlie their lower sensitivity to pain,” lead author Joshua Grant said in a statement.

Building on an earlier study, the researchers measured thermal pain sensitivity by applying a heated plate to the calf of participants. This was followed by scanning the brains of subjects with structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

The MRI results showed central brain regions that regulate emotion and pain were significantly thicker in meditators compared to non-meditators. “The often painful posture associated with Zen meditation may lead to thicker cortex and lower pain sensitivity,” Grant opined.

The study was published in a special issue of the American Psychological Association journal, Emotion.

In the previous study, the researchers recruited Zen meditators with more than 1,000 hours of practice and non-meditators and measured their respective tolerance to pain.

Several of the meditators tolerated a maximum 53°C produced by a heating plate. They appeared to further reduce their pain partly through slower breathing: 12 breaths per minute versus an average of 15 breaths for non-meditators.

“Slower breathing certainly coincided with reduced pain and may influence pain by keeping the body in a relaxed state,” Grant said in the earlier study.

Ultimately, Zen meditators experience an 18% reduction in pain sensitivity, according to the original study.

Article: autonomous sitting

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This article focuses on the physiology of sitting. It mentions challenges for meditators with steps to strengthen sitting ability.

http://www.zafu.net/whatswrong.html

I began sitting on an exercise ball at my office job about 5 years ago. I felt tired at the end of the workday because of the extra effort of holding my torso upright without support. That lasted for a week. I don’t notice it at all now.

Using an exercise ball for a chair ($13 at Target), I move more frequently. I found a stable position that works well too: I sit with my tailbone at top center, knees wide, heels tucked into the ball — so my hips are higher than my knees.

I add air once or twice a year to keep it firm.

Pink noise, bad memory

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Got up early, sat before work, and right now I cannot remember anything clearly about sitting this morning, except that I did it! No big or small realizations, no startling insights, not even small moments stand out in my memory.

So there you have it. Nothing to write about. The blogger’s worst nightmare. Oh, well!

I did read something today that may be of interest to you — it was news to me. Apparently some film geeks (or attention geeks, or psychologists) broke down a bunch of movies into scenes and shots and compared them to the natural human pattern of attention. Here are some excerpts:

Pink noise is a characteristic signal profile seated somewhere between random and rigid, and for utterly mysterious reasons, our world is ablush with it….

Hollywood filmmakers, whether they know it or not, have become steadily more adroit at shaping basic movie structure to match the pulsatile, half-smooth, half-raggedy way we attend to the world around us….

Track the pulsings of a quasar, the beatings of a heart, the flow of the tides, the bunchings and thinnings of traffic, or the gyrations of the stock market, and the data points will graph out as pink noise. Much recent evidence from reaction-time experiments suggests that we think, focus and refocus our minds, all at the speed of pink.

I wonder how meditation affects one’s signal profile. Food for thought! Pulsatile food for thought, that is.

I had never seen or heard the word pulsatile before. I looked it up. It means:

Undergoing pulsation; vibrating.

Not sure why the writer didn’t choose pulsating. (Just my mind at work.)

Here’s the link if you want to read the whole article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/science/02angi.html?em

And here’s a link to a UT/Austin website about white, brown, and pink noise. Scroll down for findings about noise and people with ADHD and recovering alcoholics: http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/group/GildenLAB/fractal.htm

Can the world be different?

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Spent much of the morning online, catching up on Facebook and email, and finishing reading a remarkable article I started last week, The Women’s Crusade.

Here’s the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.html

The article mentions a nonprofit in Hyderabad, India, called Prajwala, on page 3. A 14-year-old Hyderabad girl from a poor family was forced into prostitution in New Delhi under false pretenses (a job as a maid). She witnessed the murders of 3 other girls who resisted. She was never paid and often beaten.

Eventually the police freed her and returned her to Hyderabad. She was taken in by Prajwala, which teaches new skills to girls rescued from brothels. She now earns a decent living as a bookbinder, is getting an education and helping put her younger sisters through school.

The thesis of the article is this: “With education and with help starting businesses, impoverished women can earn money and support their countries as well as their families. They represent perhaps the best hope for fighting global poverty.”

Here’s another quote: “In Asia alone about one million children working in the sex trade are held in conditions indistinguishable from slavery, according to a U.N. report…. India probably has more modern slaves than any other country.”

The wheels of my mind and heart began turning. Here, listen to them creak:

This is happening in India, the home of yoga, a practice that I love, that has given so much to me, and to so many other Americans, who are fortunate enough to be able to take yoga classes and go on yoga vacations and retreats.

Wow, this is the kind of reporting (from Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn) that I would pay for. It’s not just about how bad things are. The article notes a few organizations that are making a difference in places around the planet.

Most beautifully, it provides a big insight into how to make the seemingly impossible actually happen — end poverty by focusing on educating and empowering women.

Creak. What if, and this is a big what if, American yogis adopted Prajwala as their nonprofit of choice, to give something back to the country that gave us yoga?

I emailed Prajwala with questions. It’s not as easy as you think — they don’t take PayPal, for one. I want to know how to help — not just by giving money, but by connecting American yogis to Prajwala. How can I best proceed? Ideas welcome!

My mind was churning with this when I sat on the zafu. First my body became still, then my breath slowed, my mind slowly slowed, my energy softened.

It’s not about me. It’s something moving through me.

It comes from a heart that has repeatedly been horrified by how humans can treat each other and a mind that wants so much to believe that the world can be different.

I ask you, can it?

article: Damage to One Brain Region Can Boost “Transcendent” Feelings

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I like learning about scientific discoveries, especially those that have to do with health and well-being and the brain. Sometimes the findings are surprising to me, and often I feel happy for scientists to be learning something that I already “know” is true! Because scientists learn using a painstaking method. I am not often painstaking, not a scientist.

But then, I could be wrong. It’s all a hypothesis to me–if a belief works, use it. If not, discard it. My Museum of Old Beliefs is vast!

Often these reports on scientific discoveries add to my knowledge about how the body-mind works because they contain details about areas like anatomy that I am finding more and more interesting. I have been buying picture books about anatomy. I don’t know where if anywhere this is leading, but I’m finding it more and more interesting.

I will post links on this blog to articles I come across that are interesting to me. Here’s the first one:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/02/11/damage-to-particular-brain-region-can-boost-transcendent-feelings/