Meditation has become a popular practice over the years, helping to combat stress and promote mental well-being.

But it seems the daily ritual isn’t only a form of rest and relaxation – it can also improve your sex life.

Women who are able to train their thoughts while love-making experience more pleasure between the sheets, a study has revealed. Read more

When I started practicing meditation in 1995, I didn’t tell too many people about it for fear they would think I had joined a cult or turned into some kind of new-aged oddball. If I mention it today, however, I’m more likely to be greeted by comments like, “I just came back from a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat,” or “Yes, my doctor told me I should meditate to stabilize my blood pressure.” I knew that this ancient practice had officially entered our culture when I saw a billboard advertising a new sleeping pill called Zazen. It’s here.

Now, we’re faced with a plethora of choices for developing a meditation practice. I say go for it! Explore the practice of “Vipassana” or “Insight Meditation.” Ask your doctor to refer you to a clinic where they teach mindfulness based stress reduction, which is connected to Vipassana. Visit your local Shambhala center or another Tibetan Buddhist center and learn “Shamatha” or the practice of tranquility. Try “Zazen” (the Zen meditation practice, not the sleeping pill).

There are many other forms of meditation practice, but as a Buddhist, these are the ones I am familiar with and can vouch for. And as you do your research, I suggest you consider these parameters: Read more

However you try to define meditation, it’s not that. — Swami Brahmananda

Through many years of being involved with meditation we have seen how easily people miss the point, mainly because they take the practice and themselves too seriously. Many “try” to meditate but their minds are so busy they get frustrated and quickly believe they are no good at it. Others turn into diehard advocates of a particular method or technique and become like a salesperson trying to sell a product.

Just like yoga, people want to own meditation and to believe that their technique is the best one. They give it a name: TM, Vipassana or Kundalini meditation and sometimes make outrageous claims of what can be achieved, but that is not the point. Meditation is not a technique — being quiet happens by itself, not because of following the breath in and out, reciting a specific mantra or creating a visualization.

Teachers, through their compassion, have created the many methods and techniques in order to help their students to concentrate and focus their minds, to be one-pointed. No one technique is better than another; they equally give our monkey minds something to do other than drive us bananas. Many of the practices known as meditation are actually concentration; they bring the mental energy together so the mind is less fragmented. But this is not meditation. Read more

… After several years of number-crunching, data from the so-called Shamatha project is finally starting to be published. So far the research has shown some not hugely surprising psychological and cognitive changes – improvements in perception and wellbeing, for example. But one result in particular has potentially stunning implications: that by protecting caps called telomeres on the ends of our chromosomes, meditation might help to delay the process of ageing. Read more

… Tips for Inducing Altered States of Consciousness

It is very difficult to pinpoint the reasons why these altered states take place when they do. If such states do interest you and you would like to explore them in your own life, I would give the following advise as starters…

1. Ask How You Spend Your Energy:

Start with that question. See how you spend the energy you are given. Do you simply waste it away or are you putting it to good use? If you are wasting your time and energy, then it is wise to start making modifications to your life in order to better gather and use your energy. Perhaps enlightenment is simply a reward for doing this. Read more

Meditation is just a way to relax and maybe calm you down for the moment, right? Wrong. Not only will most regular meditators tell you that meditation makes them feel better emotionally and physically, but now there is also scientific evidence that regular meditation literally changes the body — specifically, it changes the brain in ways that appear to be beneficial.

In a study published in the January 30 edition of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers concluded that an eight week mindful meditation practice produced measurable changes in participants’ brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. This is the first study to document meditation-produced changes in the brain’s grey matter over time. Read more

Why the need to develop intuition, you ask? First of all, intuition promotes good communication. It makes you more sensitive to the people around you. It often keeps you from hurting those you love because you are intuitive enough to understand them. Intuition also has a healing power. This healing power is not in the physical sense, but in delving deep into your soul to eradicate negative energy buried in it.

If you ready to develop your intuition, here are six ways to unlock this gift:

1) Trust your first impressions.

When you see someone for the first time and think that he is a bit too arrogant for your taste, chances are that impression actually is correct. Most of the time, first impressions are brought by intuition.

2) Just let go.

If you are faced with a major decision, let go of all the inhibitions and head to a quiet place where you can find out where the letting go has brought you. Sometimes you just have to listen to the voice within you, and that voice can’t speak to you unless you let go.

3) Never expect.

After letting go of the inhibitions and all those things that stop you from thinking and feeling clearly, never expect an answer right away, or that the “hunch” will come to you immediately. Give it some time.

4) Stay positive!

A worry-free, fear-free state can do so much to improve your intuitive ability. By staying positive, you attract positive energy that will be able to easily recognize imminent feelings and events.

5) Be happy!

Happiness attracts immense power, and such power includes intuition. In tapping your intuition, your motivation must be happiness and contentment. In that emotional state, intuition comes to you more easily.

6) Meditate

Meditating means finding peace in yourself. If your mind and heart are cluttered with too much baggage and pain,  you won’t be able to reach that part of you that can eventually initiate intuition. There are so many ways to meditate. All of them work iff you practice them.

Intuition is helpful, because sometimes it leads you to knowledge that cannot be attained otherwise. Decisions are made more easily if informed by this gift. Develop intuition now and reap benefits you never imagined.

The majority of my clients resist mindfulness meditation at first, although the time commitment is small and the payoff is enormous. One insisted that it wasn’t necessary and that she didn’t have enough time in her day to devote to a regular practice. Then she went through the loss of a parent, and had such trouble coping that she couldn’t even drag herself out of bed. After missing work 10 days straight, she called me for my advice. I told her to mindfully meditate while in bed. Terrified and bewildered, my client did and, in a few days, found that she could face going to work again. After that, whenever she was in an overwhelming state of grief or so distracted that she couldn’t focus, she would close her door, tell her assistant to hold all her calls and do a five minute meditation. Slowly, her grief lessened.

Typically, those who resist meditation are buying in to one of the following four common myths from my book, “Wise Mind, Open Mind” that create resistance to regular mindfulness meditation practice. Read more

Some of us need regular amounts of coffee or other chemical enhancers to make us cognitively sharper. A newly published study suggests perhaps a brief bit of meditation would prepare us just as well.

While past research using neuroimaging technology has shown that meditation techniques can promote significant changes in brain areas associated with concentration, it has always been assumed that extensive training was required to achieve this effect. Though many people would like to boost their cognitive abilities, the monk-like discipline required seems like a daunting time commitment and financial cost for this benefit.

Surprisingly, the benefits may be achievable even without all the work. Though it sounds almost like an advertisement for a “miracle” weight-loss product, new research now suggests that the mind may be easier to cognitively train than we previously believed. Psychologists studying the effects of a meditation technique known as “mindfulness ” found that meditation-trained participants showed a significant improvement in their critical cognitive skills (and performed significantly higher in cognitive tests than a control group) after only four days of training for only 20 minutes each day. Read more