Choose a Luxurious Awakening with Chime Alarm Clocks

The luxurious awakening provided by the Zen Alarm Clock is part of the growing preference for things natural—natural foods, natural fibers, and now, natural acoustic sounds.  Like organic tomatoes in your salad, the organic sounds of the Zen Alarm Clock’s sweet acoustic chimes are truly a gourmet experience.

Natural Acoustic Chime Alarm Clocks

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Get a Good Night's Sleep, Choose Soothing Chime Alarm Clocks to Wake You

Learn to cope with nighttime disruptions―no pills required.

If You Can’t Relax

• Listen to soft music. Background music has been shown to help improve sleep. In one recent study published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing, senior citizens in Taiwan who had difficulty sleeping listened to calming music for 45 minutes before bedtime. They subsequently slept significantly longer and more deeply than those who didn’t hear the music.Try: Whatever music you find soothing and relaxing. The Taiwan study used various selections, including harp music by Georgia Kelly, quiet jazz by Paul Desmond, and synthesized sounds by Steven Halpern.
• Sip warm drinks. Chamomile tea works for many people, as does hot milk. “Some teas have mild soporific effects,” says Emsellem. “When you warm milk, it releases tryptophan,” an amino acid used by the body to make serotonin, a neurotransmitter believed to promote sleep. “But over time the body can develop an immunity to tryptophan,” she adds, “and its sleep-promoting properties dissipate.” Some doctors suspect the power of warm drinks resides largely in the ritual of sipping them. “Biologically, we can’t find much evidence for these drinks,” Maas says. “But psychologically, if they make people relax and reduce stress, they work.”Try: Warm milk, caffeine-free herbal tea, or hot water with lemon and honey. These drinks may help get your body ready for rest.
  

  Zen Chime Alarm Clocks Wake You Gradually and Naturally

• Breathe soothing scents. Lavender, in particular, is a scent that is said to help lull the body to sleep. But no scientific evidence supports this claim, so experts neither recommend nor discourage it. “It’s like 300-thread-count sheets,” Neubauer says. “If you believe it works, it will.”Try: Anything that relaxes you before bedtime―a gentle scent or a nice, warm bath.And remember waking up in the morning should be as pleasant as falling asleep at night. The Zen Alarm Clock’s gradual, gentle awakening is transformative.

By Mary Duenwald; Additional Reporting By Lisa Ann Smith, Real Simple.com

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morning meditation practice with meditation timer

Sense the Stillness

You don’t have to be a regular yoga or meditation practitioner to reap the benefits of a morning meditation ritual. Start with five minutes daily, using the guidelines that follow. Then over the course of a few weeks — or when you are ready — gradually work up to 10 minutes. Remember, with meditation it’s quality, not quantity, that matters.

Start with awareness. Rather than lunge out of bed, Novie suggests waking up slowly. “Spend a few minutes just becoming conscious of the sensations of your body. Awareness is such a beautiful way of entering your day.” Once you’re up, resist the temptation to check your e-mail, flip on the radio, or do any of the other countless things that draw you out of yourself and into the concerns of the world. Instead, keep the focus inward.

Find a comfortable spot. Practice your five minutes of meditation anywhere you like (the bedroom floor, a favorite chair) except the bed, where you may fall back to sleep. Be sure to set your Singing Bowl Meditation Timer (Now & Zen, $199.95) for 5 minutes so that your session can end with a calm chime.  To enhance the sacred aspect of her meditation space, Novie set up a small altar in her living room that she uses only for meditation, giving the space a positive energy of its own.

Sense your breath. Close your eyes. Feel your breath moving in and out of your body without controlling it. Bring your attention to the rise and fall of your abdomen or to the tip of your nose. The more awareness you bring to breath and body, the more grounded in your body you’ll become. This, in turn, will help relieve some of the stress that comes with getting through your morning.

Don’t try to block your thoughts. Your mind will wander — that’s what it’s designed to do. Rather than try to fight off thoughts as they emerge, acknowledge them, but don’t engage them. And give yourself some slack — meditation is, after all, a practice, not perfection.

For yoga instructor Alison Novie, mornings make an ideal time for meditation — perhaps more than any other time of day. “The sun’s about to rise, but it’s still sort of dark and quiet,” says Novie, who wakes at 5:00 a.m. to meditate. “I get up, brush my teeth, light a candle, and then sit for half an hour. The calm energy I get from that morning meditation carries me through the day.”

adapted from Body + Soul Magazine, March 2006

Singing Bowl Meditation Timer is Ideal for Morning Meditation Practice

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Alternative to Beeping Alarm Clocks...Tibetan-Singing Bowl Alarm Clock

Use The Zen Chime Alarm Clocks with Acoustic Sounds as an Alternative to Shocking Alarm Clock Sounds

Zen Timepiece Black - Eliminate Your Beeping Alarm Clock

Our Zen Timepiece’s acoustic 6-inch brass bowl-gong clock is the world’s ultimate alarm clock, practice timer, and “mindfulness bell.”  It fills your environment with beautifully complex tones whenever it strikes. In the morning, its exquisite sounds summon your consciousness into awakening with a series of subtle gongs that provide an elegant beginning to your day. Once you experience the Zen Timepiece’s progressive awakening, you’ll never want to wake up any other way. It also serves as the perfect meditation timer. Available in 5 wood styles, including bamboo (shown).

Eliminate Beeping Alarm Clocks, Zen Chime Alarm Clocks are an Alternative!

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Eliminate shocking Alarm Clocks, Zen Clocks are Soothing

Eliminate Shocking Alarm Clocks to Extend Your Life

There’s nothing quite like the shock of the alarm going off in the morning. For most, it signals the arrival of yet another dreary day of work. For some, like me, it heralds the tragic end of what was probably a poor night’s sleep: intermittent, anxiety-filled, and barely coaxed with the aid of half an Ambien. Many of us prolong the act of getting up by repeatedly hitting the snooze button until we accidentally turn the damn thing off. Why do so many alarm clocks greet us with sadistic, high-pitched screeches? Is there a better way to wake?

The Bamboo Digital Zen Clock’s long-resonating Tibetan bell-like chime makes waking up a beautiful experience – its progressive chimes begin your day with grace.  There are no gimmicky buttons or sounds. The Digital Zen Alarm Clock doesn’t have a snooze button, instead it has a gradual sequence of chimes to awaken you in the morning.

When the clock’s alarm is triggered, the acoustic chime bar is struck just once … 3-1/2 minutes later it strikes again … chime strikes become more frequent over 10 minutes … eventually striking every 5 seconds until shut off. As they become more frequent, the gentle chimes will always wake you up – your body really doesn’t need to be awakened harshly, with a Zen Clock you’re awakened more gradually and thus more naturally.  Unlike artificial recorded sounds coming out of a tiny speaker in a plastic box, natural acoustic sounds transform your bedroom or office environment.

By Dan Crane from Slate.com

Digital Zen Alarm Clocks Eliminate Shocking Wake Ups

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Try a Listen Meditation as a Mindfulness Practice

Listening Meditation
Instructor Sally Kempton is a spiritual guide who teaches yoga and meditation at her Carmel, Calif.-based Awakened Heart Meditation (sallykempton.com). She authored The Heart of Meditation under her monastic name Swami Durgananda.

What is it? While many meditation techniques require solitude and silence, this one has you engage with the sounds all around you; it invites you to work with and use the noise instead of fighting it. Listening meditation also encourages you to harmonize with your surroundings, and, by extension, the universe. The intent is to experience sound as vibration, rather than information. The listening practice is a way of interacting with the environment that allows you to take in the whole energy of the present moment, says Kempton.

What’s it good for? Especially adaptable and portable, listening meditation can be practiced in crowded, noisy situationson a bus, at the office that would be hard on other styles. (Kempton once led a listening meditation workshop in the middle of a busy Whole Foods store!) People with particularly chattering minds may need to couple this practice with a mantra or breathing meditation. However, many people welcome the chance to focus outward rather than inward and find that listening meditation is one of the easier techniques to undertake. You’ll come away from it feeling refreshed, expanded, and at ease with your environment, declares Kempton.

How long does it take? Try for five minutes at first, then add a minute or two until you can do it for 15 or 20 minutes at a time.  Set your Chime Meditation Timer by Now & Zen for five minutes and then increase as you get better at this practice.

How Do I Do It?
1. Set your Meditation Chime Timer for 5 minutes (increase the minutes as you improve). Sit in a comfortable position and close (or half close) your eyes.

2. To get centered and quiet the mind, first bring your awareness to your breath, noticing but not trying to change it.

3. Now open your ears and bring your awareness to the sounds around you. The goal is to listen to the whole range of sounds, without favoring one over another and without identifying them. Hear the quiet sounds and the silences as well as the dominant sounds.

4. When you find yourself identifying sounds (there’s a fire engine; thats the cat scratching the rug), gently redirect your attention from listening to a specific noise back to hearing the whole spectrum of sounds.

5. To end, slowly open your eyes, stand, and carry this heightened awareness with you for as long as you can.

Tip: Do a one-minute mini-listening meditation while standing in line or sitting at your desk, or anytime you feel frazzled: Close your eyes, breathe, and listen to the sounds around you. Like the practice of counting to 10 when you’re in the heat of an argument, this will help you pause, center, and regroup.

Zen Meditation Timers, The Digital Zen Alarm Clock in Solid Walnut

adapted from Natural Health Magazine

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Awaken gradually

Dreaming of a Good Night’s Rest

How you awaken each morning can also influence how well you sleep. Some experts believe your body is naturally designed to awaken gradually with the rising sun and should not to be jarred awake by a screaming alarm clock. Dawn simulators recreate a natural sunrise by slowly increasing the intensity of light in the room. A study in BMC Psychiatry found that dawn simulators improved the quality of sleep during winter months for a group of about 80 randomly chosen people.

The right light can also help you fall asleep more easily. Studies have shown that exposure to 2,000- to 10,000-lux light (the equivalent of gazing at the horizon on a sunny day and up to 20 times brighter than normal room lighting) can improve overall sleep quality, says psychiatrist Daniel Kripke, MD, of the University of California, San Diego. This is most beneficial for about 20 to 30 minutes in the morning and a few hours prior to bed. More specifically, light therapy has been used to reset body clocks for those with sleep-timing problems and to correct erratic sleep habits caused by depression. A recent study in the journal Sleep found that evening exposure from a light box effectively treated people who often woke up too early and were unable to fall back to sleep. Exactly how light therapy improves sleep for people with depression remains unknown, Kripke says, but one popular theory is that bright light increases sleep-aiding serotonin levels.

Now & Zen’s Digital Zen Clock’s long-resonating Tibetan bell-like chime makes waking up a beautiful experience – its progressive chimes begin your day with grace. When the clock’s alarm is triggered, the acoustic chime bar is struck just once … 3-1/2 minutes later it strikes again … chime strikes become more frequent over 10 minutes … eventually striking every 5 seconds until shut off. As they become more frequent, the gentle chimes will always wake you up – your body really doesn’t need to be awakened harshly, with a Zen Clock you’re awakened more gradually and thus more naturally.  Unlike artificial recorded sounds coming out of a tiny speaker in a plastic box, natural acoustic sounds transform your bedroom or office environment.

adapted from Natural Solutions Magazine, December 2005 by Matthew Sloan

Natural Awakening, Digital Zen Alarm Clock

Now & Zen’s Chime Alarm Clock Shop

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Katsushika Hokusai Ukiyo-e, Japanese Iris

There’s a good reason that people say you should “sleep on it” when facing a tough problem—it helps! A new study suggests dreaming is beneficial for problem solving. Psychology Today reports, “In REM sleep, cortical activation spreads from whatever one’s been pondering to marshal associated ideas, thanks to changes in levels of the neurotransmitters norepinephrine and acetylcholine.” Jasper Johns, Jack Nicklaus and many others have credited their dreams for successful ideas. A co-author of the study adds: “So many times, we already have the solution somewhere in our brain. It just needs an extra ‘boost’ before it can be accessed.”

adapted from Psychology Today by Elizabeth Ryan, October 2009

Zen Alarm Clock

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Sleep your way to a better health with The Zen Alarm Clock

A good night’s rest can help you lose weight, beat depression, and ward off heart disease.

People think sleep is a waste of time,” says James P. Krainson, M.D., director of the South Florida Sleep Diagnostic Center in Miami. “But they don’t realize that sleep will make them more productive.” It will also help you improve your memory, shed postpregnancy pounds, and stave off obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. Dozens of studies support the notion that sleep is just as important for maintaining good health as diet and exercise. For example, a study published in the journal Sleep found a relationship between short sleep and increased diabetes risk. Other studies found a lack of sleep can exacerbate pain, cause mood disturbances, and even increase the risk of gum disease.

Your wake-up call. If results from a 2007 Sleep in America poll are anything to go by, too many women are risking their health from lack of sleep. Conducted by the National Sleep Foundation (NFS), last year’s poll revealed that 60 percent of American women get a good night’s sleep only a few nights per week or less. Apparently, when women are pressed for time—which, let’s face it, is every day—sleep is usually the first thing to go.

Take back the night. With health benefits that important, you can’t ignore those eight hours of shuteye any longer. To help you get back in bed and waking up well rested, we looked at four sleep ailments—and discovered some surprisingly effortless solutions.

THE PROBLEM: No time
Recent research at the University of Pennsylvania, published in 2007 in Sleep, says our work-driven culture keeps us from getting the rest we need. Among the findings: The more time we spend working and com- muting, the less time we spend in bed. Even when we know that get- ting more sleep will make us feel better, it usually isn’t enough to keep us from burning the candle at both ends, says Michael Breus, Ph.D., sleep expert and author of Beauty Sleep: Look Younger, Lose Weight, and Feel Great Through Better Sleep (Plume, 2007). What’s required, Breus says, is a plan for making sleep a priority:

Set your ZenAlarm Clock for sleep. Set your alarm to go off an hour before you want to go to sleep. The alarm is your cue to start getting ready for bed.

Wind down for an hour. Take 20 minutes to shut down the house for the night and prepare for the next morning. Spend the next 20 minutes doing your usual evening ablutions like washing your face, brushing your teeth, and changing into your pj’s. For the final 20 minutes, relax and meditate in bed. That’s it. No work, reading, e-mails, phone calls, paying bills, or getting into a discussion with your partner about your health, finances, or relationship during your power-down hour, says Breus. “Avoid any activity that gets your mind revved up before you go to bed,” he advises.

Create a sleep sanctuary. “I’ve gone into bedrooms of people who say they can’t sleep, and they’ve got a computer in there, a TV, a huge pile of laundry on the floor,” says Breus. The question then becomes, according to Breus, not “Why can’t I sleep?” but “How could I sleep under these circumstances?” To transform your bedroom, Breus recommends moving the computer and the TV out of the room and clearing out the clutter. “You want to create an area that’s flowing and positive,” he writes in his book Beauty Sleep.

Adapted from Natural Health Magazine, July 2010 by Susan Hayes

Sleep your way to better health and wake up gently with a Zen Clock

Japanese tea ceremony

Kyoto: 10 Things to Do

By ROB GOSS

Zen again, but this time in a tea cup. The cleansing of the tea utensils, the gentle bow as you receive your cup, the three clockwise turns before you take a sip: it’s not difficult to see how deeply rooted the slow and graceful movements of the tea ceremony are in Zen Buddhism. Chado or sado, as the ceremony is known, is by no means limited to Kyoto, but with the city’s rich Zen connections, it is an ideal place to experience it. Try visiting En, a small teahouse in Gion with tatami tearooms and English-speaking Kimono-clad servers. You’ll find it next to Chionin Temple, a short walk from the Chionmae bus stop on route number 206 from Kyoto Station.

1. En
272 Matsubara-cho, Higashiyama-ku, Kyoto, Japan; 81 (0)80 3782-2706 teaceremonyen.com

adapted from Time Magazine, Jan. 2012

Zen Alarm Clock for a Gentle Awakening with Chime

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(800) 779-6383