Once you experience the Zen Timepiece's progressive tones, you'll never want to meditate any other way.

This simple yet profound meditation can ease emotional or physical tension.

Based on Taoist Meditation practice, the inner smile meditation is a simple yet profound meditation that is quite natural to many people. It is centered on generating the benevolent qualities of a genuine smile that we usually offer to others. The inner smile is an opportunity to offer a smile to oneself. It can be done in a seated meditation session or in the midst of daily life. The inner smile can also be integrated into hatha yoga practice and can be particularly helpful during intense poses.

To begin, find a comfortable posture for meditation (seated on a cushion or blanket, in a chair, or against a wall). It may be helpful to set a timer for 10, 20, or 30 minutes so you can sink deeply into your meditation without wondering about the time. You may also want to gently ring a bell at the beginning and end of your meditation.

Place your hands on your knees in Jnana Mudra (index and thumb touching), with palms facing up to open your awareness or palms facing down to calm the mind. Do a body scan and relax any tension you may be holding. Let your spine rise from the root of the pelvis. Draw your chin slightly down and lengthen the back of your neck.

Meditation Practice
Begin by generating a feeling of natural happiness as if it emanates from the backs of the eyes. This may happen naturally or it may take you awhile to drop into the poetic possibility needed to allow a smile to come from the backs of your eyes. If the feeling does not come immediately, remind yourself of any experience of natural joy-for example, the face of a joyous child.

Once you generate the feeling of this smile, let it radiate down the backs of your eyes like a waterfall. Visualize this meditative stream flowing down the center of your spine, to your heart and lungs, then into your stomach and spleen (under your left lower ribs), and liver (under your right lower ribs). Let it run down through the kidneys (back ribs), the colon and intestines (belly), down into your genitals, and out into your legs and feet. You can repeat the sweep from the backs of the eyes to the feet or do one long, slow sweep. The inner smile can be its own complete meditation or it may lead you into an effortless meditative absorption.

When you are ready, bring your hands together in Anjali Mudra (Salutation Seal) and complete your meditation with a moment of gratitude, reflection, or prayer to seal the energy of your meditation into your life. Remember that you can cultivate the inner smile anytime throughout the day to fill the heart with compassion.

It serves as the perfect meditation timer.

Use our unique “Zen Clock” which functions as a Yoga & Meditation Timer.  It features a long-resonating acoustic chime that brings your meditation or yoga session to a gradual close, preserving the environment of stillness while also acting as an effective time signal. Our Yoga Timer & Clock can be programmed to chime at the end of the meditation or yoga session or periodically throughout the session as a kind of sonic yantra. The beauty and functionality of the Zen Clock/Timer makes it a meditation tool that can actually help you “make time” for meditation in your life. Bring yourself back to balance.

adapted from yogajournal.com by Shiva Rea

It's exquisite sounds summon your consciousness out of your meditative state with a series of subtle gongs.

Now & Zen – The Meditation Timer Shop

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orders@now-zen.com

Once you experience the Zen Timepiece's progressive tones, you'll never want to meditate any other way.

Meditation’s virtues have long been praised and, more recently, documented in studies on Buddhist monks, who devote their entire lives to the discipline. But how effective can it really be for Western meditators, who practice on average just 30-40 minutes a day while balancing an entirely different set of external responsibilities and social stresses than their more rigid Eastern counterparts?

A team of researchers from Yale, Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently checked it out. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the scientists scanned the brains of 35 test participants; 20 Western-style meditators and 15 control participants who had never practiced meditation or yoga. The former group was instructed to meditate, while the latter was asked to relax and let their minds wander.

The result? Brain regions associated with attention and sensory processing were denser in meditators (up to 4 to 8 thousandths of an inch thicker) than those of the control group. Moreover, the study demonstrated that regular meditation could reduce the effects of normal cognitive aging and perhaps even memory loss. “This was the first time anyone has looked at brain structure in meditation subjects”, said lead researcher Sara Lazar, Ph.D., a psychologist at Harvard Medical School. “Consistent with the reports of meditators, who claim that meditation affects all aspects of their lives, our findings suggest that cortical plasticity (structural changes of the brain) are not just limited to the amount of time spent actually sitting and meditating.”

You don’t have to shave your head and hole yourself up in an ashram; even a half-hour of meditation delivers lasting mind-body health benefits.

Bring yourself back to balance.

Use our unique “Zen Clock” which functions as a Yoga Timer.  It features a long-resonating acoustic chime that brings your meditation or yoga session to a gradual close, preserving the environment of stillness while also acting as an effective time signal. Our Yoga Timer & Clock can be programmed to chime at the end of the meditation or yoga session or periodically throughout the session as a kind of sonic yantra. The beauty and functionality of the Zen Clock/Timer makes it a meditation tool that can actually help you “make time” for meditation in your life. Bring yourself back to balance.

adapted from healinglifestyles.com by Lindsay Morris

Once you experience the Zen Timepiece's progressive tones, you'll never want to meditate any other way. It serves as the perfect meditation timer.

Now & Zen – The Meditation Timer Store

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

orders@now-zen.com

How to Zazen - Stillness of Being

As the name Zen implies, Zen sitting meditation is the core of Zen practice and is called zazen in Japanese. The posture of zazen is seated, with folded legs and hands, and an erect but settled spine.

The legs are folded in one of the standard sitting styles.   In many practices, one breathes from the hara (the center of gravity in the belly) and the eyelids are half-lowered, the eyes being neither fully open nor shut so that the practitioner is not distracted by outside objects but at the same time is kept awake.

How to Zazen, a Sitting Mindfulness Practice adapted from wikipedia.org

Meditation Clock Timer- Zen Timers and Alarm Clocks by Now & Zen

Use our unique “Zen Clock” which functions as a Yoga & Meditation Timer. It features a long-resonating acoustic chime that brings your meditation or yoga session to a gradual close, preserving the environment of stillness while also acting as an effective time signal. Our Yoga Timer & Clock can be programmed to chime at the end of the meditation or yoga session or periodically throughout the session as a kind of sonic yantra. The beauty and functionality of the Zen Clock/Timer makes it a meditation tool that can actually help you “make time” for meditation in your life. Bring yourself back to balance.

Now & Zen – The Yoga & Meditation Timer Store

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

Lady purple - Gong Meditation Timer with Acoustic Sound

You spill a cup of coffee all over your desk. How do you react? If you’re chatting on the phone with a new love interest, you shrug and chalk it up to giddy distraction. If it’s right before an important meeting, you feel annoyed, even angry with yourself. Why the difference? In one scenario, it’s just an accident. In the other, it goes to prove your day is doomed.

There’s a reason for this: We view the world through mood-colored glasses, interpreting events according to how we feel at the time. But while we may swear that the guy who cuts us off in traffic ruined our morning, it’s the way we respond that creates our experience. Life’s little annoyances themselves don’t sour a day; they serve as a reflection of the mood we’re already in. “When you focus on negative thoughts or memories, you begin to interpret events around you through that lens, which generates more negative thoughts,” says cognitive psychologist John Selby, coauthor of “Take Charge of Your Mind.” It’s a vicious cycle — and one that can cause even the best of moods to plummet.

When negative thoughts or difficult circumstances begin to upset you and make your blood pressure rise, stop and say to yourself: “I feel the air flowing in and out of my nose.” Let those words gently guide your attention to the actual experience of breathing.

Meditation for a Better Mood

Choose a stillness practice like meditating:

Meditation Timers and Gentle Chime Alarm Clocks by Now & Zen, Inc.

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meditating may change your brain

Apparently, people who meditate are a bit thickheaded—in a good way of course. A new study led by Massachusetts General Hospital shows that the regular practice of a particular form of meditation appears to thicken areas of the brain associated with attention and sensory processing.

Brain scans of experienced, frequent meditators showed thickening in the insula, an area of the cortex involved in the integration of emotion with thought. Most of the structural changes occurred in the right hemisphere of the brain, in the prefrontal cortex, which regulates memory and attention. This area tends to thin as we age, and yet the thickening was more pronounced in older practitioners. According to Sara Lazar, PhD, the study’s lead author, this evidence suggests that meditation may slow down the atrophy of certain areas of the brain that typically occurs with age.

Perhaps even more interesting, you needn’t don robes and retire to a cave somewhere to achieve these results. Instead of scanning the brains of Buddhist monks who devote their lives to meditation, researchers enrolled 20 people who averaged nine years of experience and about 40 minutes a day meditating. (Fifteen people with no experience in meditation formed the control group.) Those participants who meditated most deeply—as measured by breathing rates—showed the greatest changes in their brains, which suggests that meditation caused the thickening, as opposed to the thickening indicating a predisposition to meditate.

Tibetan Bowel Meditation Timers

adapted from Natural Solutions Magazine, August 2006 by Megan Keough

Now & Zen’s Meditation Timer Store

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

Yoga Clocks and Timers by Now & Zen, Inc.

YOGA FOR BEDTIME

Need help sleeping? Doing yoga exercises before bedtime can be just what you need

Sit up in bed comfortably, either with your legs folded or straight in front of you; whatever you can do with the most ease. Sit up and lean slightly back on your pillows or backboard. Close your eyes and rest your hands on your thighs and just breathe here for a few minutes. This doesn’t have to be a serious meditation but just a short while to do nothing but breathe.

Need a Yoga & Meditation timer?  Get the natural one: A Bowl-Gong Bamboo Zen Timepiece from Now & Zen

Spiritual practices such as meditation or yoga are best done in an environment  of beauty and tranquility. And the clock/timer you use for your practice can make  a real difference in creating such an environment.  But using a timer with artificial “beeps,” or even “recorded gongs,” coming out of a plastic box can be less than ideal.  The Bamboo Zen Timepiece  is unlike any other meditation timer on the market because it features a real, natural,  acoustic, long-resonating gong, produced by its traditional Japanese style bowl-gong, or “rin-gong”.  Moreover,  The Zen Timepiece is made with sustainable natural bamboo, so it is as beautiful to see as it is to hear.  Once you use a Zen Timepiece, nothing else will do.

Yoga & Meditation Timer and Clocks

Now & Zen – The Yoga Clock & Timer Store

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

Choose a Soothing Chime Timer for Your Mindfulness Practice - Utgarwa Beauty

Mindfulness

Choose a Yoga & Meditation Timer with Soothing Chimes

Soothing Chime Meditation & Yoga Timers from Now & Zen, Inc.

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& Yoga Timer Store

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zen-like bedroom

“That massive cleaning effort is a metaphor,” says Rabbi Sherre Hirsch, author of “We Plan, God Laughs.””When your physical surroundings are cluttered, your emotional and spiritual self is cluttered. If your space is clean, then your mind is open and you can let God in.”

zen-like alarm clocks

Gong Meditation Timers - The Zen Alarm Clock can effect your awareness in a variety of positive ways, all of which require your participation

(HealthDay News) — Meditation can take many forms, including the art of deep breathing. It’s a great way to relieve stress.

The American Academy of Family Physicians offers these steps to deep breathing, which helps your body get plenty of oxygen:

Lie on your back on a flat surface.

• Rest one hand on your stomach above your belly button, and the other hand on your chest.
• Breathe in slowly and deeply, making your stomach rise a bit. Hold for a second.
• Slowly exhale, so that your stomach goes back down.
• Set Your Zen Timepiece with Gong to repeat every 2 minutes.
• Repeat several times.

adapted from abcnews.com by By Diana Kohnle

Meditation is generally an inwardly oriented, personal practice, which individuals do by themselves. Meditation may involve invoking or cultivating a feeling or internal state, such as compassion, or attending to a specific focal point. The term can refer to the state itself, as well as to practices or techniques employed to cultivate the state. There are dozens of specific styles of meditation practice; the word meditation may carry different meanings in different contexts. Meditation has been practiced since antiquity as a component of numerous religious traditions. A 2007 study by the U.S. government found that nearly 9.4% of U.S. adults (over 20 million) had practiced meditation within the past 12 months, up from 7.6% (more than 15 million people) in 2002.

Meditation - The Zen Alarm Clock is a consciousness-raising tool.

Use our unique "Zen Clock" which functions as a Yoga Timer. It features a long-resonating acoustic chime that brings your meditation or yoga session to a gradual close, preserving the environment of stillness while also acting as an effective time signal.

Signing Bowl Alarm Clock and Timer - Ukyioe Girls Festival Chokosai Eisho

One powerful way to tap into the authentic inspiration and boundless creativity potential is to invoke your higher Self. The following meditation, which Yogi Bhajan taught students, can help you sharpen concentration, access intuition, and enhance creativity.

Begin by sitting in any meditation pose, with your eyes focusing on the tip of your nose. Lift your chest and elongate the spine. Lift the crown of the head as your chin relaxes down and in. Let the shoulder blades relax down the back.

Create a connection to the sacred wisdom within by chanting Ong namo guru dev namo three times. This chant calls on the creative consciousness and the subtle intelligence of the entire universe. Ongis similar to Om—the vibrational sound of the universe—but in its active, creative form. While Om is beyond time and space, Ongconnects us to the creative energy embodied in this moment. Namomeans “to acknowledge or call on respectfully.” Guru refers to wisdom or teacher, and dev refers to the subtle or divine.

Next, bring your awareness to the breath and silently repeat the syllables sa ta na ma, the sacred mantras signifying infinity, birth, death, and rebirth–the cycle of creation. Continue for 11 to 62 minutes. When you feel complete, inhale and retain the breath only for as long as it is comfortable. Exhale and continue to breathe naturally.

Take a moment to say a prayer or set an intention for your creative endeavors. To close, chant sat nam (which means “I am truth”) three times.

Singing Bowl Meditation and Yoga Timer with Gentle Chime

Use our unique “Zen Clock” which functions as a Yoga & Meditation Timer.  It features a long-resonating acoustic chime that brings your meditation or yoga session to a gradual close, preserving the environment of stillness while also acting as an effective time signal. Our Yoga Timer & Clock can be programmed to chime at the end of the meditation or yoga session or periodically throughout the session as a kind of sonic yantra. The beauty and functionality of the Zen Clock/Timer makes it a meditation tool that can actually help you “make time” for meditation in your life. Bring yourself back to balance.

adapted from www.himalayaninstitute.org by Hari Kirin Kaur Khalsa

Singing Bowl Alarm Clocks by Now & Zen, Inc.

Now & Zen – The Singing Bowl

Alarm Clock Headquarter Store

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