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Just Say No to a Snooze Button

Sleep Sounder - Choose the Most Unusual Clock with Acoustic Chimes

Gentle Clocks and Timers - Boulder, CO

Now & Zen – The Home of the Most Unusual Gentle Clock

The Zen Alarm Clock Headquarter Store

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

orders@now-zen.com

Just Say No to a Snooze Button, Get the Zen Alarm Clock

Most modern alarm clocks include a “snooze button” mechanism which allows the user to go back to sleep for a brief period after the initial alarm.

Zen Clocks without Snooze buttons

Now & Zen Headquarter Store

1638 Pearl Steet

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

Do you want an alarm clock with real, acoustic sounds - choose The Zen Clock from Now & Zen

Are you and your partner at odds over your sleeping arrangements? Does one person snore in bed and the other hog the covers? Do you hate your spouses radio alarm clock?

If sleeping next to your partner is a struggle, you’re not alone. One in fourAmerican couples sleep separately, according to a study by the National Sleep Foundation. Often the problem is not intimacy, but the seemingly simple act of sharing a bed with a spouse.

The Wall Street Journal reports that while many couples have learned to compromise in other areas of their lives, they can’t find common ground on sleeping together.

Couples often have different sleeping habits and preferences — like room temperature, watching TV in the bedroom or when to turn the lights off — and experts say it takes communication and compromise to share the sack.

Alarm Clocks with Real Sounds - No Electronic Sounds - Boulder, CO

Now & Zen – The Zen Alarm Clock Store

Alarm Clocks with Chimes – no Electronic Sounds

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

orders@now-zen.com

Meditation as a Transformation Tool - Ukiyo-e

Many moons ago, a wandering Nepalese prince sat under a tree, vowing not to rise until he attained enlightenment.

After a long night of deep meditation, Siddhartha Gautama, better known as the Buddha, saw the light and declared that suffering is subjective, and can be reduced through self-awareness.

Today, 2500 years later, a growing number of American doctors and healthcare workers are teaching people who are ill how to apply Buddha’s epiphany to their lives.

adapted from abcnews.com by By Ephrat Livni

In hospitals, businesses and community centers around the country, meditation is increasingly being offered as a method of stress reduction, and to help patients better cope with the physical pain and mental strain associated with many medical conditions, including heart disease and HIV infection.

Recent research shows meditation’s soothing effects can be detected in arterial walls and in the brain. Once considered outside the mainstream, today more insurers are paying for meditation, both as a form of medication and as preventive medicine.

Learning to ‘Disidentify’

“Meditation is the act of disidentifying from inner thought flow and concentrating on calming and healing,” explains Robert Thurman, Ph.D., a professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University in New York and the first American to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk. Through meditation, doctors help patients detach from their pain and anxieties and cultivate a connection between the mind and the body, he says.

Gong Clock - Progressive, Soothing Tones to End Your Stillness Practice

While there are many kinds of meditation, the mindfulness approach, used widely in hospitals around the country, focuses primarily on breathing. Practices vary, but the basic idea involves sitting comfortably, with eyes closed, spine straight and attention focused on breathing.

Practitioners aim to maintain a detached, calm awareness of their thoughts and sensations. Through mindfulness, experts say, meditators learn to pay attention to the present and cultivate clarity of mind, equanimity and wisdom.

Minor Mindfulness Miracles

All of which may sound very abstract. Unless, points out Jeff Brantley, Ph.D, Director of the Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Program at the Duke Center for Integrative Medicine in Durham, N.C., you are a patient who is suffering.

“We had one patient, a 40-year-old woman with metastatic breast cancer who was enrolled in the 8-week MBSR program. At her exit interview she said that before the course began 5 minutes wouldn’t go by without her worrying about what would become of her and her young family and now, after the class, she can concentrate on other things for more than hour at a time, even days,” Brantley says, calling the results “a minor miracle.”

The Duke program is one of at least 70 such mind-body based courses modeled on the University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Stress Reduction Clinic, in Worcester, Mass., created in 1979 by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn. Taught mainly in hospitals around the country, mindfulness training is typically run as an 8-week-long outpatient program to complement other medical treatments.

The aim, according to a website dedicated to Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction, is to assist people in taking better care of themselves “through a gentle but rigorous daily discipline of meditation and relaxation.”

Doctors refer patients to mindfulness programs for any number of diseases and disorders, including heart disease, anxiety and panic, job or family stress, chronic pain, cancer, HIV infection, AIDS, headaches, sleep disturbances, type A behavior, high blood pressure, fatigue and skin disorders.

In keeping with the growing interest in preventative medicine, some insurance companies, such as Blue Cross/Blue Shield in Massachusetts and a number of insurers in what Thurman calls “the more enlightened states like Oregon and California,” are now paying for all or part of these programs.

Research for Coverage

Meditation for Well-being, Choose a Soothing, Chime Timer

While the National Institutes of Health says it is too soon to quantify the medical benefits of meditation, Anita Greene, spokeswoman for the Institute’s Complementary and Alternative Medicine division, concedes, “It is a therapy worthy of further scientific investigation to refute or support the health claims being made.”

In fact, in 1999, the NIH granted Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, $8 million during a five-year period to study the effects of meditation in African Americans with cardiovascular diseases.

Researchers at Maharishi say that relaxing and reducing stress through transcendental meditation may reduce artery blockage and the risk of heart attack and stroke, according to a study released in the March issue of the American Heart Association’s journal Stroke (see related story).

Another recent pilot study, published in the May 15 issue of NeuroReport, by Sara Lazar, Ph.D., a Harvard research fellow in psychology at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, suggests meditation activates specific regions of the brain that may influence heart and breathing rates. Using a brain imaging technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, Lazar measured blood flow changes in experienced meditators.

“What we found were striking changes. There was significant decrease in blood flow and activity in specific areas of the brain,” says the study’s senior author Dr. Herbert Benson, president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Mass.

The usual, fight-or-flight brain response liberates adrenalin and is stressful to the body, he explains, but during meditation the brain acts to quiet the body through concentrated breathing or word repetition, evoking a relaxation response that minimizes the harmful effects of stress.

“It does away with the whole separation of mind and body and gives further proof to insurers that [meditation] is cost effective,” he says. Ultimately, Benson predicts, medicine will be akin to a three-legged stool, leaning on pharmaceuticals, surgeries and procedures, and self-care, which includes, meditation, nutrition, exercise and health management.

A Tool for Transformation

But, Thurman points out, meditation is for more than just health benefits: It is a tool for seeking inner transformation. Meditation practices in the health field are secular, however.

Gong Clock for Meditation and Yoga Practices

“We get everyone from born-again Christians to avowed atheists. We tell people we are not trying to make anyone into anything,” Duke’s Brantley reassures. No matter what their religious persuasion, he says, patients find an increased awareness and appreciation of their lives.

Registered nurse Shirley Gilloti, a San Rafael, Calif., health educator and mindfulness training teacher agrees, “I tell people to try to bring more mindfulness to saying their rosary if that’s what they do.”

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.

Gong Clock & Timers by Now & Zen, Inc. - Boulder, CO

Now & Zen – The Gong Clock Shop

Downtown Boulder, CO

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

Orders@Now-Zen.com

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

Re-wire Your Brain for Happiness - Choose a Meditation Timer with Chime

A quiet explosion of new research indicating that meditation can physically change the brain in astonishing ways has started to push into mainstream.

Several studies suggest that these changes through meditation can make you happier, less stressed — even nicer to other people. It can help you control your eating habits and even reduce chronic pain, all the while without taking prescription medication.

Meditation is an intimate and intense exercise that can be done solo or in a group, and one study showed that 20 million Americans say they practice meditation. It has been used to help treat addictions, to clear psoriasis and even to treat men with impotence.

The U.S. Marines are testing meditation to see if it makes more focused, effective warriors. Corporate executives at Google, General Mills, Target and Aetna Insurance, as well as students in some of the nation’s classrooms have used meditation.

Various celebrities also are known meditators, including shock jock Howard Stern, actors Richard Gere, Goldie Hawn and Heather Graham, and Rivers Cuomo, the lead singer of the band Weezer.

In one study, a research team from Massachusetts General Hospital looked at the brain scans of 16 people before and after they participated in an eight-week course in mindfulness meditation. The study, published in the January issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, concluded that after completing the course, parts of the participants’ brains associated with compassion and self-awareness grew, and parts associated with stress shrank.

Recently, the Dalai Lama granted permission for his monks, who are master mediators, to have their brains studied at the University of Wisconsin, one of the most high-tech brain labs in the world.

Richie Davidson, a PhD at the university, and his colleagues, led the study and said they were amazed by what they found in the monks’ brain activity read-outs. During meditation, electroencephalogram patterns increased and remains higher than the initial baseline taken from a non-meditative state.

But you don’t have to be a monk to benefit from meditation, which is now gaining acceptance in the field of medicine.

The Most Soothing Meditation Timer and Clock with Chime

Physicians have increasingly started prescribing meditation instead of pills to benefit their patients. A Harvard Medical School report released in May found that more than 6 million Americans had been recommended meditation and other mind-body therapies by conventional health care providers.

Perhaps the most mind-bending potential benefit of meditation is that it will actually make practitioners nicer. Chuck Raison, a professor at Emory University, conducted a meditation study in which he hooked up microphones to participants who had been taught basic meditation and those who hadn’t. He then recorded them at random over a period of time. Raison found that these newly-trained mediators used less harsh language than people who had no meditation experience.

“They were more empathic with people,” Raison said. “They were spending more time with other people. They laugh more, you know, all those things. They didn’t use the word ‘I’ as much. They use the word ‘we’ more.”

However, even the Dalai Lama admitted that meditation is not the silver bullet cure-all for every ailment or emotion.

“Occasionally, [I] lose my temper,” he said. “If someone is never lose temper then perhaps that may come from outer space, real strange.”

The Dalai Lama also cautioned that meditation takes patience, so new mediators should not expect immediate results.

“The enlightenment not depend on rank,” he said, laughing. “It depends on practice.”

Some scientists believe that in a generation, Americans will see meditation as being as essential to maintaining a healthy lifestyle as diet and exercise.

Although meditation can be done in almost any context, practitioners usually employ a quiet, tranquil space, a meditation cushion or bench, and some kind of timing device to time the meditation session.  Ideally, the more these accoutrements can be integrated the better.  Thus, it is conducive to a satisfying meditation practice to have a timer or clock that is tranquil and beautiful.  Using a kitchen timer or beeper watch is less than ideal.

And it was with these considerations in mind that we designed our digital Zen Alarm Clock and practice timer.  This unique “Zen Clock” features a long-resonating acoustic chime that brings the meditation session to a gradual close, preserving the environment of stillness while also acting as an effective time signal.

adapted from worldnewsreport.com by Maggy Patrick and Lauren Effron

The Most Soothing Meditation Timer and Clock with Acoustic Chime

Now & Zen – The  Meditation Timer Store

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

Soothing Gong Meditation Timers - It's exquisite sounds summon your consciousness out of your meditative state with a series of subtle gongs.

(HealthDay News) — There are many forms of mediation, most of which are rooted in ancient tradition.

For many people, it’s a great way to relax and soothe stress.

Here’s a summary of meditation’s common principles, courtesy of the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine:

• Find a quiet place with little sound or distracting activity.
• Find a position that’s comfortable for you, including sitting, lying down, walking or standing.
• Focus completely on meditation, which in practice may include repeating a word or phrase, focusing mentally on an object or focusing on breathing in a certain way.
• Have an open mind and learn to acknowledge life’s distractions without necessarily judging or acting on them.
• Set your Gong Meditation Timer for 20 minutes and relax.

adapted from abcnews.com by By Diana Kohnle

Although meditation can be done in almost any context, practitioners usually employ a quiet, tranquil space, a meditation cushion or bench, and some kind of timing device to time the meditation session.  Ideally, the more these accoutrements can be integrated the better.  Thus, it is conducive to a satisfying meditation practice to have a timer or clock that is tranquil and beautiful.  Using a kitchen timer or beeper watch is less than ideal.

Gong and Chime Meditation Timers and Clocks

Gong Meditation Timers - preserving the environment of stillness.

Now & Zen – The Gong Meditation Store

Downtown – Boulder, Colorado

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

orders@now-zen.com

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The Most Unique Gong Meditation Timer with Tibetan Singing Bowl

As beautiful to see as it is to hear, the Zen Timepiece is also a decorative accessory that adds elegance to any room. Its wood platform (available in cherry or maple) is designed to be positioned either with the clock’s digital display to the front, or turned around, with the bowl-gong in the front. Although the clock looks good both ways, when the digital display is turned to the back it accentuates the clock’s natural theme and helps reduce the visual clutter of electronic modernity in one’s interior environment. At a suggested retail price of $199.95, it may be the world’s most expensive alarm clock, but according to Steve McIntosh, it’s definitely worth it: “Waking up in the morning is a metaphor for life, and anything that adds grace and beauty to this daily process is a good investment. When you use the Zen Timepiece it’s like waking up in a Zen temple.”

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Now & Zen – The Gong Meditation Timer Store

1638 Pearl St.

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

Calming Alarm Clocks for a Better Mood - Takeuchi KeishÃ

To control mood swings, says Selby, we need to sidestep the negative thoughts that generate our moods by shifting attention instead to sensory experiences. This breaks the free fall into an anxious or depressed emotional state. “This attention shift gets you out of past-future fixations and into the present moment,” he explains. By practicing this first step, you’ll get more adept at stopping a bad mood in its tracks.

Now that you’ve temporarily halted the downward spiral, expand your awareness to include the breathing experience in your torso. Say to yourself: “I’m also aware of the movements in my chest and belly.” Don’t make any special effort to breathe; rather, feel the natural flow of your breath as it moves in and out.

Waking up in the morning should be as pleasant as falling asleep at night. The Zen Alarm Clock's gradual, gentle awakening is transformative.

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).

adapted from body + soul, Jan/Feb 2007

Wake up with gradual, beautiful acoustic chimes. The Zen Alarm Clock transforms your mornings and gets you started right, with a progressive awakening

Now & Zen’s Bowl/Gong Alarm Clock & Meditation Timer Store

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

COURTESAN OF MONTOYA by Suzuki Harunobo

By Fleda Brown

Our local sangha had our 4-hour block meditation yesterday–people coming and going, with a number of us staying and sitting the whole time. Plus our 30-minute snack time afterward, which is gradually creeping into the realm of an actual meal, so much food!

Since we had no discussion group to tell you about, I thought for today I’d offer a few more poems you may not know. Here are two from Ryokan (1758-1831), a Japanese Buddhist hermit who spent much of his time writing poetryand doing calligraphy. His poetry is simple and inspired by nature. He loved children, and supposedly sometimes forgot to beg for food because he was playing with the children of the nearby village. Ryōkan refused to accept any position as a priest or even as a “poet.”

Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days’ worth of rice in my bad;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.

And another:

The man pulling radishes
pointed the way
with a radish.

What I notice in what I’ll call “Buddhist poetry” is the way it takes the authority of the moment for granted. It doesn’t ask anything of me, the reader, other than to be a companion to the poem. It lacks decoration and it lacks self-consciousness, almost as if the speaker has to work up the energy to write it down, the poem that has just occurred to him/her.

We don’t fly away in these poems, as the nineteenth century poet John Keats put it, on the “wings of Poesy.”  We don’t fly away anywhere. We are where we are, right here, and that’s just fine. Or, more to the point, it is what it is.

Peonies, c. 1900

Here’s another poem by Ghalib (1797-1869), a Persian poet from India. It’s translated by Jane Hirshfield, a contemporary Buddhist poet:

For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river—
Unbearable pain becomes its own cure.

Travel far enough into sorrow, tears turn to sighing;
In this way we learn how water can die into air.

When after a heavy rain, the stormclouds disperse,
Is it not that they’ve wept themselves clear to the end?

If you want to know the miracle, how wind can polish a mirror,
Look: the shining glass grows green in spring.

It’s the rose’s unfolding, Ghalib, that creates the desire to see—
In every color and circumstance, may the eyes be open for what comes.

This one seems a bit like a “teaching poem,” doesn’t it? It doesn’t seem to be just opening the immediate moment to a companion—it’s “telling me” something. But look again: it’s telling the speaker himself something. He’s speaking this to himself. So really, it looks as if it’s the same simple seeing as in the poems by Ryokan.

adapted from Spirituality and Health Magazine, Feb. 2012

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Now & Zen

1638 Pearl St.

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383