Choki Eishosai, Sunrise at New Year

By approaching the night sky with fresh eyes, you become more intimate with the world.

Starry Night

When we spend time in the wilderness, it can be tempting to focus our awareness on “doing” something: taking pictures; getting a certain amount of physical exercise; traveling from point A to point B; naming all the species of birds we encounter. While nature photography is a lovely craft, and we need to exercise for good health, and understanding what lives in our environment is a valid part of deepening our relationship with the land, these activities can separate us from a more intimate experience of the natural world. It is all too easy to forget to actually experience with all our senses that which we are busily capturing and identifying.

The natural world invites us out of our world of fixed concepts and into a closer proximity with reality—what Buddhist teachings call “nonconceptual awareness.” Experiencing the natural world with nonconceptual awareness means that, rather than seeing a [small] black bird and thinking, “That’s a starling, a nonnative bird introduced from England several centuries ago,” we stop and see each particular bird’s incandescent blue-black velvet feathers, piercing amber eyes, and delicate, wiry feet. Instead of encountering the world through a filter of ideas, memories, and labels, we connect deeply with the unfiltered and vital pulse of life in that moment.

If we’re not mindful, intellectual knowledge can easily cloud our direct experience. When we’re guided through life solely by our intellect, by our ideas of what we know, we’re robbed of a sense of discovery. A nonconceptual awareness allows us to approach each moment as fresh and new. A depth of wisdom can arise from such immediacy, and lead to greater wonder about the mysteriousness of life; we may realize just how little we can ever know.

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.

Whatever we experience most often provides us with an excellent opportunity to cultivate nonconceptual awareness. My garden sits in the shade of an old California oak tree that has a wide trunk, deeply veined and wrinkled. The gray-brown bark has deep, dark, vertical grooves intersected by thinner lateral lines——on some days it looks to me like a lopsided checkerboard. Where limbs once grew, there are large knots on the trunk the size of dinner plates. The tree curves gracefully skyward, supporting branches laden with young, shiny, dark green leaves holding their palms to the sun.

When I look at this oak without any preconceived ideas, it is a “different” tree each time I encounter it. My awareness or mood may be slightly different, altering how I see it. Depending on the time of day or time of year, shifting light changes its color. Gentle breezes and strong winds bend the tender limbs into different shapes. From this perspective I forever see it anew. Instead of relating to it solely through a static concept of “oak tree” or failing to see it in all its living, breathing aliveness, I can take it in with fresh eyes. This tree is my constant mindfulness companion, mirroring to me how present and open I am to the freshness of the moment.

The challenge is to be present to all of our experience with such wakefulness. Our concepts of time, of good and bad, of right and wrong can easily distort our ability to see the world clearly. Abiding with nonconceptual awareness allows us to observe the natural world, as well as the people and opportunities we encounter, without the lens of our fixed concepts, views, and opinions. Similarly, we can begin to look at ourselves with a fresh perspective in each moment, without any preconceptions or predetermined limitations.

The following meditation is a way to cultivate a nonconceptual awareness. It works best on a relatively clear night, preferably away from bright city lights. Find a place outdoors where you can lie down on the ground and view the night sky. Gaze up at that vast ocean of darkness that sparkles with infinite stars until you find the cluster of stars known as the Big Dipper. Officially part of Ursa Major, the Great Bear constellation, the Big Dipper consists of seven stars broadly spaced apart. Four stars make the shape of a large rectangle, and the other three splay out horizontally to the left from the top of the rectangle, so they resemble a large dipper, or a saucepan with a long and slightly curved handle.

Once you locate this constellation, try to let go of any preconceived ideas you have about it, and look at the cluster of stars without fixating on the shape of a big dipper. Allow yourself to see seven bright dots amid black space. Notice each star individually. Notice the stars in their context in the sky, within the vast field of shining lights. See how the stars are located in relationship to other stars not in this particular constellation. Observe the spaces between each star. As you continue the meditation, notice if you go in and out of being able to see the stars themselves, without the idea or image of the dipper. If in moments you find it difficult to let go of seeing the Big Dipper, shift your focus to other parts of the night sky. Try looking at just part of the constellation, along with other stars outside the constellation.

Close your eyes for a moment, relax your body, and then open your eyes and refresh your attention using a soft gaze. Let your vision be broad and spacious, and look at the stars without thinking about them, yourself, or anything else—just rest in open awareness. Another approach is to stare at the Big Dipper for a long time; after a while, the concept or memory of a dipper may fade and the stars will return to just being individual lights in the sky.

Once you practice this meditation, you can apply the technique to other constellations—seeing the stars without their associated imagery, taking in the simple reality of what is, and experiencing the vastness of the night sky. Try doing this meditation for up to half an hour, taking time to alternate between simply resting your awareness in the vastness of sky, and noticing whether you get caught up in concepts about specific constellations. You can also expand this practice to include other objects and people—you might try looking at a rose bush without the concept of “rose.”

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 more you do this, the more you’ll begin to see how using only our preconceived concepts to approach the world can limit our experience and our awareness. Simple concepts can in no way describe the fullness and complexity of any experience or thing, including something as simple as a single, unique maple leaf or mushroom, or something as vast as constellations in the sky.

This technique can also help us approach people with a fresh awareness every time. Try looking at an acquaintance or a loved one without fixing on a preconceived idea about who they are, what they are like, or what they will do. We often get stuck in our concept of who someone is, which limits both people in the relationship.

A dear friend of mine sits his teenage daughter down every year, and they do a playful exercise in which they look at each other, and he says, “I am not your father,” and she says, “I am not your daughter.” This attempt to break down the narrowness of the concepts of “father” and “daughter” allows them to see each other more completely as people, rather than seeing only the parts of each other that relate to the roles they know each other in.

So when you look at someone, notice what concepts arise about them—man, woman, parent, child, waitress, taxi driver, lover. See how your approach to them changes based on your ideas of what it means to be old, young, sick, cute, shy, loud, extroverted, or smart. See then if you can let go of the labels and look at them without these concepts interfering with your perceptions of who they are. Notice their form, movements, and expressions, and try to get a sense of their essence beyond their surface appearance, movements, and expressions. When we look at people or anything in this way, we get to see the world anew, with fresh eyes. We come closer to experiencing the truth of how things actually are, undimmed by the concepts in our minds.

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.

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 – Excerpted from Awake in the Wild: Mindfulness in Nature as a Path of Self Discovery, by Mark Coleman, with permission from Inner Ocean Publishing. © 2006 by Mark Coleman.

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.

Now & Zen – The Meditation Timer Shop

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

orders@now-zen.com

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

Find your inner artist and connect with your spirit.

“The urge to create is inherent in all of us and is an essential component of the human spirit,” Linda Novick writes in The Painting Path: Embodying Spiritual Discovery through Yoga, Brush and Color. Novick, an artist and Kripalu Yoga teacher who leads painting-and-yoga retreats, uses yoga to help her students open to the roots of their creativity.

Tap into your creativity with Nadi Shodhana Pranayama(Alternate-Nostril Breathing), a purifying and balancing technique that leads to a state of deep, receptive calm. The practice can open you to a rush of creativity while quieting your inner critic, says Novick. She offers these instructions in her book and suggests having paper and colored oil pastels or crayons at hand before you begin.

1. Sit comfortably with your eyes closed. Gently bring your attention to the natural flow of your breath.
2. Lift your right hand and fold your middle and index fingers down, leaving your thumb, ring finger, and pinkie open.
3. Close your right nostril with your right thumb. Exhale, and then inhale through your left nostril. Release your right nostril and close your left nostril with your ring finger. Exhale, then inhale through your right nostril. Practice alternate breathing in this manner for several minutes, or until you feel relaxed.
4. Slowly open your eyes and take up the oil pastels; draw freely, observing without judgment how it feels to cover the paper with color.

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 Charity Ferreira

It serves as the perfect meditation timer.

Now & Zen –  The Meditation Timer Shop

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

orders@now-zen.com

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.

You don’t have to work for happiness. It’s already here to be experienced in every moment.

Use this practice to rediscover your natural connection with joy.

The more you practice invoking states of well-being, the more available they are. Use the following practice to teach your mind and body to experience joy in the moment. As you invite happiness into your life in this way, you will have more access to a joyful life.

1.Get comfortable and, if you wish, close your eyes. Become aware of your breath, and breathe slowly and deeply. Breathe in relaxation and a sense of ease. Let go of any tension as you exhale. Let the warmth of relaxation flow through your whole body, from your head all the way down to your feet.

2. Find your own way to the still, quiet center of your being, with your body relaxed, your emotions calm, your mind peaceful and spacious.

3. Think of a time when you experienced great joy and well-being, perhaps when you were in a beautiful place or with a good friend.

4. Recall your experience with as much detail as you can. If possible, bring an image of that moment to mind. What was happening? What was the environment like? Were you alone or with others? What sights or sounds can you remember?

5. Remember how the experience of well-being or joy felt in your body. Did your body feel light? Energetic? Expansive? What did joy feel like in your mind? Did your mind feel open? Present? Clear? Take a few moments to let your awareness feel the sensations in your body and the mood in your mind. Let them fully register as you breathe in this feeling of well-being. Relax into it with each exhalation.

6. Practice calling up this image and the feelings of well-being regularly each day for one week. At times, you may find you can simply invoke and sustain those feelings of well-being without having to re-create the specific memory.

Use this practice whenever you are feeling stuck and want to shift to a more uplifted state of mind, or simply want to open yourself to joy.

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.

adapted from yogajournal.com

It's exquisite sounds summon your consciousness out of your meditative state with a series of subtle gongs. Once you experience the Zen Timepiece's progressive tones, you'll never want to meditate any other way.

Now & Zen – The Singing Bowl Meditation Timer & Alarm Clock Store

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

orders@now-zen.com

The Zen Alarm Clock transforms mornings, awakening you gradually with a series of gentle acoustic chimes Once you use a Zen Clock nothing else will do

Deep sleep can provide much needed rest after a difficult day, but a new study suggests it can also help decrease the emotional intensity of painful experiences.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley found that the more time spent in REM sleep, or the dream phase of sleep, may diminish the activity of stress-related chemicals in the brain.

“The dream stage of sleep, based on its unique neurochemical composition, provides us with a form of overnight therapy, a soothing balm that removes the sharp edges from the prior day’s emotional experiences,” said Matthew Walker, a  co-author of the study and an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at UC Berkeley in a statement.

Their findings, the authors said, could help explain why people who have  with post-traumatic disorder  experience recurring nightmares.  One of the hallmarks of the disorder is less time spent in REM sleep.  As a result, the researchers believe they don’t experience the same emotional blunting brought on by adequate REM sleep.  REM sleep normally makes up about 20 percent of normal sleep hours.

In the study, 35 healthy adults were split into two groups.  Each group looked at 150 emotional images two different times, 12 hours apart, and an MRI measured brain activity.

Half of the participants stayed awake between each viewing, and the other half got a full night’s  in between each viewing.

Those who slept had a less emotional reaction the second time they looked at the images, and the MRI showed less activity in the amygdala, the emotion-processing part of the brain.

Tests that measure brain activity while the participants slept indicated decreased activity of stress-related chemicals, which had a calming effect.

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

“We know that during REM sleep there is a sharp decrease in levels of norepinephrine, a brain chemical associated with stress,” Walker said. “By reprocessing previous emotional experiences in this neuro-chemically safe environment of low norepinephrine during REM sleep, we wake up the next day, and those experiences have been softened in their emotional strength.  We feel better about them, we feel we can cope.”

Boulder, Colorado—an innovative company has taken one of life’s most unpleasant experiences (being startled awake by your alarm clock early Monday morning), and transformed it into something to actually look forward to. “The Zen Alarm Clock,” uses soothing acoustic chimes that awaken users gently and gradually, making waking up a real pleasure.

Rather than an artificial recorded sound played through a speaker, the Zen Clock features an alloy chime bar similar to a wind chime.  When the clock’s alarm is triggered, its chime produces a long-resonating, beautiful acoustic tone reminiscent of a temple gong.  Then, as the ring tone gradually fades away, the clock remains silent until it automatically strikes again three minutes later.  The frequency of the chime strikes gradually increase over ten-minutes, eventually striking every five seconds, so they are guaranteed to wake up even the heaviest sleeper.  This gentle, ten-minute “progressive awakening” leaves users feeling less groggy, and even helps with dream recall.

Now & Zen – The Soothing Alarm Clock Store

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

orders@now-zen.com

The Zen Alarm Clock transforms mornings, awakening you gradually with a series of gentle acoustic chimes Once you use a Zen Clock nothing else will do

drink more tea for relaxation

Did you know that drinking herbal tea is one of the best ways to nourish the body? Herbal teas provide hydration to the body along with a variety of antioxidants, antiviral and antimicrobial properties, minerals, and vitamins.  They warm the body and relax in times of stress.  They can aid in digestion and support the bodies systems.  It has recently been found that Hibiscus tea for example can help lower blood pressure.

“The Zen Alarm Clock & Chime Timer’, uses soothing acoustic chimes that signal it’s time –  gently and gradually.

Rather than an artificial recorded sound played through a speaker, the Zen Clock features an alloy chime bar similar to a wind chime.  When the clock’s alarm is triggered, its chime produces a long-resonating, beautiful acoustic tone reminiscent of a temple gong.

Zen Timepiece with Singing Bowl

Now & Zen’s Chime Timer and Clock Store

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

What Monks Know...Set Your Meditation Timer & Chime Clock

… and We Can Learn about the Fruits of Meditation.

By Rabiya S. Tuma

The images of monks with electrodes taped to their scalps were startling when they first appeared. Today, the ancient practice of meditation, begun in Vedic times, is attracting the attention of a growing community of scientists—and not all their study subjects wear robes. Meditation has gone mainstream: Millions of Americans practice some kind of meditation—among them school children, executives, cancer patients, prisoners, sports teams. Even many of the scientists themselves are meditators, for without a first-person experience of meditation, they say, it would be hard to design high-quality studies or even identify which questions are the right ones to ask.

Amishi Jha, a neuroscientist who studies attention and memory, took up meditation as a way to handle the stresses of life as a mother of two young children, with a faculty position at an Ivy League university. “As I meditated, I realized that what I was actually doing was training my attention,” Jha says. “It was really anaha moment as a scientist.” She decided she could use her scientific techniques and paradigms to discover what exactly was happening in the brain during meditation.

Jha is not alone. Scientists are using increasingly sophisticated high-tech tools—imaging of the functioning brain, for one—to learn what effect meditation has on the brain, on psychological distress, and on the physical symptoms of illness. In all cases they are finding that meditation leads to profound improvements in functioning.

One particularly interesting body of research has focused on mindfulness meditation, though researchers recognize that other forms of meditation may produce different or more significant changes in the brain and body. Part of the reason for the interest in mindfulness meditation, says Philippe Goldin, PhD, a clinical psychologist and meditation researcher at Stanford University in California, is that in 1979 Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, developed a specific eight-week course called Mindfulness-Based Stress Response (MBSR). The standard MBSR course encompasses formal meditation sitting with a focus on the breath, walking meditation, body scans in which participants observe their own physical sensations, eating meditation, and hatha yoga. Students also participate in weekly discussions and lectures, and commit to a daily home meditation practice.

More than 15,000 students have completed the course at the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society, which Kabat-Zinn founded, and thousands more have taken the course elsewhere. With that long-standing experience, scientists know that the MBSR program is effective, and the consistency of the approach enables them to compare results between studies and over time.

Rewiring the Brain
In Jha’s first study on meditation and the brain, which will be published next month in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, she found that mindfulness meditation improved study volunteers’ ability to focus their attention. Seventeen people with no prior experience in meditation completed a series of computer tasks before and after the MBSR course. The tasks probed three neurological systems in the brain that control different aspects of attention. The systems are called alerting, orienting, and conflict monitoring, and they correspond, respectively, to one’s readiness to pay attention to something, one’s ability to direct attention to that object, and one’s ability to focus on something in the presence of distractions. After completing the MBSR course, the volunteers were faster at orienting their attention than they were before it. They showed no improvement in computer tasks that relied on either the alerting or conflict monitoring realms of attention.

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.

By contrast, when Jha challenged experienced meditators before and after a month-long meditation retreat with the same computer tasks, she found that their alerting system improved. “They got better at their readying capacity of attention,” Jha says. “They could keep their attention in a much more neutral state without knowing what they were to engage in.”

Contrary to what many meditators might expect, Jha didn’t find that meditation improved the volunteers’ ability to sustain their attention. “What we think might be happening,” she says, “is that even though the subjective experience is one of sustaining continual attention for a longer period of time, this experience may be a consequence of improvements in the moment-by-moment orienting of attention without being distracted away.”

Of course, Jha is not alone in her efforts to find out what is going on under the scalp during and after meditation. Antoine Lutz, PhD, and Richard Davidson, PhD, of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, made headlines three years ago when they reported that the electrical activity in the brains of Buddhist monks was significantly different from what was seen in meditation novices.

During the study, the monks were asked to enter a meditative state of pure compassion while wearing a cap with 128 electrodes on their heads. The resulting electroencephalogram (EEG) illustrated that the monks had high amplitude gamma waves, which are a particular type of brain wave that occurs when physically separated neural networks work together to process information. Thus these long-term meditators have somehow learned how to turn on coordinated activity in multiple brain regions.

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.

More remarkable, perhaps, Lutz says, is that there seemed to be both short- and long-term differences between the monks’ gamma waves and those of novice meditator control subjects, which suggests that meditation can induce lasting changes in the brain. “The interesting thing is that meditators not only want to reach some state during meditation, but they also want to transform themselves, meaning that after a period of meditation you want to be somehow behaving differently and have a different way to experience emotions,” Lutz says. The brain changes that showed up in the monks, when compared to controls, suggest that those changes are happening—and at the level of brain wiring.

Changing Thinking Patterns
In addition to examining meditation’s impact on brain activity, scientists and clinicians want to know what impact it has on a person’s psychological health and well-being. And though individual meditators may say they feel better as a result of meditation, only carefully designed scientific studies can help pin down who benefits from such practice and what those benefits really are.

One of the most important studies in this area was done by Zindel Segal and John Teasdale at the University of Toronto. They reported that a combination of cognitive therapy and mindfulness meditation halved the risk of relapse in patients with a history of three or more episodes of major depression.

The likely explanation for this dramatic risk reduction is that individuals with a history of depression are extremely vulnerable to negative thinking. Such thinking can trigger a spiral into another depressive episode. Mindfulness training takes away some of the power from those thoughts by allowing individuals to see that they are only thoughts or memories, not facts, and that they are only part of a larger experience.

“Time and again, mindfulness-based stress reduction has been shown to be very helpful in reducing symptoms of anxiety, depression, and experience of physical pain,” says Stanford researcher Goldin. “It gives people specific skills to be with whatever is happening and not add on layers of thinking, interpreting, and habits that actually enhance the psychological imbalance.”

Bring yourself back to balance.

Goldin himself came to meditation while studying in Nepal during his junior year of college. While there, he spent time living in monasteries, learning Sanskrit and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. “And most important,” he says, “I was meeting many different teachers who just through their example showed me that their mind was more free and unencumbered than mine…through meditation practice.” When Goldin came back to the United States and embarked on a career in clinical psychology and neuroscience, he brought the meditation skills with him.

Exercising the attention “Muscle”
In his current research, Goldin has been testing the effect of MBSR and cognitive-based therapy in patients with social anxiety. People who suffer from social anxiety disorder, which is also called social phobia, have an intense fear of negative evaluation by other people, they fear humiliating or embarrassing themselves in performance or social situations, and can have trouble forming close relationships or even leaving the house. Goldin finds that patients who participate in a modified MBSR course, which takes nine weeks and integrates cognitive skills as well as mindfulness meditation, feel a relief of their symptoms and do better on diagnostic tests.

To find out what is happening at the level of neurobiology, Goldin gives them a series of challenges and exercises while they are lying in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner. The functional MRI (fMRI) images show how much blood is flowing to different regions of the brain, which is indicative of how hard an area is working. In these tests, which he conducts before and after the nine-week course, Goldin first triggers the participants’ anxiety with images or verbal cues. Then he asks them to either try to regulate their emotions through self-talk aimed at reducing the intensity and credibility of the trigger, or by mindfulness meditation with a focus on the sensation of their breath at the tip of their nose.

When he looks at the pictures that were taken at different points in the exercise, he finds that the amount of activity in different regions of the brain shifts substantially. When the participants first experience the trigger, without making an effort to control it, activity is high in the limbic regions of the brain, which encode fear and other emotions. After mindfulness training, however, when they shift their attention to their breath, the brain activity shifts to the networks involved in attention—the same ones that Jha studies. Moreover, they were more adept at using self-talk strategies to reduce activity in the limbic regions. “This is promising. It is like when you use a muscle for three months and it becomes stronger and bigger. These people are using the muscle of attention,” he says.

Effects on the Body, Too
Numerous clinicians have found that meditation helps with physical ailments as well. For example, Kabat-Zinn found that patients with psoriasis healed almost four times more quickly if they used a combination of standard ultraviolet light therapy and meditation.

Linda Carlson, PhD, a clinical psychologist at the University of Calgary, and her colleagues regularly use MBSR with cancer patients and have found that the practice improves both subjective and objective measures of health and well-being. “We’ve found a huge effect,” Carlson says, “on symptoms of stress, anger, muscle tension, digestion, sleep, anxiety. We were surprised at the size of the effect. It was quite a bit bigger than research on a lot of other interventions shows.”

Recently the team has looked at the impact of MBSR on blood pressure in women cancer patients, most with breast cancer. They found that in women with high blood pressure, the training led to drops in pressure that were similar to when a patient is put on medication. In other words, the women’s blood pressure dropped from slightly above normal into the normal range—without pharmaceutical intervention.

Numerous groups have also seen improvements in immune system functioning after MBSR training. Carlson thinks that the adjustments reflect a re-balancing of internal rhythms that get out of whack during episodes of illness or disease. By meditating regularly, the patients seem to be able to restore that balance and strengthen their own physical and mental defenses.

For Jha, her work studying the brain adds an extra layer of challenge to letting go during her practice. “Because I think so much about it in my normal non-meditating life, about what are the mechanisms of these effects, when I am actively practicing it is hard not to wonder about what might be happening.”

For the rest of us, interesting as all these findings may be, we have simply to turn our attention to our breath and begin to reap all the benefits.

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.

Rabiya S. Tuma, PhD, is a biologist. She is a regular contributor to the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives and writes frequently on brain research.

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.

Now & Zen – The Meditation Timer Shop

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

orders@now-zen.com

reduce stress

A technique known as “thought-stopping” can help you halt negative, obsessive thoughts, says Dr. Kenneth Ruggiero, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.

The first step is to literally call a halt to this train of thought. If you’re alone, say the word “Stop!” out loud. If you’re around others, think it to yourself. Some people even find it useful to pinch themselves to disrupt those stressful thoughts, says Ruggiero.

Next, choose a positive thought on which you’ll focus instead, such as “I’ve given presentations before, and they went well” or “I know this material better than anyone in the audience.” In doing so, says Ruggiero, you swap a negative, stress-inducing thought for a positive one. Repeat this affirmation using your Zen Timepiece signaling  you to repeat this thought every 30 seconds.

singing-bowl alarm clocks and timers for meditation and yoga

Now & Zen

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

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.

Researchers say they’ve taken a significant stride forward in understanding how relaxation techniques such as meditation, prayer and yoga improve health: by changing patterns of gene activity that affect how the body responds to stress.

The changes were seen both in long-term practitioners and in newer recruits, the scientists said.

“It’s not all in your head,” said Dr. Herbert Benson, president emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind/Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “What we have found is that when you evoke the relaxation response, the very genes that are turned on or off by stress are turned the other way. The mind can actively turn on and turn off genes. The mind is not separated from the body.”

One outside expert agreed.

“It’s sort of like reverse thinking: If you can wreak havoc on yourself with lifestyle choices, for example, [in a way that] causes expression of latent genetic manifestations in the negative, then the reverse should hold true,” said Dr. Gerry Leisman, director of the F.R. Carrick Institute for Clinical Ergonomics, Rehabilitation and Applied Neuroscience at Leeds Metropolitan University in the U.K.

“Biology is not entirely our destiny, so while there are things that give us risk factors, there’s a lot of ‘wiggle’ in this,” added Leisman, who is also a professor at the University of Haifa in Israel. “This paper is pointing that there is a technique that allows us to play with the wiggle.”

Benson, a pioneer in the field of mind-body medicine, is co-senior author of the new study, which is published in the journal PLoS One.

Benson first described the relaxation response 35 years ago. Mind-body approaches that elicit the response include meditation, repetitive prayer, yoga, tai chi, breathing exercises, progressive muscle relaxation, biofeedback, guided imagery and Qi Gong.

“Previously, we had noted that there were scores of diseases that could be treated by eliciting the relaxation response — everything from different kinds of pain, infertility, rheumatoid arthritis, insomnia,” Benson said.

He believes that this study is the first comprehensive look at how mind states can affect gene expression. It also focuses on gene activity in healthy individuals.

Benson and his colleagues compared gene-expression patterns in 19 long-term practitioners, 19 healthy controls and 20 newcomers who underwent eight weeks of relaxation-response training.

More than 2,200 genes were activated differently in the long-time practitioners relative to the controls and 1,561 genes in the short-timers compared to the long-time practitioners. Some 433 of the differently activated genes were shared among short-term and long-term practitioners.

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.

Further genetic analysis revealed changes in cellular metabolism, response to oxidative stress and other processes in both short- and long-term practitioners. All of these processes may contribute to cellular damage stemming from chronic stress.

Another expert had a mixed response to the findings.

Robert Schwartz, director of the Texas A&M Health Science Center’s Institute of Biosciences and Technology in Houston, noted that the study was relatively small. He also wished that there had been more data on the levels of stress hormones within the control group, for comparison purposes.

However, Schwartz called the study “unique and very exciting. It demonstrates that all these techniques of relaxation response have a biofeedback mechanism that alters gene expression.”

He pointed out that the researchers looked at blood cells, which consist largely of immune cells. “You’re getting the response most probably in the immune cell population,” Schwartz said.

“We all are under stress and have many manifestations of that stress,” Benson added. “To adequately protect ourselves against stress, we should use an approach and a technique that we believe evokes the relaxation response 20 minutes, once a day.”

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.

More information

There’s more on meditation at the U.S. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

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.

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.

Now & Zen – The Meditation Timer Shop

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

orders@now-zen.com