by Dedeker Winston

I watched the dense forest trees blur as the car flew along the twists and turns of some back road through the Marin headlands, and a queasiness crept into my stomach. It wasn’t the nausea of car sickness but a creeping anxiety for what lay ahead: my very first residential meditation retreat.

I tried to rely on my meditation practice—focusing on the emotional sensations manifesting in my stomach, watching them move and change, disappear and reappear. But as we got nearer and nearer to the retreat center, my mind struggled for control and kept butting in with a tidal wave of questions, stories, fantasies, and worries about heading into the unknown. All of these excited and apprehensive thoughts had been worming their way into my psyche over the four months that had passed since I first signed up for the retreat, and now they were at a fever pitch.

It was in this state that I watched my uncle drive away, leaving me standing at the gate marked “Silent Retreatants ONLY Beyond This Point.”

The silence didn’t begin until that evening, after I’d filled out the necessary paperwork, received my work assignment, and gotten settled in my sparse yet sufficient room. Though refraining from talk was a comfort to me, I immediately recognized its weight. Speaking was another distraction that I was to put down for the week, just as I had put down and disconnected from the distractions of my phone, my books, and any other entertainment that I might normally turn to. That first evening I settled into bed with a considerable amount of unease, particularly since I no longer had any way of telling the time, and could no longer keep my usual careful eye on the future. With all diversions removed, I was already experiencing far more of my self, my thoughts, my neuroses than I had ever cared to. The week ahead was going to be a long one.

Every day followed the same schedule. Wake up bells were rung at 5:45 a.m., followed by another series of bells at 6:15 calling everyone to the first sitting meditation of the day. From there, alternating between 30 to 45 minute sitting and walking periods, taking breaks for meals, one session of yoga, and a Dharma lecture in the evening.  I was used to sitting for about 15 minutes a day, with a 30 to 45 minute sit once a week in Jessica’s class. And here I was thrown into approximately six hours of sitting meditation per day.

The effects of such a big change were swift. If my normal meditation practice was deconstructing old neural pathways and creating new ones with hammer and chisel, here I found the bulldozer, the steam roller, the wrecking ball. For the first time I saw; for the first time I heard. I watched the worries plaguing my brain drop one by one as I came to the simple realization that every single one was out of my control. Resistance to the mental, physical, and emotional discomfort began dropping away into a surrender that brought more insight than any other experience I’ve known.

Because I could really only interact with myself, I could truly see the relationship I had within, as clearly as if I were examining a relationship between two of my friends. I saw my dysfunctional inner life, my lack of self-worth, a heart rooted with a sense of insufficiency. It was painful to look at, but it made me see the importance of regularly offering metta (lovingkindness) towards myself and my body. As I incorporated it into my practice over the week, I noticed my confidence and esteem growing, comfort and happiness with myself in the present moment becoming less and less intangible.

Each day was chock-full of insight and revelation–far too much to include all of it here. However, I don’t want to give the impression that it was all heavy, all serious, all earth-shattering. When I needed a break from the intensity, I would take a hike up into the gorgeous, forested hills, gently allowing my thoughts to rise and pass away. A surprising number of Yoda quotes kept flitting in, but my mind also often settled on the Whitman line,

Why are there trees I never walk under
but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?

Whitman unfortunately failed to mention the large and copious spiders and ticks that also enjoyed descending upon me. When not respectfully re-locating creepy crawlies, I often used my hikes just to dance. Accustomed to regular physical activity, the long periods of sitting took their toll on my muscles and joints, and dancing all alone in the woods, sans music, was a refreshing movement meditation. I’d get completely caught up, broken out of my trance only by the bells ringing for the next sit, and I’d have to quickly rush back and put my shawl and game face back on. It was like the opening scene of The Sound of Music, but considerably quieter.

Eccentricities aside, the profundity of my retreat experience was striking. In examining my initial reservations and fear, I saw that I had perceived that coming to retreat would mean being trapped with my negative thoughts for seven days. I thought that perhaps through intensive meditation I would learn to cope with that imprisonment, learn to accept it and tolerate it, but that at the end of the day I would still be stuck with my thoughts. Instead, I found that I had come to a place where I could choose to escape from the self-created mental torture chamber in which I had thrown myself. That was really the turning point of the retreat—when my resistance fell away and was replaced with an unshakeable freedom.

And the best part? After returning to civilization—slapping on makeup in the morning, getting distracted by text messages, sliding back in to the tiny collection of victories and losses that is daily life—that freedom is still there. Even outside of the special retreat conditions, I still know that the mud has settled and the water is clear. Every day, every sit, every breath, and every moment are greeted as another opportunity for consciousness, for wakefulness, and to start again. Totally worth it.

Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to the life
We have refused
Again and again
Until now.
Until now.

—David Whyte

By Traci Pedersen for PsychCentral

A new study reveals that practitioners of meditation experience changes in gene expression that are the exact opposite of what occurs during the “flight or fight” stress response.

Specifically, genes associated with energy metabolism, mitochondrial function, insulin secretion, and telomere maintenance are turned on, while those involved in inflammation are turned off.

These effects are more significant and consistent for long-term practitioners.

People who practice simple meditation aren’t “just relaxing,” explained the study’s senior author, Dr. Herbert Benson. Instead, they’re experiencing “a specific genomic response that counteracts the harmful genomic effects of stress.”

It’s been shown that repeating a yoga pose, prayer, or mantra while disregarding other thoughts protects against anxiety and depression as well as physical conditions such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and types of cancer that are exacerbated by stress.

For the study, published in the open access journal PLoS One, researchers at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind/Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Subjects trained 26 adults with no previous meditation experience for eight weeks.

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By Jessica Graham

I’ve recently become of big fan of lovingkindness meditation, or as Shinzen Young calls it, “Focus on Positive.” From the beginning of my practice I have been pretty hard-core about going in to the most challenging material and deconstructing it using mindfulness. This technique has served me well; I have been able to quickly break through old patterns and find freedom from deeply ingrained belief systems. However, while the ability to work with the darkest and most wounded parts of myself has been a gift, at times it has left me without any resources.  As Pema Chödrön says, “Staying with pain without lovingkindness is just warfare,” and—after a particularly difficult period in my life—this has begun to ring true for me. Lately, in addition to mindfulness, I’ve incorporated a lot of lovingkindness into my practice and I’m finding that it is a great companion to the deconstruction process.

Here’s what happened. Not too long ago I was feeling overwhelmed by waves of negative emotion. It felt like there was cement in my veins and a heavy chain mail hood over my head. This feeling seemed to come out of nowhere and was shocking in it’s intensity. I kept telling my (very patient) boyfriend that it was like having a sudden bout of the worst PMS of my life. It also felt similar to what I would have labeled “depression” in my teens and early twenties. At first it took a minute to detach from the experience of negative emotion enough to observe it mindfully, but as it continued I got better at noticing it as it arose. I deconstructed it in the way I am trained to do. Break down the sensations and allow them. Separate the thoughts from the emotions and stop taking them personally. I also addressed this with writing, inquiry and the support of friends. Even so, I continued to have these very intense mood swings that seemed to knock the air out of me. I have learned that discomfort is often a sign that I’m growing in some way, so I buckled in for the ride, continuing to deconstruct the experience using mindfulness.

Then one day I found myself crying over my vacuum cleaner that wasn’t working properly. Before long I was taking it apart, without a clue of how to fix it (the patient boyfriend ended up fixing it). I was suffering, and while I could break down and allow the experience, I felt overwhelmed by it. I climbed into bed, tried to relax, and focusd on the parts of my body that felt good. Even in this state of overwhelm, there was a sense of observing and a lot of space around the experience, thanks to the years I have spent practicing mindfulness. If you break down challenging emotions and thoughts with meditation patiently enough, with equanimity, for long enough, they cease to wreck you. But even with the ability to observe mindfully I was really in a lot of pain. Deconstruction was not enough.

So even with a serious meditation practice and lots of support I was having a tough time. What this was all about? I have found that one of the effects of a meditation practice is that your stuff, your psychological material, comes up. You can no longer push it down and ignore it. Sometimes the content is obvious, past trauma that has a clear and linear path to what is arising today. Other times not. During the vacuum cleaner event, I was aware of some of the underlying issues, but some of it was just raw, primal emotion. Getting into meditation can be like opening Pandora’s Box or taking the Red Pill. We don’t really know what’s in there, swimming in our subconscious. I don’t say this to frighten anyone, just to explain that there isn’t always an easy answer for why you are feeling what you are feeling.

The day of the vacuum cleaner debacle I called Michael Taft and told him about the overwhelming negative emotions I was feeling. His suggestion was that I work with Focus on Positive. This would create a safe container, a resource, which would give me the resilience to then address the intense experiences. The funny thing was I had been giving that same suggestion to several of my students for the past few months! This is a good example of how important it is to have friends, teachers, and community. You can’t always see clearly when it comes to your own process and a trusted outside eye can be a real lifesaver.

What I came to realize is that directly facing the most challenging stuff is the story of my life. It’s what is most familiar and where I feel the most comfortable. To be in an almost constant state of intense emotional and physical upheaval and survive, I had to be hard-core. Being soft, gentle, and loving can get you killed or at the least emotionally destroyed. I brought this mentality into my meditation practice and in some ways that is why I grew so fast. My power-through-it, take no prisoners approach helped me to peel away huge layers of trauma and gain deep insights into the nature of the Self. But where I am now, I realized that a softer approach was necessary in order for me to continue growing without burning out. It was time to stop trying so hard and instead to try to offer myself some comfort and the resource of lovingkindness.

Soon after I put an emphasis on positive feelings, the overwhelming negative emotions began to subside. I didn’t ignore or bypass the pain, instead I treated those hurt parts of myself with the same kindness I would offer a child who was suffering. By using a gentle touch I was able to let go of resistance, and allow the experience to flow through. Of course, I didn’t just do lovingkindness. I also continued to use my mindfulness practice to untangle the emotions, gain insight into what they were springing from, and find equanimity with the raw primal material as well.

I’ve since made Focus on Positive a large part of my practice. I’ve been listening to of Sharon Salzberg, using affirmations, and relaxing my body any time I feel tension arise.  In my formal practice I often create a big container of lovingkindness before going into the more challenging material. It’s amazing how much of an impact it has made on my life. The gentleness and kindness I am showing to myself also extends out to others around me. I have found that I am more patient, understanding, and quicker to respond to conflict with compassion and love.

In addition to my own success with the Focus on Positive practice, I have come across many studies that demonstrate its possible benefits. Lovingkindness has been shown to increase social connectedness and your ability to see things from another’s perspective. In other words it can make you more compassionate. It has also been shown to lower the reaction to inflammation and distress, both of which are associated with depression, heart disease, and diabetes. If you have lower back pain you’ll be happy to hear that has also been shown to reduce pain and anger in people with chronic lower back pain. Barbara Fredrickson, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, found that lovingkindness meditation can help boost positive emotions and wellbeing in life, fostering the personal resources that come from experiencing positive emotion.

Some people find beginning a Focus on Positive practice to be very challenging. Often times people can’t think of anything positive or get bombarded with negative thoughts and emotions. This can be overwhelming, heartbreaking, and even scary. If this is your experience, know that it is quite common and there is nothing wrong with you. Start simple. Find a part of the body that feels good (or even just OK or not bad) and focus on it. You can encourage positive sensations in the body by intentionally relaxing or smiling. When you get pulled to something negative, bring your attention back to the pleasant or neutral sensation in your body.

Then try adding in some positive words. I really like “May I be safe. May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I live with ease,” but it can be anything. The lyrics to an uplifting song that you like, a prayer, an affirmation, even just a sound. For some people it’s powerful to say the words you would like to hear from a parent, lover, or friend. My favorite is “I love and accept you unconditionally.” When you find the words that feel right for you, repeat them in your mind. Notice if the body responds in a positive way, and if so, enjoy and encourage that. You may also wish to add some positive images. Anything from nature and animals to images of yourself happy and healthy. Eventually you may wish to send this lovingkindness out to family, friends, strangers, and even enemies.

Focus on Positive can be a very creative process. It’s all about finding what feels good for you. One of my go-to positive images is kittens! When I bring up an image of a bunch of cute little kittens in my mind I get ridiculously happy and it has worked for years. Experiment. Use music, guided meditations and nature. Don’t judge the process. You might be surprised by what gets your lovingkindness juices flowing. It may feel silly or embarrassing at first, but give it a try anyway. Add it in to your practice for a month and I’m pretty confident that you will see a difference in your life. It’s a great tool to add to your practice, especially if you are going though a tough time. For me it has been a lifesaver.

photo by Moyan_Brenn

By Sumathi Reddy for The Wall Street Journal

At Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, doctor’s orders can include an unlikely prescription: meditation.

“I recommend five minutes, twice a day, and then gradually increase,” said Aditi Nerurkar, a primary-care doctor and assistant medical director of the Cheng & Tsui Center for Integrative Care, which offers alternative medical treatment at the Harvard Medical School-affiliated hospital. “It’s basically the same way I prescribe medicine. I don’t start you on a high dose right away.” She recommends that patients eventually work up to about 20 minutes of meditating, twice a day, for conditions including insomnia and irritable bowel syndrome.

Integrative medicine programs including meditation are increasingly showing up at hospitals and clinics across the country. Recent research has found that meditation can lower blood pressure and help patients with chronic illness cope with pain and depression. In a study published last year, meditation sharply reduced the risk of heart attack or stroke among a group of African-Americans with heart disease.

At Beth Israel Deaconess, meditation and other mind-body therapies are slowly being worked into the primary-care setting. The program began offering some services over the past six months and hopes eventually to have group meditation classes, said Dr. Nerurkar.

Health experts say meditation shouldn’t be used to replace traditional medical therapies, but rather to complement them. While it is clear that “when you breathe in a very slow, conscious way it temporarily lowers your blood pressure,” such techniques shouldn’t be used to substitute for medications to manage high blood pressure and other serious conditions, said Josephine Briggs, director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health. In general, she said, meditation can be useful for symptom management, not to cure or treat disease.

Dr. Briggs said the agency is funding a number of studies looking at meditation and breathing techniques and their effect on numerous conditions, including hot flashes that occur during menopause. If meditation is found to be beneficial, it could help women avoid using hormone treatments, which can have detrimental side effects, she said.

Martha O’Boyle, a 51-year-old in Fremont, Calif., has suffered from chronic pain in her arms, chest and elsewhere since suffering from a heart attack two years ago.

“Here’s a cardiologist telling me to go and meditate,” said Ms. O’Boyle. “I’m thinking, does she think I’m crazy?”

Ms. O’Boyle began taking meditation classes at Stanford Hospital & Clinics in 2011. The eight-week class consisted of once-a-week sessions lasting two to three hours. “Once I started the class I saw the benefits of it,” she said. Now, Ms. O’Boyle meditates every day for 20 to 45 minutes. “The pain is not gone, but it helps me cope with it,” she said.

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By Jan Hoffman for The New York Times

Mindfulness meditation, the ancient and flourishing practice that increases awareness of random thoughts and redirects attention to the present moment, has been used to manage stress, depression and even chronic pain. But can it improve test scores?

Researchers in the department of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who have been studying the relationship between mindfulness and mind-wandering, or the tendency to let our minds drift away on “task-unrelated thoughts,” as it is referred to in academic literature, sought to find out.

“We had already found that mind-wandering underlies performance on a variety of tests, including working memory capacity and intelligence,” said Michael D. Mrazek, a graduate student working with Jonathan W. Schooler, a professor of psychology at the university who studies the impacts and implications of mind-wandering and mindfulness. The higher the working memory, or an individual’s ability to keep in mind chunks of information and also use them, the better students tend to perform on reading comprehension tests.

Researchers disagree about the extent to which an individual’s working memory capacity can be enhanced. But in a study published last month in the journal Psychological Science, the Santa Barbara researchers found that after a group of undergraduates went through a two-week intensive mindfulness training program, their mind-wandering decreased and their working memory capacity improved. They also performed better on a reading comprehension test — a section from the Graduate Record Examination, or G.R.E.

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Sometimes you have to do something a little extreme in order to get a better understanding of yourself. For many people, the urge towards self knowledge takes the form of a challenge. Skydiving, mountain climbing, long meditation retreats. Here, my friend Kestrel, an amazing photographer, talks about her personal experience with the challenge of following Buddhist vows for a month. Often at Buddhist meditation retreats, a ceremony of taking such vows is offered for those who would like to intensify their practice. ~ Michael

by Kestrel Lancaster

Now, understand that I share my generation’s resistance to association with any form of religion or ideology, but have noticed my life to have problems, like everyone else’s, and I’m going to do something about it. In an attempt to figure out what that something is, for one month I committed to a form of Buddhism’s Pratimoksha Vow, the vow of personal liberation. My interpretation of the initial pledge in what is referred to as The Three Commitments came from the teachings of the American-born Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön (particularly her latest book, Living Beautifully With Uncertainty and Change), in combination with my own personal values.

The basic idea is simple: you work with your thoughts, feelings, and habitual actions to not cause harm to yourself or others, liberate from the suffering that comes with resisting the reality of our human situation: the uncertainty and ambiguity that is part of existence. Since that doesn’t sound so simple overall, it’s broken down into specific precepts to free you from distractions and get you to start noticing what you’re doing, so that you can make a conscious decision to stop or keep it up.

• protecting life: I vow not to kill any living being, do my best to cultivate nonaggression and compassion, to learn to protect all life.
• respecting what belongs to others: I vow not to take what is not offered, and do my best to respect the property of others.
• not harming others with sexual energy: I vow to be faithful to my partners in our arrangements, be aware of what harms myself and others, to nurture true love and respect free from attachment.
• mindful speech: I vow to cultivate right speech, do my best not to lie, not to gossip or slander, not use harsh or idle speech, and not say things that bring about division or hatred.
•  protecting body and mind: I vow not to use drugs or alcohol, to do my best to live my life in a way that will increase my inner strength and flexibility, my openness to all beings and life itself.

These things might not sound so unfamiliar, of course; they’re just common sense practices to being a good person. However, we all make mistakes and get into habitual and harmful patterns. Neuroscience tells us that the most effective way to accomplish any kind of goal is to begin with a straightforward commitment. So I did it, pledged the vows to myself for 30 days, and even made it alive all the way through.

As easy as that list sounds, because we all would like to imagine ourselves that way, this was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. The number of ways I hadn’t expected it to affect my life were astonishing, and it was on my mind all the time – noticing some way I wanted to break a vow in some small way. Suddenly, I felt like a horrible person for this huge pile of little things – the desire to illegally acquire a tv show’s latest episode, wanting to take a nice pen that a waitress left, an embellishment or omission in conversation to simplify communication – and noticing the habitual actions I was taking that created or prolonged suffering in myself and others. One night right in the exact middle of the project, I realized while at a concert all the excuses I’d been making for other people to get away with treating me poorly, this streak most of my life of straightforward, habitual, unnecessary suffering, and just had to put away a few ounces of bourbon and then sob on the fella I was seeing. If Pratimoksha is supposed to teach you to notice, it did that without question, but I hated myself.

By the end of the month, I’d broken all but one of the precepts in some little way or other. I didn’t kill anyone or cheat on my relationships, but there was that other, smaller nonsense that life could do better without. The month ended eventually, and though I must admit that some of my distractions from the fundamental ambiguity of being alive have resumed their presence in my life (I missed you, whiskey), there have also been some pretty huge shifts and life changes. It was a very deeply personal journey in a way I’ve never really experienced, and did manage to put me more in touch with myself. This connection to myself, being aware of my choice in action, feels fantastic, but is currently attached to a great amount of self criticism. Now the next steps are a) how to accept myself without judgment, and b) find and successfully express how my needs can be fulfilled rationally. I’ve got a plan for each.

So… I’m going to stay right here for a little while and work on this, before considering the further vows in Buddhism’s Three Commitments, which are even more terrifying, impossible, ambiguous and noble: dedicating our lives to keeping our hearts and minds open to all beings at all times, and to embrace the world just as it is.

photo by MWT

by Claudine Ryan for ABC Health and Wellbeing

Feeling less stressed, having better concentration and a greater resilience to life’s challenges are some of the commonly-cited reasons for trying meditation. But this quest for inner calm is not limited to adults sitting in the lotus position; inside classrooms you’ll find children and young people also quietly focusing their thoughts inwards.

One technique popular with many schools and universities is mindfulness meditation, which involves focusing your attention on the present moment and accepting things for what they are (without judging or reacting to what you feel). This is usually done through exercises where you mentally focus on your breath or feelings in different parts of the body. But you can also do less formal mindfulness exercises that involve focusing on sensations you feel during daily activities like having a shower or washing the dishes.

Dr Richard Chambers is a clinical psychologist who uses mindfulness-based techniques in his work with young people, including undergraduate university students. He says research shows these techniques can really benefit students and young people.

“There is now a lot of research around mindfulness and performance, mindfulness and leadership, mindfulness and cognitive performance and mindfulness and academic performance.”

In his own research at Monash University, yet to be published, he has taught young people to meditate and then showed them how to draw on these skills to improve their learning and study habits.

“Our findings show that as well as becoming more mindful and less stressed, they become better able to concentrate, their memory improves and their academic performance improves as well.”

Chambers’ claims are backed by a recent US study that found links between mindfulness training and better working memory and improved test scores in undergraduate students.

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by Julianna Raye

  As a singer/songwriter, I’ve had some pretty amazing opportunities. And I absolutely love the process of performing live, which I’ve done since I was 5 years old, in one form or another. I also love creating music. It’s a genuinely exhilarating process. But, I really can’t stand playing an instrument in front of people; I have a very hard time with that. I can barely stand playing it when I’m by myself. For me, it’s like being forced to speak a foreign language I don’t like, because I’m living in that country and I have no choice. It’s clunky and frustrating, like an old typewriter with sticky keys. Singing, on the other hand, is so easy and natural. You just open up your mouth and the voice is there for you. But a guitar or piano needs your fingers to tell it how to sound and where to go. I just don’t have the same cooperative understanding with my fingers that I have with my vocal chords. But because of the economics of touring and the desire to contribute in co-writing sessions, I’ve had no choice but to play instruments in front of people. So, since this was a necessary relationship for me as a writer and artist, I decided to treat it as a spiritual practice.

Every day, I would sit on my seiza bench with eyes closed and guitar in hand and I’d run through the songs for my set. I would concentrate mostly on the emotions that came up as I struggled to master this process. I would also concentrate on the way my fingers felt against the strings. I noticed that fear led me to grip the strings just a little too tight and that set off a chain reaction, affecting the fluidity of my performance. I noticed the frustration that came up in a sloppy transition between chords. I noticed the frustration that came up because playing guitar feels like work to me. I noticed a lot of frustration and discomfort, coming up. I even had insight into my childhood. I remembered knocking over the orange juice as a kid at the breakfast table and how pissed off my dad got. I started to look on my clumsy fingers with compassion, recognizing how they held the painful desire and helpless inability to get life perfectly right.

I’d like to tell you I had a massive breakthrough and was transformed into a virtuoso guitarist. So far, no go. But it has definitely brought something rich into the mix. On one occasion, I remember missing a chord change on stage and just as I was headed into a shame spiral I caught myself and chose a better way forward. In that instant, right there on stage, between the words of the song, I felt forgiveness and compassion for myself. I said some reassuring words in my mind and was able to let the fumble go. Another time, I became overwhelmingly nervous playing a new song for an intimate group of strangers. I warned them I might not make it through the song and sure enough, half way in, I slipped one time too many and begged off. To my surprise the crowd insisted I keep going. So I rallied and we weathered my repeated slips and stumbles together, until I finished, to rousing applause. We had climbed the mountain and survived the journey, together. I was reminded that it’s connection we’re all truly looking for. Connection can be most profound when we’re willing to turn towards the parts of ourselves we have the hardest time accepting, bringing love into the darkness.

Visit Julianna’s Meditate with Music website.

From Science Codex

Focusing on the present rather than letting the mind drift may help to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, suggests new research from the Shamatha Project at the University of California, Davis.

The ability to focus mental resources on immediate experience is an aspect of mindfulness, which can be improved by meditation training.

“This is the first study to show a direct relation between resting cortisol and scores on any type of mindfulness scale,” said Tonya Jacobs, a postdoctoral researcher at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain and first author of a paper describing the work, published this week in the journal Health Psychology.

High levels of cortisol, a hormone produced by the adrenal gland, are associated with physical or emotional stress. Prolonged release of the hormone contributes to wide-ranging, adverse effects on a number of physiological systems.

The new findings are the latest to come from the Shamatha Project, a comprehensive long-term, control-group study of the effects of meditation training on mind and body.

Led by Clifford Saron, associate research scientist at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain, the Shamatha Project has drawn the attention of both scientists and Buddhist scholars including the Dalai Lama, who has endorsed the project.

In the new study, Jacobs, Saron and their colleagues used a questionnaire to measure aspects of mindfulness among a group of volunteers before and after an intensive, three-month meditation retreat. They also measured cortisol levels in the volunteers’ saliva.

During the retreat, Buddhist scholar and teacher B. Alan Wallace of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies trained participants in such attentional skills as mindfulness of breathing, observing mental events, and observing the nature of consciousness. Participants also practiced cultivating benevolent mental states, including loving kindness, compassion, empathic joy and equanimity.

At an individual level, there was a correlation between a high score for mindfulness and a low score in cortisol both before and after the retreat. Individuals whose mindfulness score increased after the retreat showed a decrease in cortisol.

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From LiveScience

If you’ve ever struggled to keep your mind from wandering during an important test or another task that requires laser-like focus, researchers say a little meditation could help you concentrate.

Mindfulness training, which teaches how to center one’s thoughts on the present moment, improved both GRE reading-comprehension scores and working memory capacity in a group of college students, according to the results of a new study.

“Despite the wide recognition that mind wandering is a pervasive and often disruptive influence in our lives, almost no research has established effective strategies for reducing mind wandering,” Michael Mrazek, a graduate student researcher in psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said in a statement. “We set out to find ways to reduce mind wandering and thereby improve performance within educational contexts.”

Mrazek and his colleagues recruited 48 college students and assigned half to a mindfulness class and half to a nutrition class as a control. The classes met for 45 minutes four times a week for two weeks. While the students in the nutrition class learned about strategies for healthy eating, students in the mindfulness class learned how to clear distracting thoughts out of their head. In some of their meditation exercises, they sat on cushions in a circle, legs crossed and gaze lowered, focusing their attention on a sensory experience, like their own breathing, the taste of a piece of fruit, or the sound of an audio recording, allowing the mind to rest naturally instead of actively trying to suppress thoughts that may pop up.

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