In other words, accepting your body as it is and spending less time thinking about it is the best way to live a leaner, healthier lifestyle.

We’re bombarded with images of unattainable, unrealistic, and unhealthy beauty. Start with an average model, who has a BMI of 16.5. Add lots of computer software and hours of editing. You end up with a distorted, imaginary, arguably non-human view of what purports to be a “normal” and beautiful body.

For some perspective, at my height of 5’8″ (173 cm), I would have to weigh 107.5 lb to have a BMI of 16.5. Since my normal weight is about 140 lb, I would have to lose all my body fat plus nearly 10 pounds of lean body tissue.

Then of course, I’d be airbrushed into oblivion. (To get an idea what is possible with digital enhancement, take a look at a weight loss session done with Adobe Photoshop software).

But here’s the paradox. Bizarrely, impossibly thin images are all around us. Yet more people are overweight and obese than ever before. Seems odd. You’d think that having more pressure would push people into the direction of losing weight, but the opposite is happening instead. Why?

Being a biologist I like to think that biology matters and can explain things more than, say, squishy things like feelings and perceptions. So I might have argued that weight loss was simply energy in (food) versus energy out (movement).

Looks like us geeks might have been a little simplistic.

In this week’s research review, we see that for people struggling with their weight, how they see their body is just as important as — if not more important than — the biology of their body.

Body image: evaluation and investment

We all went through an awkward stage as a teenagers. Heck, you may still be in an awkward stage 30 years later.

Looking in the mirror or fretting over a picture. Is that what I really look like?! The horror! If I could just lose/gain x pounds, lift this, and tuck that, THEN I would be happy. You know the drill.

Body image is how we perceive our physical appearance — good or bad — as well as how important your body perceptions are to you.  Body image is separated into two parts (aka attitudinal dimensions):

1. Evaluative body image: How you think and feel you look, as well as how happy you are with your body. This is your cognitive appraisal and associated emotions (aka what you think or feel). It doesn’t necessarily mean this is reality.

2. Body image investment: How important body image is to you and how much body image affects your daily life. Being preoccupied with the way your body looks (body concern) is a hallmark of dysfunctional body image investment. Another part of body image investment is social physique anxiety, which makes you anxious in social settings and during interactions with others because you feel that others are judging your body.

So, you might not like your body much (evaluation) but not really care an awful lot (investment). This might mean you treat your body like an ugly but necessary inconvenience, like having to clean out the cat’s litter box. Gross, but what are ya gonna do, you think.

Or, you might think you look great (evaluation) and find that greatness really, really important as well (investment), which might mean that you spend a lot of time being afraid of losing that hot bod.

Of course, many of us have the worst of both worlds. We don’t like our bodies, and because we’re so invested in body image, our perceived-grotesque physiques make us want to hide under a rock.

Whether evaluation and/or investment, we tend to think of “body image” as something that happens inside our head. But could it affect our actual bodies?

What role does body image play in weight loss?

In this week’s review, I look at whether improving body image may help women lose weight over a year-long behaviour change program.

Carraça EV, Silva MN, Markland D, Vieira PN, Minderico CS, Sardinha LB, Teixeira PJ. Body image change and improved eating self-regulation in a weight management intervention in women. Int J Behav Nutr Phys Act. 2011 Jul 18;8:75.

Methods

A group of obese women went through a year-long weight loss program that focused on behaviour changes.

You may be thinking, Well aren’t all weight loss programs behaviour changes? Yes, but this one focused on self-regulation of eating (with an approach known as self-determination theory) rather than calorie counting or specific meal plans.

Our own Lean Eating program at PN focuses on eating self-regulation, which bothers some people who may be expecting a auto-pilot type of approach. What — I don’t get a list of meals? Or a meal plan to follow? You mean I have to pay attention to how my body feels and I have to make decisions!?

Now, I get that it’s often easier to let other people make decisions for you. However, the advantage of self-regulated eating is that mindful, voluntary and self-directed eating is more sustainable long-term, while fostering independence. You learn the skills you need to eat better… for life… without someone else looking over your shoulder.

Scary at first, but a lot more sustainable and useful. (Trust us. We’ve helped thousands of clients.)

Self-regulation

Several factors guide self-regulation of eating:

• confidence that you can do it (eating self-efficacy);
• consciously controlled eating that isn’t too rigid (highly flexible cognitive restraint );
• less emotional eating; less eating triggered by specific situations; and less eating because of habits (reduced disinhibition including emotional, situational and habitual cues); and
• less perceived hunger.

The women also increased their level of physical activity, but as with the eating, there were no specific prescriptions for what to do each day.

Body image sessions

Half the women also went to body image enhancement sessions to improve their body acceptance and satisfaction (evaluative body image) and decrease their over-preoccupation with appearance (investment in body image).

Exercises to improve body acceptance and evaluation included:

• looking at a mirror and systematically looking at body parts;
• making realistic goals and expectations for their bodies; and
• creating a realistic ideal body based on their parents’ weight history and their body type.

Exercises to improve investment in appearance included:

• understanding body image;
• finding the cause of the disorder (what situations — social and personal — triggered dysfunction?);
• keeping a diary to record negative self-talk and the feelings it causes;
• helping the women to cope with prejudice;
• helping the women let go of the belief they need to look different in order to be happy.

How do you measure body image?

You might be wondering how you measure body image and the different parts that make it up. There are a series of questionnaires and scales to indicate someone’s body image.

For evaluative body image, one of the more interesting and easy scales to use and understand is the figure rating scale (Figure 1). This provides a series of body outlines numbered 1 (very thin) to 9 (very heavy).

Participants pick the number they think fits their actual body size, and then they pick the number that represents their ideal body size. The bigger the difference (self-ideal discrepancy) the more body image issues a participant has.

Keep in mind this is perceived body size, not real body size. People may actually be their ideal body size but not think so. If you think you’re a 9 on the scale but you’re really a 1, you’ve definitely got a problem.

Body image investment is assessed using questionnaires that ask things like:

• How often do you feel fat when taking a bath?
• How often has your body shape/size kept you from concentrating?
• How nervous do you feel about your body in social settings?

Figure 1: Figure Rating Scale. From Bhuiyan et al, 2003.

Results

Improved body image

The body image sessions worked. The women in these sessions improved both evaluative body image and body image investment.

Improved eating self-regulation & weight loss

Improving body image also improved eating self-regulation. With better eating, there was better weight loss.

The body image group lost 7.3% of their body weight, while the control group lost only 1.7% of their body weight.

It makes sense that better eating means more weight loss, but seems odd that a better body image would help weight loss. Wouldn’t you think that people should lose weight first… and then feel better about their bodies?

Not in this case. The group that got care, counselling, and compassion kicked ass. Goes against the drill sergeant/tough love approach, doesn’t it?

Using a mathematical model (partial least squares) the researchers found that changes in body image investment was a little more important for weight loss than body image evaluation. In other words, to lose weight, it’s more important to let go of rigid investment in body size and shape than it is to always feel great about yourself.

(After all, remember our hypothetical people who feel good about their body, but are afraid of losing it? They’re much more likely to rigidly control their eating and exercise, which sets them up for problems like diet rebounds, exercise compulsions, and binge eating later on. Plus, if you’re not as invested in your body image, you realize that small things like day-to-day weight fluctuations aren’t that big a deal.)

Conclusion

You’d think people would be motivated to change if they were unhappy with their body. In fact, the opposite is true: Greater body image dissatisfaction actually hinders weight loss.

You may need a certain amount of dissatisfaction with your current body if you want to change it, but more isn’t better. Pointing out that someone is overweight or obese, or beating up on yourself, doesn’t make you more motivated. Nor does it help you get leaner.

We know this to be true. In Lean Eating, we use an “awesomeness-based coaching” approach. We don’t spend time pointing out your “flaws” or “problem areas” (imaginary or otherwise). We find what’s already awesome about you, right now, no matter what your body looks like… and help you do and feel more of that.

(And just a warning: We have a Five-Pushup Rule in Lean Eating: Self-criticism gets you five pushups. We know that negative self-talk doesn’t do you any good. So we pushup that nasty stuff right outta you.)

This study shows that improving body image helps with weight loss. And it seems that spending less time worrying about how your body looks and how other people may scrutinize your body is a bigger part of the puzzle than how unhappy you are about your body.

Want to lose weight?

• Stop obsessing about your body. If possible, try to get “outside yourself” — into a bigger world full of activities, experiences, social causes, and other things more interesting than whether you can see your abs.
• Pursue self-acceptance, self-care and self-compassion… not self-criticism.
• Pay more attention to what you eat — eat slowly and mindfully.
• Move your body more.

Simple, but not necessarily easy.

Bottom line

Whether you’re coaching a client or are interesting in losing weight yourself, improving body image can help you lose weight.

As counter-intuitive as it sounds, accepting your body as it is and spending less time thinking about your body can improve your weight loss. You still have to eat a little less and move around a little more… but at the very least, you’ll also like yourself at the end of the day.

…

_______________________________________________________________

About Author

Helen Kollias, Ph.D. has earned a doctoral degree in Molecular Biology from York University (2006) with a specialization in the area of Muscle Development and Regeneration. Prior to her doctoral work, Dr. Kollias completed a Masters Degree in Exercise Physiology and Biochemistry at the University of Waterloo (2000) and a Bachelor’s Degree in Biochemistry from the University of Lethbridge (1996).

As a result of her academic training – covering exercise physiology, biochemistry, molecular biology, and biomechanics – Dr. Kollias has aquired a broad scientific knowledge that ranges from the cell to the whole body.

Although some folks are either all brain or all brawn, don’t let Dr. Kollias’ solid academic training fool you. In addition to the brains, she’s played varsity soccer, is a certified Level II NCCP (National Coaching Certification of Canada) soccer coach, and has coached both soccer and basketball. Further, she’s been involved in fitness and weight training for over 16 years, working, at one point, as a personal trainer.

Nowadays, Dr. Kollias is a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, studying Myostatin signaling and Muscular dystrophy.

In addition, she lends her considerable talents to the Precision Nutrition team as the Director of Research. In this role, she’s found a way to fuse her academic background in scientific research with ‘real world’ applications to create cool new experiments.

_______________________________________________________________

References

Bhuiyan AR, Gustat J, Srinivasan SR, Berenson GS. Differences in body shape representations among young adults from a biracial (Black-White), semirural community: the Bogalusa Heart Study. Am J Epidemiol. 2003 Oct 15;158(8):792-7.

I wasn’t aware fasting was used as a weight-loss plan until I read the “Intermittent Fasting” article on the Mindful Muscle blog. And, having read it, I found myself wanting to know more about supposed benefits and risks. My impression, from the article, was that outside of spiritual benefits, fasting was not an ideal method of weight loss.

Upon further research, what I found was contradictory. There were those who lauded fasting and those who emphatically denounced it. One aspect that appears to be universal—at least universal in the articles I delved through—is that no one actually prescribes it as a weight-loss method. Those who recommend fasting usually do so because of its supposed cleansing benefits, not because it was a guaranteed pound-shedder. To be honest, I find that a relief; the idea of not eating for a long period of time to lose weight just sounds too much like anorexia or starvation to me.

The Spiritual Side of Fasting

With the intent of centering oneself through fasting in a spiritual context, however, I can understand and appreciate the testimonies of practitioners. Depending on one’s religious or spiritual knowledge, many people have some familiarity of when fasting occurs today. Be it the fasting on Good Friday for many Christians, or the month of Ramadan for Muslims, it is still a prevalent practice in the religious realm. Its history is far reaching; ancient tribes, including Native Americans, would fast for a number of reasons, including penitence, fertility, and protection. (…fasting.html)

I read of one Christian man’s personal account of prayer and fasting as a means to finding answers from God. My first reaction, since the man also mentioned how historically fasting was often employed by Christians for answers, was that fasting for answers sounded a lot like a magic eight ball—hope you like the answer you get … and that it makes sense… But after thinking about it for awhile, and reading more and more how fasting is used a tool for centering oneself, I realized fasting and praying were more like remembering one’s goals, ethics, or hopes. It was a way to connect to higher thoughts and beliefs. As a Catholic, I practice fasting before mass and on days like Good Friday as a method to reflect upon Christ’s sacrifices and cleanse the soul, so to speak. I’d never thought to use fasting to find answers within myself, though I’m sure it isn’t just Christians who employ it for such purposes; there are also the accounts of less religious, more spiritually-oriented people using fasting as a means of centering themselves and focusing on higher thoughts.

A little more research revealed some nuances of spiritual fasting. For example, while Catholics may employ fasting as a reflective tool or to better empathize with the impoverished, the Eastern Orthodox may use fasting as a way to fight gluttony. Likewise, while the Jewish may use fasting as penance, Mormons may use it to pray for a special request. Buddhists and Hindus use fasting as a spiritual renewal of the mind—but this isn’t to say these benefits or tools don’t or can’t cross over into other religions. It was eye-opening, though, to see which religions emphasize what through fasting.

Fasting for Good Health

And while some would use the word “purification” to describe fasting, in terms of the mind and soul, it’s also the word used to describe the physical benefits of fasting—at least, if you’re a believer in the benefits of fasting. There is evidence that it can be both harmful and beneficial, depending on its length.

According to the studies I’ve read through, short-term fasting poses little threat unless one is already emaciated, on drugs, or pregnant. Short-term fasting is between twenty-four and thirty-six hours of abstaining from food. It seems that longer fasting (over several days) helps the body to cleanse itself of toxins. What I’ve gathered, however, is that there seems to be more advantage to shorter fasting periods with periods of caloric restriction; the lab results of Roy Walford and Richard Weindruch’s* studies point to this.

They performed tests on rodents, giving one group the all-access-buffet pass, the other group a restricted but still nutritive diet after hours of fasting. I think you can guess where this might be headed.

The rodents that fasted and were then given smaller portions of food than those rodents that ate whatever, whenever, had longer lives and less ailments. The researchers also had a group where adult rodents’ diets were changed from the unhealthy variety to the restricted and fasting diet. Problems like tumors or disease began to clear up and they, too, had longer lives than those that indulged their appetites.

If the improved longevity of rats’ lives doesn’t justify cutting out unnecessary treats in your life, there was another study, this time on humans, that shows how the food people eat can affect life expectancy.

In the late 19th century Sir Robert McCarrison** observed northern and southern Indians  and their eating habits. He found the northern Indians looked healthier than the southern Indians and discovered the diet of the northerners was richer in vegetables and fruits, with less intake of meat, than the southerners.

Okay, I’m not done spouting rat studies just yet because McCarrison took what he saw in his human observations and put them to the test. He fed one group of rats the exact same diet of the northerners, the other the diet of the southerners. The “northern” rats were healthy, happy little rodents with low mortality. The southern rats? They developed diseases … and they turned on each other. Perhaps the key to peace among men—and rats—is more vegetables.

McCarrison even did a study comparing an Indian diet to a British diet (you know, tea, biscuits and marmalade, meat, that sort of thing). According to the results, the British will soon eat each other.

All joking aside, though, this study certainly is fascinating and is convincing if one wants proof that a more balanced and restricted (this is where the fasting comes into play) diet correlates to a longer life with less health problems. There are numerous other studies that prove fasting is healthy and leads to a longer life with less problems (for a good summary of these studies, go here: http://www.systemanorway.com/default.asp?iId=JLHLK).

On the flip side, however, there are those that believe by fasting, especially for too long, the body is being deprived of nutrients. This leaves the body vulnerable and susceptible to illness.

Fasting as a Diet Fad

There’s also the danger of doing it for the wrong reason. There are celebrities out there who have had fasting-diets and there are people who try it for themselves, hoping to end up with the same results. This is starvation, not fasting, because the incentive is to lose weight and lose it fast—fasting for more than three days will definitely lead to problems, including liver damage, anemia, and muscle breakdown to name just a few.

Conclusion

The incentive of the person fasting makes all the difference. When one’s goal is not to lose weight, but to gain clarity of mind or to improve the quality of one’s life, there are definitely going to be advantages. For the person whose incentive is, let’s say, shallow, though, I think the fasting-diet would be yet another disappointing fad.

Bearing this in mind, it’s hard for me to enthusiastically recommend fasting, despite being convinced that the studies on longevity and better quality of life are proof that what we eat and how often we eat affect us. If a person truly employs fasting in combination with healthy caloric restriction, I can find no fault. With our culture’s obsessive dieting trend, though, I would rather recommend fasting for its mental merits. But at least we know, while we fast, there are physical benefits being gained in addition to our spiritual cleansing!

* For more on Weindruch and Walford’s research, go here: http://www.healthy.net/scr/article.asp?ID=496
** For more on McCarrison’s research, go here: http://180degreehealth.blogspot.com/2008/02/robert-mccarrison-straight-nutrition.html

…

_______________________________________________________________

About the “Seeker” of this Article

Chris Willitts is an entrepreneur, freelance web designer, and continuing student at the University of Michigan, where one of his primary focuses in academia is consciousness studies. He also teaches a 6-week meditation course that integrates positive psychology interventions called Illuminate Your Life With Purpose.

Chris founded Mindful Muscle - an online initiative that advocates mindfulness practices and believes these practices can revolutionize day-to-day living in modern societies, which can play a crucial role in elevating our collective consciousness, health, and human potentiality. For almost 10 years prior to Mindful Muscle, Chris was busy developing various other Internet ventures.

Be sure to check out Chris’s philosophy about meditation, mindful strength training and mindful living at www.mindfulmuscle.com

_______________________________________________________________

Following a cloud with our eye and drifting through the sky with it can be an easy and relaxing meditation.

When people use the phrase “head in the clouds,” they usually refer to a mental state that appears to be drifting rather than concentrating. For this reason, putting our heads in the clouds can be a wonderful meditation tool. Whether puffy and white or tinted with the colors of dawn and dusk or shades of gray, those vaporous sky dwellers can remind us of so many things about life and about ourselves.

For this meditation, we can find a physical place to relax and look upward, or we can look to the skies from within our imaginations. Directing our thoughts to the endless of expanse of sky that clouds inhabit, we feel our souls expand to reach beyond any seeming limitations. Following the clouds, we are free to unleash our imaginations. We may choose to merely drift along with them for a time, enjoying their distanced perspective on the world. Or we can look for messages in their fantastical shapes, or feel the joy of bounding between their immense billowy puffiness. However we interact with them, we do so from a peaceful place.

Clouds drift above the hustle of the world below, knowing they belong to another realm that cannot be affected by its frenzy, reminding us that peace is always available to us. By directing our vision beyond the ordinary, clouds also remind us of the illusion of appearances. While appearing to be solid, their vapor and mist appear like cotton balls ! from below, giving little indication of the heights they reach. Sometimes they may cast shadows, leaving us in shade, but like life’s difficulties clouds change shape and move onward, revealing the shining sun, twinkling stars, and blue sky that are behind them.

When a ray of light breaks through the clouds, their dramatic filtering only makes the light more beautiful by contrast, just as we can shine more brightly in the midst of life’s challenges. When we allow clouds to offer us a welcome respite, they help us visit the realm of illusion to see the truth beyond.

**To read more articles like this, please visit the DailyOM by clicking here

…

_______________________________________________________________

About the “Seeker” of this Article

Chris Willitts is an entrepreneur, freelance web designer, and continuing student at the University of Michigan, where one of his primary focuses in academia is consciousness studies. He also teaches a 6-week meditation course that integrates positive psychology interventions called Illuminate Your Life With Purpose.

Chris founded Mindful Muscle - an online initiative that advocates mindfulness practices and believes these practices can revolutionize day-to-day living in modern societies, which can play a crucial role in elevating our collective consciousness, health, and human potentiality. For almost 10 years prior to Mindful Muscle, Chris was busy developing various other Internet ventures.

Be sure to check out Chris’s philosophy about meditation, mindful strength training and mindful living at www.mindfulmuscle.com

_______________________________________________________________

It’s no secret that humans are not entirely rational when it comes to weighing rewards. For example, we might be perfectly happy with how much money we’re making — until we find out how much more the guy in the next cubicle is being paid.

But a new study suggests that people who regularly practice Buddhist meditation actually process these common social situations differently — and the researchers have the brain scans to prove it.

Ulrich Kirk and collaborators at Baylor Medical College in Houston had 40 control subjects and 26 longtime meditators participate in a well-known experiment called the Ultimatum Game. It goes like this:

One person has a sum of money to split with another person. If the other person accepts the offer, they both walk away with cash in their pocket, but if he or she rejects the offer as too chintzy — which happens surprisingly often — neither receives anything.

The rational course is to accept any offer that is proposed, because getting something is better than nothing at all, but the Ultimatum Game suggests that for many people, emotion trumps reason. Being treated fairly is more important than coming out ahead financially.

Kirk’s subjects had $20 to split among themselves. When the offers were wildly asymmetrical (keeping $19 for oneself, while offering only $1), 72 percent of the controls refused the money, meaning both parties left empty-handed. But when the meditators played, only 46 percent rejected such blatantly unfair offers. More than half were willing to take whatever they were offered.

The test subjects played the game while lying inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, enabling the researchers to see which areas of their brains became active as they responded to various monetary offers. As in earlier experiments with the Ultimatum Game, the control subjects saw increased activity in a brain structure called the anterior insula when they were confronted with an unfair offer — an area linked to the emotion of disgust.

But the meditators’ brains reacted quite differently, activating brain areas associated with interoception — the representation of the body’s internal state. In fact, the researchers found very little overlap in the two groups’ neural responses.

Kirk, who recruited his meditators from the Houston Zen Center and other local Buddhist groups, wanted to explore a different mechanism for managing their emotions than the ones usually studied in cognitive neuroscience.

“To us it seemed that a more ecological way of doing this would be to see the effects of mindfulness,” he says. “Mindfulness, as opposed to emotion regulation, is using an outside perspective on one’s experiences, rather than changing their content (through distraction) or context (through reframing).”

To view the rest of this article, please click here where it’s originally published.

…

_______________________________________________________________

About the “Seeker” of this Article

Chris Willitts is an entrepreneur, freelance web designer, and continuing student at the University of Michigan, where one of his primary focuses in academia is consciousness studies. He also teaches a 6-week meditation course that integrates positive psychology interventions called Illuminate Your Life With Purpose.

Chris founded Mindful Muscle - an online initiative that advocates mindfulness practices and believes these practices can revolutionize day-to-day living in modern societies, which can play a crucial role in elevating our collective consciousness, health, and human potentiality. For almost 10 years prior to Mindful Muscle, Chris was busy developing various other Internet ventures.

Be sure to check out Chris’s philosophy about meditation, mindful strength training and mindful living at www.mindfulmuscle.com

_______________________________________________________________

PREPARING THE BODY FOR HEALING

Eckhart Tolle says this on page 143 in his book The Power of Now.

The first thing to remember is this: as long as you make an identity for yourself out of the pain, you cannot become free of it. As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt you make to heal the pain. Why? Quite simply because you want to keep yourself intact, and the pain has become an essential part of you. This is an unconscious process, and the only way to overcome it, is to make it conscious. To suddenly see that you are or have been attached to your pain can be a shocking experience. The moment you realize this, you have broken the attachment.

The pain-body is an energy field, almost like an entity, that has become lodged in your inner space. It is life energy that has become trapped, energy that is no longer flowing. Of course, the pain-body is there because of certain things that happened in the past. It is the living part of you, and you identify with the past. A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth. It is the belief that other people and what they did to you are responsible for who you are now, for your emotional pain or your inability to be your true self. The truth is that the only power there is, is contained within this moment: it is the power of your presence.

All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry - all forms of fear - are caused by too much future - and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past - and not enough presence.

Once you know that, you realize that you are responsible for your inner space now - nobody else is - and that the past cannot prevail against the power of the Now.

THE PAIN-BODY

There are two types of pain; one is present pain that occurs in the Now and the pain which is based on past events, usually from childhood experiences.

The pain-body is a very low vibratory frequency that feeds on pain, misery, drama, etc. It is unconsciousness and it feeds on unconsciousness. When you notice yourself in a reactive state, the pain-body is active and looking to be fed. Go into a place of allowing and observation, thereby supporting the raising of your vibratory state and the vibratory state of the pain-body. The pain-body consists of trapped life-energy that has split off from your total energy field and has temporarily become autonomous through the natural process of mind identification. Anything can trigger it, particularly if it resonates with a pattern from your past.

Tolle writes on page 30 - 33, that the pain-body is the dark shadow cast by the ego, it is actually afraid of the light of your consciousness. It is afraid of being found out. Its survival depends on your unconscious identification with it, as well as on your unconscious fear of facing the pain that lives in you. But if you don’t face it, if you don’t bring the light of your consciousness into the pain, you will be forced to live it again and again. The pain-body may seem like a dangerous monster that you cannot bear to look at, but I assure you that it is an insubstantial phantom that cannot prevail against the power of your presence.

The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, `become you’ and live through you. It needs to get its `food’ through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence and even disease. So that the pain-body, when it takes you over, will create a situation in your life that creates its own energy frequency to feed on. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy. It finds it quite indigestible.

When you start to misidentify and become the watcher, the pain-body will try to trick you into identifying with it again. Although you are no longer energizing it through your identification, it has a certain momentum, just like a spinning wheel it will keep turning for a while, even though it is not being propelled. When you are present enough, it cannot control your thinking.

When a dark mood comes over you and you start getting into a negative mind-pattern, your thinking has become aligned with the pain-body and you have become unconscious (to be identified with some mental or emotional pattern) and vulnerable to the pain-body’s attack.

To summarize the process - focus attention on the feeling inside you. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that it is there. Don’t think about it - don’t let the feeling turn into thinking. Don’t judge or analyze. Don’t make an identity for yourself out of it. Stay present and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside of you. Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of ‘the one who observes’ what is happening inside of you. Become aware of not only the emotional pain but also of `the one’ who observes, the silent watcher. This is the power of the Now, the power of your own conscious presence.

On page 140 Tolle writes that - as a general rule, the major obstacle for men tends to be the thinking mind and the obstacle for women is the pain-body, although in certain individual cases, the opposite may be true and in others the two factors may be equal.

THE PAIN-BODY EXPLAINED IN OTHER WORDS

The following is from a Tolle/Winfrey webcast.

Thinking is a form of energy that happens to you all the time. Some thinking happens to you, like breathing, digestion, circulation, that the greatest part of most people’s thinking is involuntary, automatic, and repetitive. It is no more than a kind of mental static and fulfills no real purpose, but some thinking involves the human mind that seems to be hooked on my, me and my story.

This constant mind chatter keeps the negative emotions alive and personalizes everything and you become identified with that voice in your head, with its repetitive thought patterns and that is what most people are trapped in. It makes up their superficial personality with all their, the continuous repetitive judgment, and likes, and dislikes and prejudices and whatever makes up the content of their egoic mind. So people are trapped in that and derive a sense of self from that, which is ultimately insubstantial, conditioned by the past and not who they are with its repetitive thought patterns. And that is what most people are trapped in.this addiction to these negative thoughts in our head, which is at the root of humanity’s problems.

When you become aware of this you start the awakening and realize that there is a voice in the head that doesn’t stop speaking. When you realize, “Oh there’s…” and then you begin to realize what kinds of things the voice is saying: repetitive judgments and so on, negative thoughts about yourself, about other people, about situations you are in. Especially all these repetitive negative thoughts that many people are trapped with. You become aware of that. The power to stop the pain-body comes in with your awareness that there is a voice.

Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from the present moment. Many people are so attached to the past that they carry a burden, like carrying a huge sack on your back, a burden. You’re identified with that. And they believe that they’re unable to be present because the past prevents them from being present. But it can’t do that. You can step out of the stream of thinking. Take your attention into present, and immediately the past no longer has that power over you.

The core of all this is the pain-body. Any negative emotion that is not fully faced and seen for what it is in the moment it arises does not completely dissolve. The energy field of old but still very much alive emotion that lives in almost every human being is the pain-body.

So first realization is that there is something in me that seeks unhappiness, that seeks unpleasant experiences, that seeks more negativity because it feeds on those things. And if you can recognize that as it arises, then you’re no longer totally at the mercy of it.

Those things, negative thoughts, will feed to the pain-body. That is one of the favorite ways pain-body to feed is on your own thinking. So this is very important for people to realize, to observe within themselves that periodically in many people, an addiction to negativity arises.

The pain-body is the emotional aspect of the ego. So, really, pain-body is part of the ego, and it’s a very unhappy entity. But because its very existence consists of this unhappy vibration, it does not want an end to its unhappiness because an end to its unhappiness is the end to the pain-body.

Because pain-bodies are very cunning, very clever they know exactly what will make you unconscious and what will make you react. It’s a creature that’s like an alien force inside of us.

Although the body is very intelligent, it cannot tell the difference between an actual situation and a thought. It reacts to every thought as if it were a reality. It doesn’t know it’s just a thought. To the body, a worrisome, fearful thought means ‘I’m in danger,’ and it responds accordingly. There is a buildup of energy, but since the danger is only a mental fiction, the energy has no outlet. The rest of the energy turns toxic, interferes with the harmonious functioning of the body, and that is what makes people sick.

So it’s very important to clear up your mind so that you stop the continuous negativity of the egoic self-talk, as we call it. So recognize it, and then step out of that stream of thinking into the present moment, take one or two conscious breaths. You’ve stepped out of the stream of thinking. Or feel the inner body, feel the aliveness in your arms, your hands, your legs. Put your attention there.

You have stepped out of the stream of thinking. Or look at something and bring your full consciousness to the act of perception. For example, a tree or a flower, anything natural is best. Look at anything natural. Give it your full attention that takes you out of the stream of thinking. Or any natural sound, a bird, the wind.

THE POWER OF THE NOW MOMENT

After the mind is ready to relax and be in conscious no thought, you can rise above thought and be in the moment where the constant thinking stops. To the ego, only the past and future matter, it is always trying to keep the past alive and projects itself into the future as it expects fulfillment there. When you think of a present feeling, by definition the present becomes the past. The solution is to be in the moment of conscious no thought. Be in your breathe. Even the present is seen as a means to an end, an end that lies in the mind projected future. The present no thought moment holds the key to liberation.

ACCESSING THE POWER OF NOW

As Tolle writes in Practicing the Power of Now, you can do this to access the power of Now. Follow the breath with your attention as it moves in and out of your body. Breathe into your body and feel your abdomen expanding and contracting slightly with each inhalation and exhalation.

If you find it easy to visualize, close your eyes and see yourself surrounded by light, or immersed in a luminous substance - a sea of consciousness. Then breathe in that light. Feel that luminous substance filling up your body and making it luminous also.

HOW TO DISSOLVE NEGATIVE THINKING

I (Tolle) was writing The Power of Now, and writing about accumulated emotions. And then I was taking a break and went into the park and sat on a bench by a pond, and I saw two ducks approaching on the pond, and suddenly, maybe one duck or, one duck got close, too close to the other. Suddenly they started getting into a fight. It lasted for about 30 seconds, and then they both separated, swam off in opposite directions. They were still agitated, both of them, and then both ducks kind of lifted themselves up on the water and vigorously flapped their wings a few times. They almost stood up on the water, and moving on. And then suddenly they were totally peaceful again and swam off.

The example of the ducks is right on as negative energy takes it’s toll when stored. We humans can release unwanted negative energy by letting it go and not dwell on it.

HOW TO DISSOLVE THE PAIN-BODY

You can achieve the conscious no thought state of mind by BEING AWARE OF THE GAP BETWEEN TWO THOUGHTS AND FOCUSING YOUR AWARENESS WITH IT This will enter you into the Now.

RELEASING BY BREATHING

This was written by Tolle. As for your past events and memories, don’t try to block them out. When they come to your attention, notice them and give them acknowledgement, then breathe them out. They will keep coming back, in harder and harder forms, until you acknowledge them. To get caught up in them - to get caught up in the drama of them again - will replant them further and further within. Notice the memory, any emotions or bodily responses, then breathe them out. Breathing puts you in the present and allows you to release - to clean, clear, organize and reorganize. Breathe.

Go into your breath when you notice any symptom. Whatever the situation, whatever the symptom, whenever we hang onto what we think it’s about, we limit it from being all that it is about. Perhaps the `negative’ thought has been a symptom. Let it go…like putting it in a balloon and letting it go up, up and away… release it, not through your thoughts but through a letting it go on it’s own journey. Breathe, with no thought…with a quiet mind, a peaceful mind, and an open heart. No thought. What we think we know…thinking we know what it’s about keeps it in a box…let it out of the box and allow it to be whatever it is… and it most often is way beyond our awareness. Breathe.

…… on a personal level by focusing on your breathing it is the start of a process …… this means that many thoughts are reduced to one …… this thought with practice becomes an awareness …… which when you are ready, becomes a feeling or emotion …… this feeling lasts for seconds, which with practice becomes minutes and so on and time disappears……

When you breathe, the breath enters through your feet, like a straw sucking from the unending sea of consciousness and moves up through the legs, chest and body, down through the arms and hands and back up the arms to the head. Notice the breath inside your physical and inner bodies.

The exhale breathe leaves through your feet. This is your spiritual body feeling our breath.
You may decide to visualize the in-breath as white and the out-breath a black. Do what is natural.

THE STOMACH AS A TRUE INDICATOR

Notice that your stomach is a true indicator of your bodies feelings. It talks to you of how it feels and therefore, how you feel. If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection. The thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth, the relative truth of your state of Mind, at that time. The stomach is a gauge for your breathing and releasing your troublesome thoughts. You may start off by taking a few minutes to release/breathe every hour, or when a thought enters your mind. It’s up to you in your choice.

When the mind connects with the body, emotion is created. When we don’t connect with those emotions, they appear in physical form as a dis-ease. With a connection, emotions come either from love or fear. Fear based emotions can overtake us if allowed and appear as the pain-body, as noted above. When you bring the light of your consciousness into the pain, it cannot survive the awareness. It has taught you by it’s presence and is sent back to the universe. By cradling this fear as you would a baby, you give love to your fear. P`taah.

Spirit wants to get your attention, so that self awareness can lead to enlightenment. It starts with a whisper, leading to conversation loudness, then louder voices, then shouting and so it progressively goes to an life altering dis-ease, then to a life ending ill-ness. Ideally we react to the whisper, but we typically go through a lot of pain before we `get it` and acknowledge and act on the message.

MENTAL MOVIES

“A chief cause of unhappiness is what is called mental movies. Mental movies are a misuse of the imagination. You know how it goes. You have a painful experience with someone, then run it over and over in your mind. You visualize what you said, what he did, how you both felt. As awful as it is, you feel compelled to repeat the film day and night. It is as if you were locked inside a theater playing a horror movie.

To break out be aware that you ARE running a mental movie. Be conscious of its mechanical hold on your mind. Then, by deliberate choice, break it off. Shake your head and break it off. Now, at this instant, take a quick look. Where is your pain? It is not there. It has disappeared. You have now accomplished something great. You have proved that you CAN snap the film and its tyrannical pain. You are free and you are free RIGHT NOW.

Try the above method for yourself. Even though you succeed at first for just a split second, you have succeeded completely! Now realizing that small success is possible, you can advance to great success!”….VERNON HOWARD

TRANSFORMING ILLNESS INTO ENLIGHTENMENT

As Tolle writes on pg 183 - 4, illness is part of your life situation. As such it has a past and a future. As there are no problems in the Now, there is no illness either. The belief in a label that someone attaches to your condition, it keeps the condition in place, empowers it and makes it a seemingly solid reality out of a temporary imbalance. It gives it not only reality and solidity, but also a continuity in time that it did not have before. By focusing on the instant and refraining from labeling it mentally, illness is reduced.

Illness is not the problem. You are the problem, as long as the egoic mind is in control. If you have a major illness, use it for enlightenment. Anything “bad” that happens in your life - use it for enlightenment. Withdraw time from the illness. Do not give it any past or future. Let it force you into intense present-moment awareness.

Then gradually focus more on the feeling. Don’t get attached to any visual image. You are now in your body. You have accessed the power of Now.

**Original Online Source: YourHealthOnline.com

…

_______________________________________________________________

About the “Seeker” of this Article

Chris Willitts is an entrepreneur, freelance web designer, and continuing student at the University of Michigan, where one of his primary focuses in academia is consciousness studies. He also teaches a 6-week meditation course that integrates positive psychology interventions called Illuminate Your Life With Purpose.

Chris founded Mindful Muscle - an online initiative that advocates mindfulness practices and believes these practices can revolutionize day-to-day living in modern societies, which can play a crucial role in elevating our collective consciousness, health, and human potentiality. For almost 10 years prior to Mindful Muscle, Chris was busy developing various other Internet ventures.

Be sure to check out Chris’s philosophy about meditation, mindful strength training and mindful living at www.mindfulmuscle.com

_______________________________________________________________

We all posses a widely unknown powerful energy called Kundalini which sits at the base of our spine.

In the classic Hatha yoga and Tantra traditions, each person is believed to possess a great reservoir of dormant feminine energy. This raw creative energy lies tightly coiled at the base of the spine. It is often associated with the serpent. Kundalini energy is part of the life force, so there is always a minute amount flowing through your subtle body. Only when properly understood and awakened can it express its full potential, rising through you and energizing your senses. It is possible to awaken your Kundalini through different forms of meditation or yoga, though the process should be undertaken slowly. A hasty opening of the Kundalini center can cause headaches and other physical symptoms. Raised properly, Kundalini energy has the potential to spring forth as active kinetic energy that may result in altered states of consciousness.

Once you have tapped into your Kundalini, what you experience will be unique. Some people experience the rising of the Kundalini upward through the chakras as spreading warmth and a feeling of extreme well being. Others find they have more energy and libido and are consistently happier. If you awaken your Kundalini, you may find yourself getting sick less often.  You may be thinking about raising your Kundalini on your own. One way to do this is to draw the Kundalini up through the Shushumna, the passageway that travels through the center of your body toward the head, by visualizing the energy as a serpent traveling upward. But only bring it up a little at a time and use caution. If you experience headaches or a burning sensation, you may be going to fast and should consult a teacher.

Though awakening the Kundalini can be a difficult experience, it can also be a rewarding and exciting one. As the raw energy of the Kundalini is transformed into a potent storehouse of refined energy waiting to be utilized, you will be tapping into a rich source of creativity and awareness.

**To read more articles like this, please visit the DailyOM by clicking here

…

_______________________________________________________________

About the “Seeker” of this Article

Chris Willitts is an entrepreneur, freelance web designer, and continuing student at the University of Michigan, where one of his primary focuses in academia is consciousness studies. He also teaches a 6-week meditation course that integrates positive psychology interventions called Illuminate Your Life With Purpose.

Chris founded Mindful Muscle - an online initiative that advocates mindfulness practices and believes these practices can revolutionize day-to-day living in modern societies, which can play a crucial role in elevating our collective consciousness, health, and human potentiality. For almost 10 years prior to Mindful Muscle, Chris was busy developing various other Internet ventures.

Be sure to check out Chris’s philosophy about meditation, mindful strength training and mindful living at www.mindfulmuscle.com

_______________________________________________________________

(Causes for addiction and how mindfulness meditation can help with them.)

One of the first steps in dealing with addiction is to discover the emotional cause of it, whether it is fear, depression, anxiety, or pessimism.  Many times these unwholesome thoughts and beliefs come from what I call the “wanting mind.”  In wanting mind, we feel that our current state of unhappiness could be cured if only we could have the money, job, relationship, recognition, or power we had and lost, or never had and strongly desire.  Often we cause ourselves suffering when we ache for something that lies out of our grasp or cling in vain to something that has already passed away. Sometimes, wanting mind involves tightly holding on to something negative: an unwholesome belief about how things ought to be or should have been, or an unwholesome emotion such as anger, sadness, or jealousy. Mindfulness practice helps us develop the capacity to see clearly exactly what we’re attached to so that we can let go of it and end our suffering. The hidden areas of resistance that emerge into our awareness can be noted and examined later so that we can make the conscious choice to reject them.

You can never completely avoid the wanting mind or any other hindrance. Desire is part of being human. It causes us to strive toward bettering our lives and our world, and has led to many of the discoveries and inventions that have provided us with a higher quality of life. Yet despite all that we can achieve and possess, we can become convinced that we won’t be happy or contented unless we acquire even more. This unwholesome belief can lead to competitiveness and feeling resentful toward, or envious of, those who seem to have an easier life.

If I have a patient who is using drugs or even food to manipulate their moods I first refer them to a nutritionist; a psychiatrist or psychopharmacologist; or a holistic doctor, such as an integrative medical doctor, to break this habit.  In addition to this I recommend mindfulness meditation, yoga practice, and regular exercise as they are all excellent to help mood regulation. These types of activities lower the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in your bloodstream, increase your interleukin levels (enhancing your immune system and providing you with greater energy), and streamline your body’s ability to cleanse itself of chemical toxins, such as lactic acid in your muscles and bloodstream, which can affect neurotransmitter receptors and alter your mood (Chopra 1994; Rossi 1993). 
 The challenge to altering addictions is the fear that you can’t change which can push you into denial and cause you to minimize the consequences of your unproductive behaviors. Whatever you discover about yourself and however painful your discovery, dramatic breakthroughs are always possible. Research on mindfulness meditation indicates that qualities we once thought immutable that form temperament and character can actually be altered significantly. By retraining your mind through mindfulness practice, you create new neural networks. If you’re aggressive, you can find ways to temper that aspect of yourself, becoming assertive and clear about your boundaries without entering into a competitive and possibly even hostile mind-set that will sabotage you.

For many years, scientists believed that the brain’s plasticity, that is, its ability to create new structures and learn, was limited after childhood. However, new research shows that we can alter the structure of the brain and reap the benefits well into adulthood. Sara Lazar, a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, discovered that the more one practices mindfulness meditation, the thicker the brain becomes in the mid-prefrontal cortex and in the mid-insular region of the brain. Changing your mind (or thought processes) actually causes changes in the brain (Lazar et al. 2005). Lazar found that, while people who’ve practiced meditation for ten or twenty years are adept at quickly achieving a state of concentration and mindful awareness, newcomers who engage in mindfulness meditation as little as four hours a week can achieve and sustain a state of mindfulness that leads to creative flow, or what I call “open-mind consciousness.” She discovered that even beginning meditators in their early twenties were able to achieve advanced states of concentration and insight (what I refer to as “mindstrength”) equal to that of senior meditation practitioners. Intention and attention of focus were the keys to reaching these states, not the number of hours spent on a meditation cushion (Lazar and Siegel 2007). From my own experience and work, I know that regular mindfulness practice allows us to set aside distractions and enter the transformative state of open mind.

Mindfulness practice may positively affect the amount of activity in the amygdala, the walnut-sized area in the center of the brain responsible for regulating emotions (Davidson 2000). When the amygdala is relaxed, the parasympathetic nervous system engages to counteract the anxiety response. The heart rate lowers, breathing deepens and slows, and the body stops releasing cortisol and adrenaline into the bloodstream; these stress hormones provide us with quick energy in times of danger but have damaging effects on the body in the long term if they’re too prevalent. Over time, mindfulness meditation actually thickens the bilateral, prefrontal right-insular region of the brain (Lazar et al. 2005), the area responsible for optimism and a sense of well-being, spaciousness, and possibility. This area is also associated with creativity and an increased sense of curiosity, as well as the ability to be reflective and observe how your mind works.

By building new neural connections among brain cells, we rewire the brain, and with each new neural connection, the brain is actually learning. It’s as if we’re adding more RAM to a computer, giving it more functionality. In The Mindful Brain, leading neuroscientist Daniel Siegel (2007, 5), defines the mind as “a process that regulates the flow of energy and information.” His early brain research showed that “where neurons fire, they can rewire” (2007, 291); that is, they create new neural pathways or structures in the brain. He postulates that one of the benefits of mindfulness meditation practice is this process of creating new neural networks for self-observation, optimism, and well-being. Through mindfulness meditation, we light up and build up the left-prefrontal cortex, associated with optimism, self-observation, and compassion, allowing ourselves to cease being dominated by the right-prefrontal cortex, which is associated with fear, depression, anxiety, and pessimism. As a result, our self-awareness and mood stability increase as our harsh judgments of others and ourselves decrease. By devoting attention, intention, and daily effort to being mindful, we learn to master the mind and open the doorway to the creativity available in open-mind consciousness.

It’s entirely possible that the same effects can be achieved through other practices that appear to open up new neural pathways, such as tai chi, yoga, and other forms of meditation, but thanks to researchers studying mindfulness meditation, we now know that we can actually remap the brain and affect the way it functions, as well as the way it influences the body.

…

_______________________________________________________________

About Author

Ronald Alexander, Ph.D. is the author of the widely acclaimed book, Wise Mind, Open Mind: Finding Purpose and Meaning in Times of Crisis, Loss, and Change. He is the Executive Director of the OpenMind Training® Institute, practices mindfulness-based mind-body psychotherapy and leadership coaching in Santa Monica, CA, for individuals and corporate clients. He has taught personal and clinical training groups for professionals in Integral Psychotherapy, Ericksonian mind-body healing therapies, mindfulness meditation, and Buddhist psychology nationally and internationally since 1970. (www.openmindtraining.com)

_______________________________________________________________

(On the eve of the release of his new book, the French monk Matthieu Ricard spoke with Tricycle about science, meditation, and his title as “the happiest man in the world.”)

Before you were a monk, you were a scientist in cell genetics. How does science inform your perspective on meditation? The basis of science is a rigorous, empirical, and pragmatic approach to everything. A suitable theory has to include the possibility that it can be proven or disproved by fact. A theory that has a ready-made explanation for anything that could happen (like the theory of universal selfishness or psychoanalysis, to give just two examples) is not scientific. A theory should not be just an intellectual construct, but it has to be in tune with reality.

One of the main pursuits of Buddhism is to bridge the gap between the way things appear and the way things are. That approach does not come just from a curiosity to investigate phenomena. It arises from the understanding that an incorrect perception of reality inevitably leads to suffering. Grasping to solid reality and to the notion of an independent self in particular engenders a host of afflictive mental states and afflictive emotions that are the primary cause of mind-made sufferings.

Thus Buddhist science is not just an intellectual pursuit for the sake of unraveling the mystery of nature, but it also has a therapeutic aspect that gets to the very basic cause of suffering. In this context, a rigorous pursuit of science is not to hold a blind belief in anything but to honestly and eagerly pursue the investigation of the mechanism of happiness and suffering.

Are there things that science can’t measure? Science is an authentic, valid means of knowledge. Science is not only about what you can measure; it is also about investigating the relative and ultimate nature of things. A valid means of investigation can be applied to the nature of mind. Provided these means are logical, rigorous, and can be tested experimentally, they do not absolutely require physical measurements. If, for instance, you evaluate the consequences of destructive emotions on your state of mind, you can investigate this thoroughly and repeatedly over time and draw conclusions about the states of mind that need to be phased out and those that need to be cultivated, without necessarily having to “measure” anything physical.

If scientists could manipulate brain chemistry to make somebody happier, would this be beneficial? Well, the problem with all that is the definition of happiness. I think there is a lack of clarity about what we mean by genuine happiness. People are often eager to generate pleasant feelings. Thinking that happiness is just an endless succession of pleasant experiences seems more like a recipe for exhaustion than it is for happiness. Happiness is a way of being, not a sensation. If you are only looking for pleasure, then you need to know that there’s probably no way that the brain could sustain pleasurable sensations forever.

By activating some areas of the brain, you could possibly generate a sensation of intense pleasure for a while, but that’s not going to last forever. That’s definitely not happiness. It is just a temporary gimmick. Genuine happiness is a state related to wisdom, to being attuned to reality, and to freedom from mental toxins (hatred, craving, and the like). Pleasure by itself has no reason to engender freedom from ignorance, dualistic clinging, and distortion of reality (true causes of suffering). There is nothing wrong with pleasure in itself, but it does not have much to do with happiness.

Recently you’ve been involved with the Mind & Life institute—which studies the relationship between Buddhist science and contemporary sciences. Could you tell us a little bit about the work you’ve done there? I knew Francisco Varela, the cofounder of the Mind & Life Institute, for 30 years or so. He came to visit my teacher Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, in France and in Nepal. Although I was close to him as a friend, I didn’t know much about Mind & Life at that time. Then in 2000 he asked me to participate in the Institute’s conference about destructive emotions with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. That was really a wonderful meeting. Many great scientific luminaries were there, such as Paul Ekman and Richard Davidson. It was then that the idea of doing more serious research was broached. When His Holiness asked: “What can we contribute to society?” the scientists told him, “If we do serious research about meditation, that could be a wonderful contribution.”

If people took mind training and meditation more seriously, it would be a good service to humanity. People would start to care for a healthy mind as much as they try to care to have a healthy body. Since I was an “apprentice” scientist even though I had not been very active in that field for 30 years, I volunteered to participate. I went to Francisco’s lab in Paris and later to Richard Davidson’s lab in Madison and Paul Ekman’s lab in San Francisco. Together we tried to devise suitable experimental protocols to study meditation. For that we needed to consider for instance, how long does it takes to get into a meditative state? How long do you need to sustain it to see some detectable effect?

All these factors have to be examined with the practitioners themselves. I offered myself as a guinea pig, and after seeing that the first results were very encouraging I asked several experienced meditators, monks, and lay practitioners—men and women—in the East and in the West to participate. They became the first group of long-term meditators who had practiced between 20 and 50,000 hours of meditation.

The Mind & Life Institute has spearheaded groundbreaking research, especially in the new field of contemplative neurosciences and psychology. It is now becoming active in Europe too, for instance at the lab of Tania Singer, who is working on empathy and compassion. All this research and the results published in scientific journals show that we should take mind training seriously. I think that’s a great service to humanity.

This research also has a powerful catalytic effect. Sometimes a tipping point occurs and that’s how culture evolves. In terms of evolution toward a more altruistic society, if you have to wait for genes to change, it may take 50,000 years. So now, fortunately, even in terms of purely evolutionary terms, the evolution of culture is something that works faster than the evolution of genes and is just as powerful. It still follows Darwinian ways, but it considers the evolution of different cultures—a selfish culture and an altruistic culture, for instance—competing with each other. Hopefully the altruistic culture may have a chance to become the one that we need for survival!

That brings us to your new book Why Meditate? How does publishing a book like this fit into your vision of an altruistic society? Why meditate? Sometimes I wonder why we need to ask this question. Nobody who admires a talented artist, or pianist and would like to become one would say, “Why should I train? Why don’t I just go on stage and play Mozart?” However, when it comes to the basic human qualities that we might admire and hope to acquire—altruism, inner strength, inner freedom to deal with whatever comes our way, emotional balance, not being swayed by hatred and craving and jealousy— we think that they come up just because we want them to, without any training. Or we think that they are fixed, permanent, and that we can’t change them. It is absurd to think that we do not need training to nourish these kinds of positive qualities.

We have the potential to be more kind, to practice mindfulness, and to experience well-being, but we only use a small fraction of the potential we have. So that’s what meditation is about: to cultivate the qualities that we have the potential for but that remain dormant, latent, unused, and to develop them to the best of our own potential.

What do you hope to accomplish with Why Meditate? I wished to offer some basic information and simple methods to engage in the process of mind training. People often say, “You know, I would really like to meditate, but how should I do it?” I heard that from business people, passengers in trains, people I meet everywhere.

So I tried to put together a very simple manual to explain what meditation is and why we should bother to meditate. I wanted to offer people a few exercises, a few tools that come from traditional sources, explaining them in simple language, without making it necessary to enter the Buddhist path itself. There are indeed Buddhist contemplative science findings that are universal and can be used by anyone. If something is true or false, it is so for everyone, Buddhist or not. Of course, most of this comes from the Buddhist path and part of the Buddhist path, but obviously not everyone wants to become a Buddhist. The Dalai Lama has been very clear about that. He often makes statements like “I don’t come here to make one or two more Buddhists.”

I have no idea what people will think of the book. In France it was well-received and I met people in the trains and on the street who said they had it in their pocket or had just read it. Many people who normally were not interested in meditation told me, “Well, we will try it.” In Europe, my book came out in October 2008, right at the beginning of the economic crisis. Many people told me, “Wow, bad timing for you! People will have other things to think about than meditation,” but it seems it was just the opposite. Surprisingly, the media was saying that people are turning now to inner values. If the book is useful to a few people, I’m glad. Besides that, I have no hopes or expectations.

How has your own meditation practice evolved over time? Well, that’s sort of my life, so what can I say? It is only through the great kindness of my teachers that I have tried the best I could to put their teachings into practice. As much as I can, I go to quiet places to practice. Over time, I did a few years of solitary retreat. In solitary retreat I feel that I am dealing with what really matters, and that gives me the strength to better engage with the world and be more at the service of others. If it wasn’t for the humanitarian activities that I am engaged in [now over forty medical and educational projects in the Himalayan region] I would have stopped traveling and I would have just stayed more quietly somewhere.

Some people think retreat is selfish, but if one of its main goals is to get rid of selfishness, it can’t be called selfish. You need to transform yourself to better serve others. We see too many instances, especially in the humanitarian world, where what brings everything to a halt is clashes of egos, corruption…., all of which come from a lack of human qualities. To try earnestly to develop positive qualities through meditation is the best activity you can do for yourself; it is also the best you can do for others.

People have called you the “happiest man in the world.” What does happiness mean? The happiest man in the world? This is really a joke. Of course it is better than being called the unhappiest person in the world, but this title is based on nothing more than the catchy title of a newspaper article, not on any scientific findings.

In modern Western societies, happiness is often equated with the maximization of pleasure, and some people imagine that real happiness would consist of an interrupted succession of pleasurable experiences. This is far from what the Buddhist notion of sukha means. Sukha refers to an optimal way of being, an exceptionally healthy state of mind that underlies and suffuses all emotional states, that embraces all the joys and sorrows that come our way. It is also a state of wisdom purged of mental poisons, an insight free from blindness to the true nature of reality.

Authentic happiness can only come from the long-term cultivation of wisdom, altruism, and compassion, and from the complete eradication of mental toxins such as hatred, grasping, and ignorance.

A Vast and Calm Mind
In order to recognize the fundamental nature of the mind, we have to remove the veils created by automatic thought patterns. How do we do that? Suppose you are trying to retrieve a key that has fallen into a pond. If you poke about on the bottom with a stick, you’ll completely muddy the water and won’t have the slightest chance of spotting the key. The first thing you have to do is let the water settle until it becomes clear. After that, it will be easy to see the key and pick it up. We must work with our mind in the same way. We have to begin by making it clear, calm, and attentive. After that, we can use this new skill to cultivate other qualities, such as altruistic love and compassion, as well as to develop a deeper insight into the nature of mind.

Most of the time our mind is unstable, disorderly, and driven by whims as it bounces back and forth between hope and fear. It is self-centered, hesitant, fragmented, confused, and sometimes even absent, as well as weakened by internal contradictions and a feeling of insecurity. It rebels against any kind of training and is constantly occupied by a stream of inner chatter that generates a constant background noise we are barely aware of. Because these dysfunctional states are nothing but products of the mind itself, it makes sense that the mind can also remedy them.

So the idea is to gradually progress from a state of mind where unfavorable conditions prevail, to another state that is characterized by stable attention, inner peace and clarity, confidence, courage, openness toward others, benevolence, the ability to deal with emotions, and other qualities of a vast and calm mind.

**To read the rest of this article in its entirety @ Tricycle please click here

…

_______________________________________________________________

About the “Seeker” of this Article

Chris Willitts is an entrepreneur, freelance web designer, and continuing student at the University of Michigan, where one of his primary focuses in academia is consciousness studies. He also teaches a 6-week meditation course that integrates positive psychology interventions called Illuminate Your Life With Purpose.

Chris founded Mindful Muscle - an online initiative that advocates mindfulness practices and believes these practices can revolutionize day-to-day living in modern societies, which can play a crucial role in elevating our collective consciousness, health, and human potentiality. For almost 10 years prior to Mindful Muscle, Chris was busy developing various other Internet ventures.

Be sure to check out Chris’s philosophy about meditation, mindful strength training and mindful living at www.mindfulmuscle.com

_______________________________________________________________

Is “experience” or history a better path to understanding Zen?

I think it depends on your definition of what Zen is. Is it an experience? Or is it a doctrine/philosophy? Or… is it both? I believe it’s both to lesser and greater degrees, and because this implies that there are two fundamentally opposed approaches to understanding Zen (i.e. objective and subjective), there will naturally be conflict amongst their respective experts. In this essay I will tease out what Zen is and discuss the consequences if we use only one approach to understanding Zen. I will also make the case that if you had to choose only one approach, why experiencing/practicing Zen trumps the research method using academic discipline. I will conclude by making the case that there is a place for a “Middle Path” approach, which is the optimal approach.

Let’s look at the history of the word itself.

The word “Zen” is Japanese for a style of Buddhism that came to fruition in China. When Buddhism arrived in China, the Chinese had to find a way to talk about these new ideas for which there were no Chinese words, so they imported the words along with the ideas. As the story goes, in the 5th century, an Indian monk named Bodhidharma came to China. Bodhidharma stressed meditation so much that he supposedly cut off his eyelids to keep from falling asleep when meditating. His style of Buddhism came to be known as the Meditation School, or “Chan” for short. Many Chinese intellectuals, poets, and artists were attracted to Chan’s simplicity and spontaneity, perhaps because it reminded them of their own Taoist tradition. Chan became a great influence in Chinese culture. Since China was the dominant nation of the day, many of its neighbors borrowed and learned from it. Many Japanese went to study in China, and eventually, Chan Buddhism was brought to Japan by a monk named Eisai in the 13th century. The Japanese, who had already imported Chinese characters into their own language, learned the character for “Chan” and pronounced it “Zen.” Zen became very influential in Japan, perhaps even more influential than it had been in China. In fact, it became so well-known that many people in the West think of it as a Japanese concept. Just as the Japanese borrowed the word from the Chinese, who borrowed it from the Indians, we have borrowed it from the Japanese, and now Zen is an English word. That is the meaning of the word “Zen.” As for the concept that this word is trying to convey, let’s turn to Mr. Suzuki and Mr. Shih. According to Dr. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki and his disciples, “Zen is illogical, irrational, and, therefore, beyond our intellectual understanding.” Hu Shih takes offense to this claim and believes that Ch’an (Zen) “can only be understood only in its historical setting.” If Zen is an experience, then Suzuki is closer to the truth. If Zen is a philosophy and a doctrine, then Hu Shih would seemingly be correct.

So what is Zen? Is it an experience? Or is it a doctrine?

Zen is the transmission of the Buddha’s enlightenment itself, and is transmitted outside of words, direct from the mind of the teacher to the mind of the student. This means that Zen is ultimately an experience. However, there’s more to the story…

Zen is an experience, that is invoked and cultivated by the daily practice of Zazen (seated-meditation), which is directed, in part, by doctrine.

Overtime, Zazen produces self-mastery with regard to composure and tranquility of mind, but these are by-products of Zazen rather than its goals. The goal is the experience of enlightenment. This means that Suzuki is correct in his claim that the experience of Zen itself, especially enlightenment, is beyond our intellectual understanding. However, I think much can be gained by looking at the historical context of Zen and in what ways the doctrine drives the practice of Zazen, which is critical for the occurrence of the experience of Zen in the first place. What are the consequences if we use only one approach to understanding Zen? Generally speaking, we are at risk of rigid and egotistic thinking. Suzuki and Hu Shih are great examples of people who represent this kind of thinking. They rigidly hold on to the perceived superiority of their respective approaches in the name of human ego. To claim that you KNOW something is an especially limiting way of being in this world. This is the number one consequence of adopting one approach (either experience or academic), and could hold you back from discovering new “truths.” To say that you have an understanding of Zen and that you are open to new ways of thinking about Zen allows for the opportunity of deeper comprehension and appreciation. One problem that may arise from an academic only approach would be insensitive conclusions made about Zen as a result of the reductionistic nature of the scientific method. Reducing Zen to names, places, and dates could easily miss the qualitative aspects of Zen—its “soul” if you will. It’s the qualitative aspects are what hold belief systems like Zen together. It’s what keeps practitioners coming back for more. Additionally, there is an animate connection/bond that comes to life when a group of people experience the same kind of experience as one another. The only genuine way to gain access to understanding this connection is to experience it for yourself. On the other hand, if you’re a practitioner of Zen and choose to neglect the historical aspects you may be subject to any shortcomings or misleadings that your particular sect/temple expresses. You also may miss out on the cultural richness of what Zen has to offer.

As it has been explained in this essay, there are two distinctly different ways to “know” about Zen. I’m going to argue that the kind of knowing that gives someone the most direct and deepest form of understanding is kind that is only gained by experience. The practitioner knows what it’s like to have the experience of practicing Zen, whereas the academic knows about the practitioner who has the actual experience. It’s not the same thing. Observing a thing is not experiencing it. Hi Shuh’s takes this a step further and claims that the experience of Zen is beyond intellectual inference, I tend to agree:

If we are to judge Zen from our common-sense view of things, we shall find the ground sinking away under our feet. Our so-called rationalistic way of thinking has apparently no use in evaluating the truth or untruth of Zen. It is altogether beyond the ken of human understanding. All that we can therefore state about Zen is that its uniqueness lies in its irrationality or its passing beyond our logical comprehension.

The primary goal of Zen is to attain enlightenment.

It is not to write a dissertation on how Zen spread throughout the East and arrived in the United States, or to understand it from any other academic standpoint. Can someone attain enlightenment and achieve the ultimate goal/experience of Zen without pursuing the religion from an academic approach. Yes, they can. Can someone attain enlightenment (according to Zen doctrine) without having the “Zen” experience? No, they can not. Even though academic study of Zen may deepen a practitioner’s understanding of the religion from a historical and cultural standpoint, it is not a necessity to have the unique experience of enlightenment that Zen reaches for. Practitioners simply don’t have to be concerned with the academic discipline. Academics on the other hand have things laid out in the opposite direction. They don’t have to experience Zen or attain enlightenment to write their academic papers and acquire their academic degrees. Why? Because they have a different objective than the practitioner. In fact, in academic inquiry there is little room for subjective expressions of knowledge and so there is little to no incentive for the academic to experience Zen for themselves other than to observe the religion, even if participating, from an objective distance. For instance, this very paper that I’m writing had instructions to not include any personal thoughts, experiences, opinions, etc. because it’s an “academic” paper. That’s too bad because I have some interesting experiences to share regarding my own meditation practice that would be relevant to the subject of Zen practice. I would argue that I know much more about meditation, which is the focal point of Zen practice, than the academic who reads about other’s experience with meditation. The experiential form of understanding (i.e. experience) gains access to a direct knowing about something that is intimate, practical, and most advantageous. If you wanted to sail across the world would you prefer to go with someone who has experienced this kind of voyage several times, or a UM grad who has a degree in sailing with no actual experience? This to me illustrates why experiencing Zen trumps learning about it in class.

I have to admit that when read the intro on page 3 of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism in China Its History and Method, it gave me the impression that the academic and the practitioner have such fundamentally opposed approaches to the study of Zen that there was no place for the reconciliation of the two. The view points of Suzuki and Hu Shih are rigid and inflexible, and I don’t believe understanding Zen is a black and white matter. I prefer a more nuanced “Middle Path” approach. Academic knowledge and experiential knowledge are two sides of the same coin. They are just two different methods/variations of knowing about something. Both are correct. You gain the most when you integrate both approaches. The academic perception gets a good look at beginnings, the evolution, and multiple expressions of Zen. The practitioner wouldn’t have access to this kind of information and knowing, by meditation, ritual, and doctrine alone. Academic study of a religion in a specific place and time is a good reflection of what that society was going through at that time. This may not affect your practice specifically, but it may deepen your understanding of Zen from a cultural standpoint. Also, in an age where it is more acceptable to question you faith and its historical motivations and traditions, academic research can provide invaluable perspective. For the academic, experiencing Zen for yourself allows you know about the qualitative aspects of Zen. It allows you enter a realm of experience that has been celebrated for thousands of years. You get a glimpse of the soul of Zen, which cannot be put in words.

In this essay I discussed two fundamentally opposed approaches to understanding Zen (i.e. objective and subjective), and teased out what Zen is. There are obvious consequences if we use only one approach to understanding Zen and I made and argument that if you had to choose only one approach, why experiencing/practicing Zen trumps the research method using academic discipline. My conclusion calls for a “Middle Path” approach, which integrates the two approaches and provides the deepest understanding of what Zen is.

Works Cited

As you can see, I didn’t follow any formal format of citation, but for what it’s worth, my essay used the following sources:

1. Class notes (Zen Buddhism @ The University of Michigan, December 2010)
2. Hu Shih and D.T. Suzuki debate (debate on Ch’an and Zen Buddhism in Philosophy East and West, vol. 3, p. 3 an p. 25, April 1953)
3. Sharf’s article of Zen and Japanese Nationalism (Robert H. Sharf History of Religions, Vol. 33, No. 1., Aug., 1993)

…

_______________________________________________________________

About Author

Chris Willitts is an entrepreneur, freelance web designer, and continuing student at the University of Michigan, where one of his primary focuses in academia is consciousness studies. He also teaches a 6-week meditation course that integrates positive psychology interventions called Illuminate Your Life With Purpose.

Chris founded Mindful Muscle - an online initiative that advocates mindfulness practices and believes these practices can revolutionize day-to-day living in modern societies, which can play a crucial role in elevating our collective consciousness, health, and human potentiality. For almost 10 years prior to Mindful Muscle, Chris was busy developing various other Internet ventures.

Be sure to check out Chris’s philosophy about meditation, mindful strength training and mindful living at www.mindfulmuscle.com

_______________________________________________________________

When the child is born, the community gathers and sings the child’s song. When the child passes through the initiation into adulthood, the people again come together and sing. At the time of marriage, the person hears his or her song. Finally, when the soul is about to pass from this world, the family and friends gather at the person’s bed, just as they did at their birth, and sing the person to their next life.

In the African tribe there is one other occasion upon which the villagers sing to the child. If at any time during his or her life, the person commits a crime or aberrant social act, the individual is called to the center of the village and the people in the community form a circle around them. Then they sing their song to them. The tribe recognizes that the correction for antisocial behavior is not punishment;

it is love and the remembrance of identity.

When you recognize your own song, you have no desire or need to do anything that would hurt another.

A friend is someone who knows your song and sings it to you when you have forgotten it. Those who love you are not fooled by mistakes you have made or dark images you hold about yourself.

They remember your beauty when you feel ugly; you wholeness when you are broken; your innocence when you feel guilty; and your purpose when you are confused. If you do not give your song a voice, you will feel lost, alone, and confused. If you express it, you will come to life.

Credit: Alan Cohen (author)

…

_______________________________________________________________

About the “Seeker” of this Article

Chris Willitts is an entrepreneur, freelance web designer, and continuing student at the University of Michigan, where one of his primary focuses in academia is consciousness studies. He also teaches a 6-week meditation course that integrates positive psychology interventions called Illuminate Your Life With Purpose.

Chris founded Mindful Muscle - an online initiative that advocates mindfulness practices and believes these practices can revolutionize day-to-day living in modern societies, which can play a crucial role in elevating our collective consciousness, health, and human potentiality. For almost 10 years prior to Mindful Muscle, Chris was busy developing various other Internet ventures.

Be sure to check out Chris’s philosophy about meditation, mindful strength training and mindful living at www.mindfulmuscle.com

_______________________________________________________________