What Is Vipassana?

According to Buddhist philosophy, the path to enlightenment combines three elements: 

• Sila, a strict moral code; 
• Samadhi, control over your impulses; 
• Panna, the understanding of impermanence. 

Vipassana is a practice that helps cultivate all three, helping you build experiential awareness of your mind and body.

- What 10 Days of Silence Taught Me About Self-Awareness

Learning From Toughest Buddhist Monks

Timeless wisdom via twitter thread  - I meditated 15 hours a day for 6 months straight with one of the toughest Buddhist monks on the planet. Here's what I learned:

1. Finding your true self is an act of love. Expressing it is an act of rebellion.

2. A sign of growth is having more tolerance for discomfort. But it’s also having less tolerance for bullshit.

3. Who you are is not your fault, but it is your responsibility.

4. Procrastination is the refusal or inability to be with difficult emotions.

5. Desires that arise in agitation are more aligned with your ego. Desires that arise in stillness are more aligned with your soul.

6. The moment before letting go is often when we grip the hardest.

7. You don’t find your ground by looking for stability. You find your ground by relaxing into instability.

8. What you hate most in others is usually what you hate most in yourself.

9. The biggest life hack is to become your own best friend. Everything is easier when you do.

10. The more comfortable you become in your own skin, the less you need to manufacture the world around you for comfort.

11. An interesting thing happens when you start to like yourself. You no longer need all the things you thought you needed to be happy.

12. If you don’t train your mind to appreciate what is good,  you’ll continue to look for something better in the future, even when things are great.

13. The belief that there is some future moment more worth our presence than the one we’re in right now is why we miss our lives.

14. There is no set of conditions that leads to lasting happiness. Lasting happiness doesn’t come from conditions; it comes from learning to flow with conditions.

15. Spend more time cultivating a mind that is not attached to material things than time spent accumulating them.

16. Sometimes we need to get out of alignment with the rest of the world to get back into alignment with ourselves. 17. Real confidence looks like humility. You no longer need to advertise your value because it comes from a place that does not require the validation of others.

18. High pain tolerance is a double-edged sword. It’s key for self-control, but can cause us to override the pain of being out of alignment. 19. Negative thoughts will not manifest a negative life. But unconscious negative thoughts will. 20. To feel more joy, open to your pain.

21. Bullying yourself into enlightenment does not work. Befriending yourself is how you transcend yourself. 22. Peak experiences are fun, but you always have to come back. Learning to appreciate ordinary moments is the key to a fulfilling life.

23. Meditation is not about feeling good. It’s about feeling what you’re feeling with good awareness. Plot twist: Eventually that makes you feel good. 24. If you are able to watch your mind think, it means who you are is bigger than your thoughts.

25. Practicing stillness is not about privileging stillness over movement. It’s about the CAPACITY to be still amidst your impulses. It’s about choice. 26. The issue is not that we get distracted. It's that we're so distracted by distractions we don't even know we're distracted.

27. There are 3 layers to a moment: Your experience, your awareness of the experience, and your story about the experience. Be mindful of the story. 28. Life is always happening in just one moment. That's all you're responsible for.

29. Your mind doesn’t wander. It moves toward what it finds most interesting. If you want to focus better, become more curious about what's in front of you. 30. Life continues whether you’re paying attention to it or not. I think that is why the passage of time is scary.

31. You cannot practice non-attachment. You can only show your mind the suffering that attachment creates. When it sees this clearly, it will let go. 32. Meditation can quickly become spiritualized suppression. Be careful not to use concentration to avoid what is uncomfortable.

33. One of the deepest forms of peace we can experience is living in integrity. You can lie to other people about who you are, but you can’t lie to your heart.

34. Be careful not to let the noise of your mind overpower the whispers of your heart.

35. Monks love to fart while they meditate. The wisdom of letting go expresses itself in many forms. 36. You can't life-hack wisdom. Do the work.

That's it. It's that simple. I learned a lot of it by not reading books or meditating (yes, I did that) but it was from Max. Just being with him and as him. 

These learnings will continue till my last breathe. 

 

The Illusion Of Self & The True Interconnectedness Of Life

A beautiful and humbling piece by Daisy Hildyard:

The ordinary life of my body stayed in its own world: that of a person who reads manuscripts, eats treacle tart, talks to pregnant doctors, and frequently drops her laptop – a person whose genes are all her own and who exists at a distance of some six thousand miles to the red earth passageways of the mines in south-eastern DRC. There is a significant if not ominous quiet in human narratives, which struggle to accommodate a real, breathing individual together with the story of her other lives, lived out on different scales, in the same story, in the same words. More-than-human scales are explained in reports, libraries, laboratories, theories – in places that have little room or concern for the daily experiences of real individuals. Meanwhile, stories about humans continue to go about their familiar business on the scale of the human body, a scale on which an individual character might talk or eat or eavesdrop.

When you draw these different kinds of story together, they disturb one another. The miner’s skin and the typing fingertip, indirectly, make physical contact over thousands of miles. The parasitic microbe has descendants in every human cell. These are small, local, real examples of how these conflicting stories get inside one another’s skin – they are mutual irritants – they bedevil one another.

Thinking about the Caesarian screen which is erected to protect a mother from the sight of her own internal organs, I had understood that this effort to separate the self from a new, extended understanding of life, is a form of self-protection. Your internal organs are you, just as your face is you – but that’s a headfuck you don’t need while you are busy giving birth. The screen is put in place. You are only trying to keep the sense of individuality undamaged, but the work of doing so becomes a growing strain the more you know about your body’s global reach, its microscopic symbionts, its evolutionary history, even the internal organs you think of as your own. If you want to witness your body in these wider contexts, you need to depart from the traditional unit of the person, which is the individual human body.

I had believed that it was dangerous to open up the individual in this way. To tear open the human self, I reasoned, would jeopardize those rights of self-possession, and this, in turn, would put the most vulnerable individuals at risk. In fact it is the other way round. A belief in self-containment is what corrodes human skin. Sealing the human body by removing or simply ignoring anything that complicates it, connects it, contaminates it: this is what exposes and contaminates human bodies in a simple and factual sense. And so it appears as a kind of contradiction: in order to protect yourself, you need to allow yourself to be broken open. This violation of the self is not an act of self-destruction – not an experience of death but an amplification of life.

Buddha was right about the illusion of self and the famous dictum of ninth-century Buddhist master Lin Chi, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

Buddha and many of his past and current disciples (without the Buddhist religious dogma, there are hordes of those creatures) were "somehow" aware of this interconnectedness of multitudes of other non-human lives with human life and the illusion of self. The delusion of human exceptionalism and anthropocentric views never even come under their radar.

I always wondered, how did they know this "microscopic fact?". It's still an open question.

I do have a hypothesis. I will talk about that another day but the clue is "Attentiveness" and Montaigne mantra of "Observe, Observe and Observe".

Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses writes about why we miss what is right in front of our nose:

We poor myopic humans, with neither the raptor’s gift of long-distance acuity, nor the talents of a housefly for panoramic vision. However, with our big brains, we are at least aware of the limits of our vision. With a degree of humility rare in our species, we acknowledge there is much we can’t see, and so contrive remarkable ways to observe the world. Infrared satellite imagery, optical telescopes, and the Hubble space telescope bring vastness within our visual sphere. Electron microscopes let us wander the remote universe of our own cells. But at the middle scale, that of the unaided eye, our senses seem to be strangely dulled. With sophisticated technology, we strive to see what is beyond us, but are often blind to the myriad sparkling facets that lie so close at hand. We think we’re seeing when we’ve only scratched the surface. Our acuity at this middle scale seems diminished, not by any failing of the eyes, but by the willingness of the mind. Has the power of our devices led us to distrust our unaided eyes? Or have we become dismissive of what takes no technology but only time and patience to perceive? Attentiveness alone can rival the most powerful magnifying lens.

What I’ve Been Reading

Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.

I highly recommend to start with Jonathan Haidt’s earlier books, his TED talk's and this Atlantic cover story which was the precursor to this book.  If someone doesn’t “get” the idea presented in this book then clearly this is book is for you or your kids (unless you are living like Captain America). Thank you both for writing this timely and much needed book.

The book revolves around these three Great Untruths:

• The Untruth of Fragility: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker

• The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always Trust Your Feelings

• The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life Is a Battled Between Good People and Evil People 

Yuval Noah Harari on the Rise of Homo Deus

What Kind Of Mind Creates A Book Like Sapiens? A Clear One

Ezra Klein: You told the Guardian that without meditation, you'd still be researching medieval military history — but not the Neanderthals or cyborgs. What changes has meditation brought to your work as a historian?

Yuval Harari: Two things, mainly. First of all, it's the ability to focus. When you train the mind to focus on something like the breath, it also gives you the discipline to focus on much bigger things and to really tell the difference between what's important and everything else. This is a discipline that I have brought to my scientific career as well. It's so difficult, especially when you deal with long-term history, to get bogged down in the small details or to be distracted by a million different tiny stories and concerns. It's so difficult to keep reminding yourself what is really the most important thing that has happened in history or what is the most important thing that is happening now in the world. The discipline to have this focus I really got from the meditation.

The other major contribution, I think, is that the entire exercise of Vipassana meditation is to learn the difference between fiction and reality, what is real and what is just stories that we invent and construct in our own minds. Almost 99 percent you realize is just stories in our minds. This is also true of history. Most people, they just get overwhelmed by the religious stories, by the nationalist stories, by the economic stories of the day, and they take these stories to be the reality.

My main ambition as a historian is to be able to tell the difference between what's really happening in the world and what are the fictions that humans have been creating for thousands of years in order to explain or in order to control what's happening in the world.

[---]

Ezra Klein: 
Before we leave the topic of meditation, I read that you do routinely 60-day retreats. That is an experience that I cannot imagine, so I would love to hear what those are like for you and what role they serve in your life.

Yuval Harari: First of all, it's very difficult. You don't have any distractions, you don't have television, you don't have emails, no phones, no books. You don't write. You just have every moment to focus on what is really happening right now, on what is reality. You come across the things you don't like about yourself, things that you don't like about the world, that you spend so much time ignoring or suppressing.

You start with the most basic bodily sensations of the breath coming in and out, of sensations in your stomach, in your legs, and as you connect to that, you gain the ability to really observe what's happening. You get clarity with regard to what's happening in your mind. You cannot really observe anger or fear or boredom if you cannot observe your breath. Your breath is so much easier than observing your anger or your fear.

People want to understand their anger, to understand their fear. But they think that observing the breath, oh, this is not important at all. But if you can't observe something as obvious and as simple as the breath coming in and out, you have absolutely no chance of really observing your anger, which is far more stormy and far more difficult.

What happens along the 60 days is that as your mind becomes more focused and more clear, you go deeper and deeper, and you start seeing the sources of where all this anger is coming from, where all this fear is coming from, and you just observe. You don't try to do anything. You don't tell any stories about your anger. You don't try to fight it. Just observe. What is anger? What is boredom? You live sometimes for years and years and years experiencing anger and fear and boredom every day, and you never really observe, how does it actually feel to be angry? Because you're too caught up in the angry.

The 60 days of meditation, they give you the opportunity. You can have a wave of anger, and sometimes it can last for days and you just, for days, you do nothing. You just observe. What is anger? How does it actually feel in the body? What is actually happening in my mind when I am angry? This is the most amazing thing that I've ever observed, is really to observe these internal phenomena.

- More Here

What I've Been Reading

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Tim Ferris.

Here's my confession: For a long long time, I remained biased because of cheesy book titles and I never read Tim Ferris. This changed when my friend gave this book as a Holiday gift.  Man, what an impact it made on my health. This is one practical book that I am still working on implementing lot of stuff in everyday life. I have changed my diet, bought some of his recommendations since the start of the year and it has already made an impact on my health. Thank you Tim !

The book is divided into three parts - Health, Wealth and Wise (Wisdom). So far, I have implemented lot of stuff from Health. Other two, I already align with lot of Tim's thoughts but need to revisit them often.

take things like playfulness and purposelessness very seriously. . . . This is not meant to be light, but I think I would have somehow encouraged myself to let go a little bit more and hang in there and not pretend to know where this is all going. You don’t need to know where it’s all going.

What Neuroscience Can Learn From Buddhism

Recently, neuroscience has to concede, maybe grudgingly, that Buddhism was right all along when it comes to the concept of the changing mind. The Buddhists call it anicca, the concept that everything is impermanent and constantly changing. Thus, Buddhists believe that life is a continuous becoming.

This concept is liberating because it brings an awareness that a person is not defined by what they think or their perception of themselves. With this awareness, there is a sense of positivism because it gives the person hope that they are constantly evolving into something better. Moreover, it gives hope that the possibilities to change themselves are endless.

Armed with the same belief that life is like a river continuously flowing, Buddhists do not attach themselves to things because they believe that when they do, they are going against the forces of the universe by controlling something to become stable.

Neuroscience also holds the same belief but they put it in a more scientific and rather complicated way. They call this state of impermanence neuroplasticity, which shows that the brain is malleable and can be easily molded to change opening yourself to great possibilities for growth.

Neuroplasticity also shows that from the time we are born and until we die, our brains continue to rewire itself finding new neural pathways to adjust to our changing needs. This process is what allows people to adapt to the different experiences they have.

- More Here

I Used to Be a Human Being

After a long hiatus, Andrew (Sullivan) is back and makes you cry:

My goal was to keep thought in its place. “Remember,” my friend Sam Harris, an atheist meditator, had told me before I left, “if you’re suffering, you’re thinking.” The task was not to silence everything within my addled brain, but to introduce it to quiet, to perspective, to the fallow spaces I had once known where the mind and soul replenish.

[---]

Has our enslavement to dopamine — to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak — made us happier? I suspect it has simply made us less unhappy, or rather less aware of our unhappiness, and that our phones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety. In an essay on contemplation, the Christian writer Alan Jacobs recently commended the comedian Louis C.K. for withholding smartphones from his children. On the Conan O’Brien show, C.K. explained why: “You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away,” he said. “Underneath in your life there’s that thing … that forever empty … that knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone … That’s why we text and drive … because we don’t want to be alone for a second.”

He recalled a moment driving his car when a Bruce Springsteen song came on the radio. It triggered a sudden, unexpected surge of sadness. He instinctively went to pick up his phone and text as many friends as possible. Then he changed his mind, left his phone where it was, and pulled over to the side of the road to weep. He allowed himself for once to be alone with his feelings, to be overwhelmed by them, to experience them with no instant distraction, no digital assist.

[---]

And yet I wonder. The ubiquitous temptations of virtual living create a mental climate that is still maddeningly hard to manage. In the days, then weeks, then months after my retreat, my daily meditation sessions began to falter a little. There was an election campaign of such brooding menace it demanded attention, headlined by a walking human Snapchat app of incoherence. For a while, I had limited my news exposure to the New York Times’ daily briefings; then, slowly, I found myself scanning the click-bait headlines from countless sources that crowded the screen; after a while, I was back in my old rut, absorbing every nugget of campaign news, even as I understood each to be as ephemeral as the last, and even though I no longer needed to absorb them all for work.

Then there were the other snares: the allure of online porn, now blasting through the defenses of every teenager; the ease of replacing every conversation with a texting stream; the escape of living for a while in an online game where all the hazards of real human interaction are banished; the new video features on Instagram, and new friends to follow. It all slowly chipped away at my meditative composure. I cut my daily silences from one hour to 25 minutes; and then, almost a year later, to every other day. I knew this was fatal — that the key to gaining sustainable composure from meditation was rigorous discipline and practice, every day, whether you felt like it or not, whether it felt as if it were working or not. Like weekly Mass, it is the routine that gradually creates a space that lets your life breathe. But the world I rejoined seemed to conspire to take that space away from me. “I do what I hate,” as the oldest son says in Terrence Malick’s haunting Tree of Life.

I haven’t given up, even as, each day, at various moments, I find myself giving in. There are books to be read; landscapes to be walked; friends to be with; life to be fully lived. And I realize that this is, in some ways, just another tale in the vast book of human frailty. But this new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any.

Concussion

They're terrified of you. Bennet Omalu is going to war with a corporation that has 20 million people on a weekly basis craving their product the same way they crave food. The NFL owns a day of the week, the same day the Church used to own. Now it's theirs. They're very big.

Will Smith's accent, enhanced darker skin, hands and everything fit's perfectly to the character of real life Nigerian born and now American Dr. Bennet Omalu.

If repeated blows to the head in a football career spanning 18 years can give CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy); can you imagine how much benefits 18 years meditation could bring?

Sorry, I could resist inserting the inverse mental model here. As far as playing football; stupidity will always prevail as long as the age old economic rule of supply and demand are in tandem.

What I've Been Reading

What is nirvana? 

Seeing one thing through to the end. 

Sit Like a Buddha: A Pocket Guide to Meditation by Lodro Rinzler. This little book can change lives; one of the simplest and practical book on meditation ever. I will treasuring this one for life.

In some sense, all seven qualities of being a dharmic person could be summarized by that term: just be kind, decent human being as a result of the fact that you are more mindful and aware than you might have been if you were not meditating. If you are able to do that then the teachings of Buddha - the dharma - are no longer something that is way out there and separate from you and your life. They are part of your being. When you feel that you view the world though the lens of meditation, exhibiting these basic qualities, then you know you are a dharmic person. You have allowed the meditation practice to change you, not into a different person, but into realizing more of who you already are. 

The simplest trick to turn meditation into a daily routine is:

"Keep Sitting!"

Wisdom Of The Week

Concentration and mindfulness are distinctly different functions. They each have their role to play in meditation, and the relationship between them is definite and delicate. Concentration is often called one-pointedness of mind. It consists of forcing the mind to remain on one static point. Please note the word force. Concentration is pretty much a forced type of activity. It can be developed by force, by sheer unremitting willpower. And once developed, it retains some of that forced flavor. Mindfulness, on the other hand, is a delicate function leading to refined sensibilities. These two are partners in the job of meditation. Mindfulness is the sensitive one. It notices things. Concentration provides the power. It keeps the attention pinned down to one item. Ideally, mindfulness is in this relationship. Mindfulness picks the objects of attention, and notices when the attention has gone astray. Concentration does the actual work of holding the attention steady on that chosen object. If either of these partners is weak, your meditation goes astray.

Concentration could be defined as that faculty of the mind that focuses single-pointedly on one object without interruption. It must be emphasized that true concentration is a wholesome one-pointedness of mind. That is, the state is free from greed, hatred, and delusion. Unwholesome one-pointedness is also possible, but it will not lead to liberation. You can be very single-minded in a state of lust. But that gets you nowhere. Uninterrupted focus on something that you hate does not help you at all. In fact, such unwholesome concentration is fairly short-lived even when it is achieved— especially when it is used to harm others. True concentration itself is free from such contaminants. It is a state in which the mind is gathered together and thus gains power and intensity. We might use the analogy of a lens. Parallel waves of sunlight falling on a piece of paper will do no more than warm the surface. But if that same amount of light, when focused through a lens, falls on a single point, the paper bursts into flames. Concentration is the lens. It produces the burning intensity necessary to see into the deeper reaches of the mind. Mindfulness selects the object that the lens will focus on and looks through the lens to see what is there.

Concentration should be regarded as a tool. Like any tool, it can be used for good or for ill. A sharp knife can be used to create a beautiful carving or to harm someone. It is all up to the one who uses the knife. Concentration is similar. Properly used, it can assist you toward liberation. But it can also be used in the service of the ego. It can operate in the framework of achievement and competition. You can use concentration to dominate others. You can use it to be selfish. The real problem is that concentration alone will not give you a perspective on yourself. It won’t throw light on the basic problems of selfishness and the nature of suffering. It can be used to dig down into deep psychological states. But even then, the forces of egotism won’t be understood. Only mindfulness can do that. If mindfulness is not there to look into the lens and see what has been uncovered, then it is all for nothing. Only mindfulness understands. Only mindfulness brings wisdom.

- Concentration vs. Mindfulness via every fascinating Farnam Street

Quote of the Day

To earn the trust of your meditation, you have to visit it every day. It’s like having a puppy.

– Chelsea Richer

Wisdom Of The Week

This week, when I was @ the Strata conference, the last keynote address was "In praise of boredom" by Maria Konnikova. Taking about boredom in a big data conference was wisdom 101!!

A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men… of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase.

- The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell

Wisdom Of The Week

Dolu was an evangelical Catholic, and Hume was a skeptical Protestant, but they had a lot in common—endless curiosity, a love of science and conversation, and, most of all, a sense of humor. Dolu was intelligent, knowledgeable, gregarious, and witty, and certainly “of some parts and learning.” He was just the sort of man Hume would have liked.

And I discovered something else. Hume had said that Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary was an important influence on the Treatise—particularly the entry on Spinoza. So I looked up that entry in the dictionary, which is a brilliant, encyclopedic, 6 million–word mess of footnotes, footnotes to footnotes, references, and cross-references. One of the footnotes in the Spinoza entry was about “oriental philosophers” who, like Spinoza, denied the existence of God and argued for “emptiness.” And it cross-referenced another entry about the monks of Siam, as described by the Jesuit ambassadors. Hume must have been reading about Buddhism, and Dolu’s journey, in the very building where Dolu lived.

[---]

I published an article about Hume, Buddhism, and the Jesuits, long on footnotes and short on romance, in an academic journal. As I was doing my research, many unfailingly helpful historians told me that my quirky personal project reflected a much broader trend. Historians have begun to think about the Enlightenment in a newly global way. Those creaky wooden ships carried ideas across the boundaries of continents, languages, and religions just as the Internet does now (although they were a lot slower and perhaps even more perilous). As part of this new global intellectual history, new bibliographies and biographies and translations of Desideri have started to appear, and new links between Eastern and Western philosophy keep emerging.

It’s easy to think of the Enlightenment as the exclusive invention of a few iconoclastic European philosophers. But in a broader sense, the spirit of the Enlightenment, the spirit that both Hume and the Buddha articulated, pervades the story I’ve been telling. The drive to convert and conquer the “false and peculiar” in the name of some metaphysical absolute was certainly there, in the West and in the East. It still is. But the characters in this story were even more strongly driven by the simple desire to know, and the simple thirst for experience. They wanted to know what had happened before and what would happen next, what was on the other shore of the ocean, the other side of the mountain, the other face of the religious or philosophical—or even sexual—divide.

[---]

But I learned that they were all much more complicated, unpredictable, and fluid than they appeared at first, even to themselves. Both Hume and the Buddha would have nodded sagely at that thought. Although Dolu and Desideri went to Siam and Tibet to bring the wisdom of Europe to the Buddhists, they also brought back the wisdom of the Buddhists to Europe. Siam and Tibet changed them more than they changed Siam and Tibet. And his two years at La Flèche undoubtedly changed David Hume.

Hume and the Jesuits and Siam and Tibet changed me as well. I’d always thought Hume was right about the self. But now, for the first time, I felt that he was right.

- How an 18th-Century Philosopher Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis by Alison Gopnik

Robert Greene on the Utility of Weirdness, Fear, and Pain

Robert Greene is also working on his new book on... yes , Human Nature!!

Wisdom Of The Week

Farnam Street's insightful post Meditation:Why Bother? based on the book Mindfulness in Plain English is one of the simple and best "arguments" to meditate I have read in a long time.

The more we understand the more flexible and tolerant we become. The more compassionate we can be.

Meditation is a lot like cultivating a new land. To make a field out of a forest, first you have to clear the trees and pull out the stumps. Then you till the soil and fertilize it, sow your seed, and harvest your crops. To cultivate your mind, first you have to clear out the various irritants that are in the way— pull them right out by the root so that they won’t grow back. Then you fertilize: you pump energy and discipline into the mental soil. Then you sow the seed, and harvest your crops of faith, morality, mindfulness, and wisdom.

Meditation sharpens the mind. 

Meditation sharpens your concentration and your thinking power. Then, piece by piece, your own subconscious motives and mechanics become clear to you. Your intuition sharpens. The precision of your thought increases, and gradually you come to a direct knowledge of things as they really are, without prejudice and without illusion.

Resilience - How to Train a Tougher Mind

Still, there’s no silver bullet when it comes to resiliency in kids, says Ron Palomares, a school psychologist at Texas Woman’s University. Between 2000 and 2013 he worked on the American Psychological Association’s Road to Resilience campaign, which it set up after 9/11 to provide public information on how to become more resilient. For adolescents with depressive symptoms, perhaps the Penn Resiliency Program approach may work best, he says. The mindfulness programmes being developed in schools in the US and the UK are focused more on emotional regulation, which some kids may need help with but others won’t.

The multifaceted approach of the Lantieri’s Inner Resilience Programme (IRP), meanwhile, may be best for a group, like an entire school, because it’s more likely to cover the various needs of most of the pupils. Yet, compared to the formal programmes, Lantieri’s IRP is more of a ‘bag of tricks’ – or “a bag of practical strategies” – as she describes it. She says she wants to give adults and kids options, as many as possible, to help children cope with whatever life throws at them. “As much as we like to think we can protect our children from what may come their way, we live in a very complex and uncertain world,” she says. “We have to give them all the skills of inner resilience, so they’re ready for just everyday life.”

- More Here

Meditation More Than Anything in My Life was the Biggest Ingredient of Whatever Success I've Had

Ray Dalio on Meditation from Meditatio on Vimeo.

- Ray Dalio, Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Bridgewater Associates

Meditation Helps You Live Longer by Protecting Your DNA

Experiments have shown that meditating can increase the length of our telomeres, protecting our dividing cells for longer, allowing them to create more copies of themselves over time, thereby increasing longevity. In a study of meditators at the Shambhala mountain retreat in northern Colorado, "those who completed a three-month-long course had 30% higher levels of telomerase than a similar group on a waiting list." Today, Blackburn is speaking to the federal government, encouraging spending on what she calls "societal stress reduction." In other words, instructing high risk individuals, such as new mothers, on how to reduce their stress is likely to contribute positively to their long-term health.

- More Here