Train Your Brain

Tools and exercises to work on:
—The Parasympathetic Nervous System
—Awareness of Your Body
—Your Precious Life
—Filling Your Body’s Cupboard
—Mindful Presence
—Positive Emotions and Taking in the Good
—From Anxiety to Security
—From Shame to Worth
—21 Ways to Feel Good about Yourself
—Anger to Peace
—From Sorrow to Contentment
—The Power of Intention
Train Your Brain  website

THE WIND OF THE MIND

In philosophical terms, Tibetan scriptures refer to neurotic mind as the impure or afflicted mind. But within the context of wind energy, neurotic mind is not just caused by self-attachment. The mind is also propelled by the movement of wind energy. The Tibetan language describes this relationship between the wind and the mind as the wind-mind (Tib. rlung sems). This compound word describes the wind energy and the conceptual mind as always intertwined and moving together—a singular motion. Again, a metaphor is helpful to understand how the mind and the wind work together. The Tibetan Buddhist teachings compare the mind and the breath to a rider and its mount. In this metaphor, the wind energy is the mount and the mind is the rider. This metaphor illustrates how it is the wind energy that carries the mind and that influences and shapes the mind’s energy. The wind energy is the root of all of our experience, since it provides energy for the mind’s movement. So, wind energy training is a powerful tool for purifying, calming, taming, and relaxing the wind energy to impact the expression of neurotic mind. See "The Tibetan Yoga of Breath" by Anyen Rinpoche and Allison Choying Zangmo

Meditation Health Benefits: What The Practice Does To Your Body

We hear it all the time: Meditation can improve our creative thinking, our energy, stress levels and even our success. Prominent artists, businessmen and politicians cop to the practice. Would it work for you?

"It did to my mind what going to the gym did to my body -- it made it both stronger and more flexible," said Dr. Hedy Kober, a neuroscientist who who studies the effects of mindfulness meditation, which she has practiced for 10 years, at her lab at Yale University. She admitted during a TED Talk that she started meditating to deal with a break up, but found that it helped her handle stress and unpleasant feelings in all areas of her life.

Studies show that meditation is associated with improvement in a variety of psychological areas, including stress, anxiety, addiction, depression, eating disorders and cognitive function, among others. There's also research to suggest that meditation can reduce blood pressure, pain response, stress hormone levels and even cellular health. But what does it actually do to the body?

For one thing, it changes our brain. The cells and neurons in the brain are constantly making new connections and disrupting old ones based on response to stimuli, a quality that researchers call experience-based neuroplasticity. This affects the neural circuits of the brain, which in turn affects how we respond to situations. It also affects the actual structure of our brains -- thickening some areas and making others less dense.

"Think of the end of a neuron as a hand, with thousands of 'fingers,'" said Dr. Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital who studies mindfulness meditation. "The number of fingers relates to the number of interconnections between neurons and that number can change -- one reason it can change is due to stress."

Want to learn more? We put together an illustration to help break down the many benefits of meditation. Click on this link.
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 from article on Huffpost Healthy Living, Oct. 20, 2014

'How to Simmer' by Pema Chodron

Not acting on our habitual patterns is only the first step toward not harming others or ourselves. The transformative process begins at a deeper level when we contact the rawness we’re left with whenever we refrain. As a way of working with our aggressive tendencies, Dzigar Kongtrül teaches the nonviolent practice of simmering. He says that rather than “boil in our aggression like a piece of meat cooking in a soup,” we simmer in it. We allow ourselves to wait, to sit patiently with the urge to act or speak in our usual ways and feel the full force of that urge without turning away or giving in. Neither repressing nor rejecting, we stay in the middle between the two extremes, in the middle between yes and no, right and wrong, true and false. This is the journey of developing a kindhearted and courageous tolerance for our pain.

From Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change by Pema Chödrön (Now in paperback!), page 51  Visit: blog.shambhala.com for more articles.

Why You Should Take a Salt Bath This Week by By Dr. Alejandra Carrasco

Soaking in a tub with Dead Sea salts is a wonderful, health promoting ritual. Do this on a regular basis, and soak up the rewards!

 

The Dead Sea has long been touted as an amazing place for healing. Since ancient times, the Dead Sea has been venerated for its life-giving powers.

Legend has it that Queen Cleopatra used medicine derived from the Dead Sea compounds to cure her ills.

The Dead Sea waters consist of 21 different minerals including magnesium, potassium, sodium, sulfur, zinc, calcium, chloride, iodide, and bromide, all of which work synergistically to nourish our bodies.

On the Earth as teacher

The Earth supports all life like a great jewel in space -- and we are a part of it all.
As a guiding force, a source of refuge, the Earth shows us the way of interdependence, interbeing and it is all teachers, all life, all our precious mothers.

The Earth as Buddha,
The Earth as Dharma,
The Earth as Sangha.

Kusali Devi, a Newari Buddhist from Nepal, considered to be an emanation of the Mother Goddess Ajama said, that in her tradition "liberation is not possible until we have had 165 teachers! Teachers can be found everywhere and exist in all directions. We need many teachers to learn all the different skills we need in life, not just one. A true teacher directs us to ourselves; to the true 'guru within.' What could be a better teacher, a more perfect source of refuge for our times than the whole Earth? It is, after all, a complete expression of the whole of which we are each an inextricable part. There are lessons to be found in every direction. How exciting, humbling, and magnificent is that? How empowering and how awe-inspiring? Like meeting a great Master or our true love; this Earth, our greatest teacher. The embodiment of the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha.

Taking Refuge in Earth by Joanna Macy

I met a Goddess in Nepal

Excerpt from a tour participant's blog about her tour to Kathmandu. If you are interested in coming on my next pilgrimage, please visit my tour website.

Spending some time so close to the Mother Goddess's greatest natural monument was a constant reminder of the divine feminine.  In fact, that's what I was seeking on my pilgrimage there.  My personal guide was a lovely, smart, western woman named Yana, who has visited Nepal numerous times.  Yana converted to Tibetan Buddhism when she was fourteen years old, and is faithful still.  Clearly it was no adolescent fad.  Nor is her reverence for female deities.  She knows her stuff and led me on a magical journey to Hindu and Buddhist temples and power spots richly endowed with goddess-worship and lore.

My first ten days in Kathmandu were during the festival of Dasain, which pays homage to the various manifestations of the fierce and heroic Goddess Durga. 

"Daughters of Dolma"

A new film on the lives of Tibetan Buddhist Nuns at several nunneries in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal. It premieres in London on June 30th, 2013. "Daughters of Dolma" signifies daughters of Tara (Dolma in Tibetan), modern day offspring of the bodhisattva who vowed: "Until samsara is empty, I shall work for the benefit of sentient beings in a woman's body!"

From their synopsis:
'In the summer of 2011, we travelled 4000 miles from London to India and to Nepal where our film crew spent a month filming the authentic ways of life of Tibetan Buddhist practitioners in two nunneries in the Kathmandu Valley. Our team consists of six international students from the University of St Andrews who are bound by the common passion to raise the profile of Buddhist nuns around the world. Our documentary is about how the Buddhist philosophy is lived out by contemporary Buddhist nuns of various age groups, personalities, and familial backgrounds and their remarkable ability to help their communities. We want to depict them as they are, beneath their shaved heads and maroon robes, beyond their monastic vows, prayers, and studies. There is another interesting side to becoming a nun and this is what our film strives to bring to the audience.'

What is extraordinary, beyond the difficulties of producing an independent film, especially on women in Buddhism (as you can see from the handful on our 'Buddhist Women in Film' page), is that this film was produced by a handful of university students still presently attending the University of St. Andrews in Scotland! Praise.

Just goes to show that whoever you are, wherever you are, if you want to share Tara's love, to share her manifestations in the world at this time, you just do it.

Emaho!

Daughter of Dolma website
Movie trailer

Power Places of Kathmandu by Keith Dowman and Kevin Bubriski

'Power Places of Kathmandu is a splendid souvenir book of the Kathmandu Valley, uniting over one hundred magnificent color plates of Kevin Bubriski’s photographs and the evocative text of Keith Dowman.'

‘In Hindu mythology the Himalayas have always been the abode of the gods. The sages and seers of the Indian subcontinent envisioned the snowy peaks as the thrones of divine authority. The remoteness and inaccessibility of the mountains, their awesome majesty, and the symbolic significance of their immutable mass have all contributed to their aura of divinity. In the lap of these mountains lies the Kathmandu Valley, a landscape chrged with the presence of the divine. In this fertile and temperate valley the Hindu and Buddhist traditions of Nepal recognize numerous power places -- focal points of divine energy -- where humans can make contact with the realm of the gods. Geomantic forces, divine myth, and human legend and history, combine to make these locations potent sources of spiritual revitalization and psychic renewal.'

For the rest of the description of this beautiful book on Kathmandu with excellent commentary on the power places, please visit:  Keith Dowman's website.