How to Begin Meditation from In TRAINING by Erik Pema Kunsang

Most of us have seen a picture of a meditator with the body placed nicely: straight back, legs loosely crossed, head balanced on the spine, palm on the knees or in the lap. The body is supposed to simply sit and keep on sitting. Imitate that, and your body is now in meditation posture. But you are not the body. You are in a body. It is not the body that meditates; it’s the mind. Meditation takes place in the realm of consciousness: that in you which is aware and thinks, feels and experiences.

The body is your vehicle, your temporary dwelling. Mind wills, body does.

My teacher, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, taught that meditation means to be unswayed when something happens. It means that your awareness is able to just be. In that continuous state of simple being, we can use techniques to allow transcendent wisdom and compassion to unfold.

Meditation for beginners.

Relax on your seat, with upright spine, and for a little while just sit. Then think: I’ll use this time to be the best I can be, the most aware, gentle and open-minded, to help myself and all others.

Breathe naturally, relax every muscle from deep within and just be.

Try this for some time and see what happens. Don’t bring in a lot of ideas, about meditating and meditation. Just allow yourself to be. That is the basis for a beginner.

Every time you forget what you are doing, just start from the beginning one more time. Stop after five minutes and make a wish: May the goodness of being present, gentle and open-minded, bring benefit for both myself and everyone else.

Slowly, you will get some personal experience about how it actually is to just be without doing anything, in a state of readiness.

This is a simple foundation, and it can be expanded endlessly.

—In TRAINING by Erik Pema Kunsang

What Science Is Telling Us About The Heart’s Intuitive Intelligence by Arjun Walia

The wonderful and brilliant scientists over at the Institute of HeartMath have done some amazing work in shedding light on some very significant findings regarding the science of the heart.

The Institute of HeartMath is an internationally recognized nonprofit research and education organization dedicated to helping people reduce stress, self-regulate emotions and build energy and resilience for healthy, happy lives. HeartMath tools, technology and training teach people to rely on the intelligence of their hearts in concert with their minds at home, school, work and play.

A large portion of their research has investigated heart and brain interaction. Researchers at the institute have examined how the heart and brain communicate with each other and how that affects our consciousness and the way in which we perceive our world.

Their research has shed light on a number of facts, one for example, is when a person is feeling really positive emotions like gratitude, love, or appreciation, that the heart beats out a very different message. They’ve been able to determine this by the fact that the heart beats out the largest electromagnetic field produced in the body, and they can gather data from it.

Harvard Unveils MRI Study Proving Meditation Literally Rebuilds The Brain’s Gray Matter In 8 Weeks

Test subjects taking part in an 8-week program of mindfulness meditation showed results that astonished even the most experienced neuroscientists at Harvard University. The study was led by a Harvard-affiliated team of researchers based at Massachusetts General Hospital, and the team’s MRI scans documented for the very first time in medical history how meditation produced massive changes inside the brain’s gray matter. “Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” says study senior author Sara Lazar of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program and a Harvard Medical School instructor in psychology. “This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.”