Practice Map

A personal selection, overview, and reference of some (life) practice material by Ken McLeod (and maybe related teachings by other teachers as well):

2012-06-17

Purpose, Method, Effects, and Results

Why People Practice
Progression

How to simplify your life

Willingness, Know-How, Capacity [2012-08-21]

Attention
- Breath
- Power, Ecstasy, Insight, Compassion

Working with Pain and Difficult Emotions
- Five Step Practice [2012-08-11]

Mind Training

Death and Impermanence


Reactive Emotions and Patterns

Six Realms
- Hell
- Hungry Ghost
- Animal
- Human
- Titan
- God
. Real Life Examples (from Monsters Under the Bed Retreat) [2012-07-22]

Five Elements / Five Dakinis
- Earth
- Fire
- Water
- Air
- Void

The Four Immeasurables
   Verses and Exercise
   Transcript and Podcast [2012-06-23]
- Equanimity
   . What is Equanimity? by Shenzen Young [2012-06-23]
- Loving Kindness
- Compassion
- Joy

Taking and Sending

Relationships
Conflict
Grief
Depression
PTSD
Emotions
Happiness

Materializing Things
Making Things Happen

What Do I Do Now?
Who Am I?

Wake Up To Your Life Audio Book

The book Wake Up To Your Life by Ken McLeod explains the meditation techniques developed over hundreds of years by Tibetian Buddhist's. More over it is a practice guideline, a program, a roadmap, or a How To document. The book format is also very good to quickly skim through, to get an overview, and to look things up (and btw, for the recent paperback price at Amazon for USD 11.43 it is a real bargain for what you get!).

However there is also an audio version available, the whole book is red page by page by Ken McLeod himself.

It gives the content a whole new dimension. While I can read much faster than listening to the audio, it is much more emotional, personal, intense - overall a deeper experience, to listen to the text, content, speach. After all, text is just a codification to what we normally would hear. Actually it is images that we put into words, that we put onto paper. Each time we add a very complex layer to communicate in order to overcome time and distance. So if you like the book, you might give the audio book a chance as well. I am sure you will like it. Last not least, you might also like his podcasts. They are also qualitatively different from the audio book. The podcasts are interactive, more spontaneous, natural, and like a conversation, while the audio book is actually red from a fixed text, it is more structured, prepared, and concentrated. Both forms have their advantages and place.

cdbaby
Amazon.com

BTW, I hope there will be an ebook version out at some point in time. It would be nice to carry the book around easily at most times.

Here is a review of the book by one of his students, George Draffan.

Review of Ken McLeod's "Wake Up To Your Life", March 21, 2001

By George L. Draffan

Originally published in the Northwest Dharma News www.nwdharma.org

Hundreds of books on Buddhism have been published in recent years, but Wake Up To Your Life, a new book by Ken McLeod, is one of the first systematic curricula written by a Westerner thoroughly trained in traditional Tibetan ways. With deep insight, clear instructions, and entertaining stories, McLeod has given us a comprehensive manual for a lifetime of spiritual work.

Wake Up To Your Life begins as many books do, introducing the context and motivations for practicing meditation, and covering basic topics such as the four noble truths, the three disciplines of morality, meditation, and understanding, and the cultivation of mindfulness. It continues with contemplations on death and impermanence, karma, reactive emotions, and the four immeasurables, and ends with difficult practices for mind training, insight, and direct awareness.

McLeod breaks new ground from beginning to end. For example, the differences and synergies between mindfulness, awareness, and attention are clearly delineated, and active attention ("volitional, stable, and inclusive") is the central principle. That has practical implications, one of which is that ethical behavior becomes primarily a natural expression of attention, rather than a set of rules dictated by an authority or tradition.

Wake Up To Your Life is especially valuable in making explicit what has been hidden from or confusing to many practitioners. Those who have struggled to practice with insufficient instruction will benefit from McLeod's pragmatic approach. For example, he makes clear the important differences between the purpose, methods, effects, and results of meditation practice. Thus the meditator who has been instructed to "open your mind" or "be centered" will learn that being open and feeling centered (as well as distraction, clarity, sleepiness, and euphoria) are effects of meditation, and not methods. The book is packed with tools for choosing and working with a teacher, for cutting through confusion and self-deception, and for discriminating between genuine insight and passing mental states and energy surges.

Those who have been bewildered by Tibetan visualization and contemplative practices will see how they are rooted in basic Buddhist principles, and those who have been confused or put off by cosmology and deity practices will find clear explanations and a sensible approach. We see how the six realms are the worlds projected by our reactive emotions, and how an understanding of the five elements and five dakinis can help us transform the energies of our reactive emotions into pristine awareness.

The chapter on karma is a significant contribution to our understanding of meditation and of psychology. Detailed analysis of how our beliefs, reactive emotions, and habituated behaviors create and perpetuate the suffering in our lives is integrated with practical exercises for dismantling the components of those beliefs and behavioral patterns. McLeod has formulated the practices in terms directly relevant to modern audiences, and encourages the reader to rely on experience rather than belief. Waking up to your life does not depend on exchanging Western assumptions for Eastern ones; it depends on direct experience.

In the debate over whether teachers should transmit the Dharma just as it was received, or whether each culture and each generation must make the Dharma their own, McLeod is squarely in the second camp. He integrates age-old Buddhist methods with modern psychological sensibilities, and uses science and Sufi teaching stories to make his points, but the result is no sweet New Age concoction. Confusion is cut at every juncture, and no slack is given for wishful thinking. "You would probably prefer not to look at some parts of your life, but to ignore the areas of life that are uncomfortable to look at is not a good idea. If we protect any aspect of our life from the practice of attention, the habituated patterns connected with that part of our life absorb the energy of practice and gradually take over our lives. We become what we don't dismantle."

While Wake Up To Your Life is intellectually challenging and satisfying, it is ultimately a manual for spiritual practice, and not an exercise in cultural reeducation, religious history, or philosophical doctrine. Its only purpose is to provide a set of tools to deal with the challenges we encounter while engaging the work of "waking up from the sleep in which we dream that we are separate from what we experience."

Both beginning and experienced students and teachers of Buddhist meditation will benefit from using the methods in Wake Up To Your Life, but McLeod's pragmatic and integrated approach applies the power of attention to social, work, and personal relationships as well as to formal meditation practice. The book will be valuable to psychologists, mediators, managers, parents, and anyone else who deals with people and their reactive emotions. It's for anyone who has felt the suffering and confinement caused by their habitual patterns, and is serious about cultivating presence and freedom.

Do I Want This?

One day, while staying at a friend’s house, Nasrudin peered over the wall into the neighbor’s yard and saw the most wonderful garden he had ever seen. He noticed an old man patiently weeding a flower-bed and asked,

“This is a beautiful garden. I’d like to have one just like it. How do you make a garden like this?”

“Twenty years hard work.”

“Never mind,” said Nasrudin.

From: Three Questions from Ken McLeod

Seung Sahn

From Open Buddha: “Completely Become One” by Zen Master Seung Sahn

After one week, my heart was only making one or two mistakes, and my doctors said, “This is wonderful! Most people take two or three months to come down to only one or two mistakes each minute!” So I said, “Thank you very much; you have helped me, so I can get better quickly. But this is only fix-your-body meditation. This is not correct meditation.”

“Why isn’t this correct meditation?” they asked.

“You can fix your body, your heart, your diabetes. In Korea, China, and India, there are people who do yoga. They go to the mountains and do breath-in, breath-out meditation. They can live 500 years and not get sick. Keeping their bodies for a long time is possible; even flying in the sky is possible. Trying this style body meditation, anything is possible. A body is like a car. Use the car a lot, and in three years, it is broken. Only keep the car in the garage, then keeping it for a long time is possible. But finally, after 500 years, then these yoga people die. Then what? Live a long time, then die; live a short time, then die–it is the same! Dying is the same.”

The doctors understood. “What is correct meditation, then?”

I told them, “I always try meditation. Meditation means always keeping one mind, not-moving mind.” They thought meditation meant only concentration and keeping your body still. So I said, “Meditation means keeping one mind. You must understand–What is life? What is death? If you keep one mind, there is no life, no death. Then, if you die tomorrow, no problem; if you die in five minutes, no problem.”

“What do you mean, no problem’?” they asked.

“Maybe you do fix-your-heart meditation. Then, ‘My heart is good; my body is good.’ It is very easy to become attached to this meditation. But, when you get old, and your heart is not so good, then you try this meditation. Maybe it is still not so good. Then, ‘Why doesn’t my meditation work?’ Then your body, your meditation become hindrances. If your meditation cannot help your body, then you don’t believe in your meditation. Then what? So, this style meditation is no good.

“Correct meditation means correctly understanding your situation moment to moment–what are you doing now? Only do it! Then, each action is complete; each action is enough. Then no thinking, so each moment, I can perceive everything just like this. Just like this is truth. Sick-time, only be sick. Driving-time, only drive. Only go straight–then, any situation is no problem.”

2010-03-13

Reminds me of this exercise by Ken McLeod.

The Known Universe

Very well done and fantastic video.

Astronomy Picture of the Day has some comments.

The Known Universe by AMNH


Pointer via Pat Stacey/UM Ning.

New Blog: Unfettered Clips

Exactly a month ago I started a new blog which I was working towards (on and off) for much of 2009 and of which I was first dreaming since exactly the time of this blog post, 2009-01-01. It has been and is a team effort as there is a group of people that took great effort to transcribe (and they still do) a lot of audio files and also Ken McLeod supports these projects and generously makes his material freely available to the public.

So what is it?

It's a kind of The Best Of Ken McLeod's teaching classes. Ken McLeod is a Western Buddhist teacher and author of the book Wake Up To Your Life (which is also available in audio form).

Personally I find his material full of wisdom, insight, and also practical value. A friend wrote about it: "I always think Buddhism indeed is among the wisest religions, or rather philosophies regarding the attitudes towards life. It is easy to understand, but also easy to forget. Thank you for reminding me these deep wisdoms. Ken McLeod did a very nice job in communicating these ideas."
Personally for me it is the other way around:), counter intuitive and difficult to understand, but once understood easier to remember. But maybe that's why I need a Western translator.

So I hope you enjoy this stuff:

Unfettered Clips & Quotes
QUOTATIONS AND AUDIO CLIPS OF BUDDHIST TEACHER KEN MCLEOD

Clips already posted and that I want to mention explicitly as I consider them especially important are the following three:

- Basic Skills
- Progression
- Manifesting Things

Cheers!

Robina Courtin

Slow start, but she speeds up, believe me.

Be Your Own Therapist

Soon Gone

The end of building is ruin. (Ken McLeod)

Meditating on Sound

My recommendation, go and sit in a life performance of a Bruckner Symphony or some big choire piece and just listen to the sound sensations...

Yongey Minyur Rinpoche: The Joy of Living

P. 151

Meditating on Sound

Meditating on sound is very similar to meditating on form, except that now you're engaging the faculty of hearing. Start by just allowing your mind to rest for a few moments in a relaxed state, and then gradually allow yourself to become aware of the things you hear close to your ear, such as your heartbeat or your breath, or sounds that occur naturally in your immediate surroundings. Some people find it helpful to play a recording of natural sounds or pleasant music. There's no need to try to identify these sounds, nor is it necessary to focus on a specific sound. In fact, it's easier to let yourself be aware of everything you hear. The point is to cultivate a simple, bare awareness of sound as it strikes your ear.

pp. 152

One of the great benefits of meditation on sound is that it gradually teaches you to detach from assigning meaning to the various sounds you hear. You learn to listen to what you hear without necessary responding emotionally to the content. As you grow accustomed to giving bare attention to sound simply as sound, you'll find yourself able to listen to criticism without becoming angry or defensive and able to listen to praise without becoming overly proud or excited. You can simply listen to what other people say with a much more relaxed and balanced attitude, without being carried away by an emotional response.

I once hear a wonderful story about a famous sitar player in India who learned to use the sounds of his instrument as a support for his meditation practice. If you're not familiar with Indian instruments, a sitar is a very long-necked instrument, usually constructed with seventeen strings, plucked like a guitar to produce a wonderful variety of tones. This particular sitar player was so gifted that he was always in demand and spent much of his time traveling around India, in much the way some modern rock bands are often away from home on tour.

After one particularly long tour, he returned home to discover that his wife had been having an affair with another man. He was extraodrinarily reasonable when he discovered the situation. Perhaps the concentration he'd learned over the years of constant practice and performance, combined with the sounds of this lovely instrument, had calmed and focused his mind. In any case, he didn't argue with his wife or lash out in anger. Instead he sat down and had a long conversation with her, during which he realized that his wife's affair and his own pride at being asked to perform across the country were symptoms of attachment - one of the three mental poisons that keep us addicted to the cycle of samsara. There was very little difference between his attachent to being famous and his wife's attachment to another man. The recognition hit him like a thunderbolt, and he realized that in order to become free of his own addiction, he had to let go of his attachment to being famous. The only way for him to do so was to seek out a meditation master and learn how to recognize his attachment as simply a manifestation of his mental habits.

At the end of the conversation, he gave up everything to his wife except his sitar, toward which he still felt a strong attachment that no amount of rational analysis could dissolve, and went in search of a teacher. Eventually he arrived at a charnel ground, the ancient equivalent of a cemetery, in which corpses are more or less deposited without being buried or cremated. Charnel grounds were scary places, covered with human bones, partial skeletons, and rotting corpses. But they were the most likely environments in which to find a great master, who had overcome his or her fear of death and impermanence - two of the fearful conditions that keep most people locked in the samsaric conditions of attachment to what is and aversion to what might occur.

In this particular charnel ground, the sitar player found a mahasiddha - a person who had passed through extraordinary trials to achieve profound understanding. The mahasiddha was living in a ragged hut that barely provided him protection against wind and weather. In the way that some of us feel a strong connection with people we meet during ordinary course of our lives, the sitar player felt a deep bond with this particular mahasiddha and asked him if he would accept him as a student. The mahasiddha agreed, and the sitar player used branches and mud to build his own hut nearby, where he could practice the basic instructions on shinay meditation that the mahasiddha had given him.

Like many people who begin meditation practice, the sitar player found it very difficult to follow the instructions of his teacher. Even spending a few minutes following his teacher0s instructions seemed like an eternity; every time he sat to meditate, he found himself drawn to his old habit of playing his sitar, and he gave up his practice and started to play. He began to feel horribly guilty, neglecting his meditation practice in favor of simply strumming his sitar. Finally he went to his teacher's hut and confessed that he just couldn't meditate.

"What's the problem?" the mahasiddha asked.

The sitar player replied, "I'm just too attached to my sitar. I'd rather play it than meditate."

The mahasiddha told him, "That's not a big problem. I can give you an exercise in sitar meditation."

The sitar player, who'd been expecting criticism - as most of us do from our teachers - was quite surprised.

The mahasiddha continued, "Go back to your hut, play your sitar, and just listen to the sound of your instrument with bare awareness. Forget about trying to play perfectly. Just listen to the sounds."

Relieved, the sitar player returned to his hut and started playing, just listening to the sounds without trying to be perfect, without focusing on either the results of his playing or the results of his practice. Because he'd learned to practice simply without concern for the results, after a few years he became a mahasiddha himself.

And just a good advise to practice on your instrument as well: "play your sitar, and just listen to the sound of your instrument with bare awareness. Forget about trying to play perfectly. Just listen to the sounds."

Meditate on sound and the music will follow...

Meditation Books

Favorite Meditation Books

1. Matthieu Ricard: Happiness - A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill

2. Geshe Michael Roche: The Diamond Cutter - The Buddha on Managing Your Business and Your Life

3. Ken McLeod: Wake Up To Your Life - Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention

4. Ajahn Brahm: Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond - A Meditator's Handbook

5. M. Williams, J. Teasdale, Z. Segal, J. Kabat-Zinn: The Mindful Way through Depression - Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness

If I had to pick a single book to keep, it would be Ken McLeod's. But if you would like to read only one of these, go for Matthieu Ricard's (and then you will likely read the other ones anyway:).

Furthermore, Ken McLeod has an ongoing Recommended Reading list.

Ajahn Chah

I haven't red this book (actually all his books in a single pdf file), but I like another book of one of his students (Ajahn Brahm) very much. Ajahn Chah is the most famous monk in Thailand and has influenced many Western teachers as well. If you don't like reading ebooks, you can order the books from amazon as well. But at least here you can get a taste first-hand.

The Teachings of Ajahn Chah: A Collection of Ajahn Chah's Translated Dhamma Talks
by Ajaan Chah, translated from the Thai by the Sangha, Wat Nong Pah Pong (2007; 3.6Mb/725pp.)

A comprehensive anthology of Ajaan Chah's Dhamma talks, translated into English. The talks include all those that have been previously published in the following books: Bodhinyana (1982), A Taste of Freedom (fifth impression, 2002), Living Dhamma (1992), Food for the Heart (1992), The Path to Peace (1996), Clarity of Insight (2000), Unshakeable Peace (2003), and Everything is Teaching Us (2004).

In the following section he describes the most basic meditation practice:

The Practice of Concentration

The training in samadhi (concentration) is practiced to make the mind firm and steady. This brings about peacefulness of mind. Usually our untrained minds are moving and restless, hard to control and manage. Mind follows sense distractions wildly just like water flowing this way and that, seeking the lowest level. Agriculturists and engineers, though, know how to control water so that it is of greater use to mankind. Men are clever, they know how to dam water, make large reservoirs and canals – all of this merely to channel water and make it more useable. In addition the water stored becomes a source of electrical power and light, further benefits from controlling its flow so that it doesn’t run wild and eventually settle into a few low spots, its usefulness wasted.

So too, the mind which is dammed and controlled, trained constantly, will be of immeasurable benefit. The Buddha himself taught, “The mind that has been controlled brings true happiness, so train you minds well for the highest of benefits”. Similarly, the animals we see around us – elephants, horses, cattle, buffalo, etc. – must be trained before they can be useful for work. Only after they have been trained is their strength of benefit to us.

In the same way, the mind that has been trained will bring many times the blessings of that of an untrained mind. The Buddha and his noble disciples all started out in the same way as us – with untrained minds; but afterwards look how they became the subjects of reverence for us all, and see how much benefit we can gain through their teaching. Indeed, see what benefit has come to the entire world from these men who have gone through the training of the mind to reach the freedom beyond. The mind controlled and trained is better equipped to help us in all professions, in all situations. The disciplined mind will keep our lives balanced, make work easier and develop and nurture reason to govern our actions. In the end our happiness will increase accordingly as we follow the proper mind training.

The training of the mind can be done in many ways, with many different methods. The method which is most useful and which can be practiced by all types of people is known as “mindfulnessof breathing”. It is the developing of mindfulness on the in-breath and the out-breath. In this monastery we concentrate our attention on the tip of the nose and develop awareness of the in-and out-breaths with the mantra word “Bud-dho”. If the meditator wishes to use another word, or simply be mindful of the air moving in and out, this is also fine. Adjust the practice to suit yourself. The essential factor in the meditation is that the noting or awareness of the breath be kept up in the present moment so that one is mindful of each in-breath and each out-breath just as it occurs. While doing walking meditation we try to be constantly mindful of the sensation of the feet touching the ground.

This practice of meditation must be pursued as continuously as possible in order for it to bear fruit. Don’t meditate for a short time one day and then in one or two weeks, or even a month, meditate again. This will not bring results. The Buddha taught us to practice often, to practice diligently, that is, to be as continuous as we can in the practice of mental training. To practice meditation we should also find a suitably quiet place free from distractions. In gardens or under shady trees in our back yards, or in places where we can be alone are suitable environments. If we are a monk or nun we should find a suitable hut, a quiet forest or cave. The mountains offer exceptionally suitable places for practice.

In anycase, wherever we are, we must make an effort to be continuously mindful of breathing in and breathing out. If the attention wanders to other things, try to pull it back to the object of concentration. Try to put away all other thoughts and cares. Don’t think about anything – just watch the breath. If we are mindful of thoughts as soon as they arise and keep diligently returning to the meditation subject, the mind will become quieter and quieter. When the mind is peaceful and concentrated, release it from the breath as the object of concentration. Now begin to examine the body and mind comprised of the five khandhas : material form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations and consciousness. Examine these five khandhas as they come and go. You will see clearly that they are impermanent, that this impermanence makes them unsatisfactory and undesirable, and that they come and go of their own – there is no “self” running things. There is to be found only nature moving according to cause and effect. All things in the world fall under the characteristics of instability, unsatisfactoriness and being without a permanent ego or soul. Seeing the whole of existence in this light, attachment and clinging to the khandhas will gradually be reduced. This is because we see the true characteristics of the world. We call this the arising of wisdom.

Intergalactic

Quite old and you might have seen it before (the book or the film in school), but in case you haven't, it is a must see (also nice for a refresher) and here it is at YouTube (who knows for how long):

Powers of 10


Did you know we (our Milky Way galaxy) are headed for a big crash with the Andromeda galaxy?! With huge consequences for both of them. Well, not sure anyone can explain what it means exactly. But as a buddy in the office responded when we first learned about this fact: "Well, it is not my biggest concern at the moment."
10 things you don’t know about the Milky Way Galaxy

Thanks to Alvis.

Talking of concers, well, looks like we will soon find out if the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will create mini black holes or other beasts or not (and if so how small and long lived they will be:).

2010-01-28

The video above has been removed from YouTube, but here it is again! Cheers.

Breathing

From The Diamond Cutter by Geshe Michael Roach, pp. 150:

The idea is to focus your mind within for your silent time by blocking out every other thought and experience; we do this by tying the mind to the breath, as it goes in and out.

Except we start with the out, and then go to the in! It works like this. You fix your mind on the inside of the two nostrils of your nose, up toward the holes. Imagine you're like a sentry who's been posted at these two little caves to watch and see if anyone is coming or going. As you breathe in and then out try to be aware of the touch of the air on the inside of your nose: the cooler, drier air coming in and the moist, warm air flowing out. Remember to stick to your post: Your mind is not allowed to stray from the inside of your nose and the touch of the air coming and going. If someone slams a door or talks loudly, you might be distracted for a second, but you are strict about bringing yourself back to your breathing as soon as you can.

The ancient custom is to repeat this for the length of ten breaths, with the caveat that - if you are distracted in a major way and lose count - then you have to start over again. The outgoing breath counts as the first half of a number, and the incoming breath as the second half. This way of counting a breath (which is the opposite of our own way, where taking, holding, and releasing a breath might be counted as a single breath, say, in swimming) is said to have an added power of bringing the mind inward, of focusing the thoughts within. If you find yourself losing count frequently before you reach ten, it's a sign that you're having trouble concentrating. This will affect everything about your business performance, and you should take special care to observe your silent time more regularly, every morning.

You can close your eyes or leave them open; it doesn't matter much, as long as you don't get distracted. If you close your eyes you might find yourself getting sleepy, again due to the conditioning of a lifetime of sleep. If you open your eyes you might find yourself looking around the room at things and losing your train of thought. The ancient Tibetan books say then that, if you leave your eyes open, you should try not to focus them on anything in particular: just let them stare out into the space in front of you, as if you were in a great daydream, and just looking off to nowhere. It's good thought if you can turn your eyes downward a bit, with your eyelids down just a touch too.

Meditation and Happiness

Two Tibetian monks on their way to Winterthur... happily posing for a photo (sometime in 2004).

An interesting and motivating article by Katherine Ellison about meditation:
Mastering Your Own Mind
Ups, the list of quotes got a bit overboard, but I can't help it...:)

In contrast, practiced Buddhist meditators deploy their brains with exceptional skill. Drawing on 2,500 years of mental technology—techniques for paying careful attention to the workings of their own minds—they develop expertise in controlling the flow of their mental life, avoiding the emotional squalls that often compel us to take personal feelings oh, so personally, and clearing new channels for awareness, calm, compassion and joy. Their example holds the possibility that we can all choose to modulate our moods, regulate our emotions and increase cognitive capacity—that we can all become high-performance users of our own brains.
...
Meditation alters what we tend to think of as stable mental traits—anxiety, for example, or anger. Practitioners discover that feelings are events that rise in the psyche like bubbles off the bottom of a pot of boiling water. "They learn to de-identify with their emotions, making it easier to let them go," says neuroscientist Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
...
The Buddha framed things differently. He taught that our default mode may be to suffer, but only because of ignorance. We can transcend our lot by learning to quiet the mind in meditation—not merely to relax and cope with stress, as the popular notion of Buddhism holds, but to rigorously train oneself to relinquish bad mental habits. Rather than being an end in itself, meditation becomes a tool to investigate your mind and change your worldview. You're not tuning out so much as tuning up your brain, improving your self-monitoring skills.

"You stop being always projected outside. You start looking in and seeing how your mind works, and you change your mind, thought by thought," explains Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk, scientist and French interpreter for the Dalai Lama. "The French intellectuals don't like this. They say, 'Let's be spontaneous; passions are the beauty of life.' They think that making an effort is not nice—a silly old discipline—and that's why we're such a mess. But many modern people understand the notion of getting fit with physical training." So the idea of developing mental skills with meditation is gaining ground.
...
Such adepts are the Lance Armstrongs of meditation, says Davidson, whose pioneering brain scans of monks provide tantalizing evidence that emotions like love and compassion are in fact skills—and can be trained to a dramatic degree. Studies also suggest that the monastic life is not a requirement; even brief, regular meditation sessions can yield substantial benefits. Nor is a belief in Buddhism necessary. "I'm convinced that you can make a huge difference in your life if you start out with even 30 minutes a day," Ricard says. "By maintaining the practice, there is a trickle of insights. Drop by drop, you fill a jar."
...
There are many types of meditation, and they can be used to develop a number of mental skills. This attitude focuses on practices that address common emotional struggles. Through basic meditation techniques, it's possible to cultivate a longer attention span, develop emotional stability, understand the feelings of others and release yourself from the constraints you place on your own happiness.
...
Much of our emotional experience consists of gusts of negative feelings blowing through the brain. The feelings torture us without being intrinsically related to experience. "Emotions are not actually facts," explains Davidson.
...
Scientists have only recently begun to map the brain regions related to positive emotions such as empathy. But when Davidson observed Ricard meditating on compassion while hooked up to EEG sensors, he found a striking increase in gamma waves in the left prefrontal cortex, an area correlated with reported feelings of happiness. The findings furnish scientific support for something the Dalai Lama often says: A person meditating on compassion for others becomes the first beneficiary.

If you liked this article, then you will love this related book by Matthieu Ricard:
Happiness - A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill

Also mentioned in the book are research results from Paul Ekman, who made a science out of reading facial expressions, especially fleeting expressions, so called microexpressions.

Ekman's studies of thousands fo subjects had taught him that the most talented at recognizing microexpressions were also the most open to new experiences, the most curious about things in general, and the most reliable and efficient. "So I had expected that many years of meditative experience" - which requires both openness and conscientiousness - "might make them do better on this ability," Ekman explained.

It turned out that two experienced Western meditators whom Ekman had tested had achieved results that were far better than those of five thousand subjects previously tested. "They do better than policemen, lawyers, psychiatrists, customs officials, judges - even Secret Service agents," the group that had proven hitherto to be the most accurate, Ekman noted.

Even more interesting:

To test the first meditator's startle reflex, Ekman brought him to the Berkeley Psychophysiology Laboratory run by his longtime colleague Robert Levenson. The meditator's body movements, pulse, perspiration, and skin temperature were measured. His facial expressions were filmed to capture his physiological reactions to a sudden noise. The experimenters opted for the maximal threshold of human tolerance - a very powerful detonation, equivalent to a gunshot going off beside the ear.

The subject was told that within a five minute period he would hear a loud explosion. He was asked to try to neutralize the inevitable strong reaction, to the extent of making it imperceptible if possible. Some people are better than others at this exercise, but no one is able to suppress it entirely - far from it - even with the most intense effort to restrain the muscular spasms. Among the hundreds of subjects whom Ekman and Levenson had tested, none had ever managed it. Prior research had found that even elite police sharpshooters, who fire guns every day, cannot stop themselves from flinching. But the meditator was able to.

As Ekman explained: "When he tries to repress the startle, it almost disappears. We've never found anyone who can do that. Nor have any other researchers. This is a spectacular accomplishment. We don't have any idea of the anatomy that would allow him to suppress the startle reflex."

During these tests, the meditator had practiced two types of meditation: single-pointed concentration and open presence, both of which had been studied by fMRI in Madison. He found that the best effect was obtained with the open presence meditation. "In that state," he said, "I was not actively trying to control the startle, but the detonation seemed weaker, as if I were hearing it from a distance." Ekman described how, while some changes had been effected in the meditator's physiology, not one muscle in his face had moved. As the subject explained: "In the distracted state, the explosion suddenly brings you back to the present moment and causes you to jump out of suprise. But while in open presence you are resting in the present moment and the bang simply occurs and causes only a little disturbance, like a bird crossing the sky."

In Paul Ekman's book Emotions Revealed (2004), there is one paragraph about his early view on the benefits of meditation:

I'd like to also mention an approach that is complementary to these, mindfulness meditation. I did not say much about it in Emotions Revealed, for two reasons. There isn't hard scientific evidence that mindfulness meditation actually improves emotional life, although there are many studies in which people claim that it has had such benefit. Also, I previously couldn't understand why focusing our awareness on breathing would benefit emotional life.
Like the proverbial bolt out of the blue, just a few weeks before writing this afterword, the explanation struck me. The very practice of learning to focus attention on an automatic process that requires no conscious monitoring creates the capacity to be attentive to other automatic processes. We breathe without thinking, without conscious direction of each inhalation and exhalation. Nature does not require that we divert our attention to breathing. When we try paying attention to each breath, people find it very hard to do so for more than a minute, if that, without being distracted by thoughts. Learning to focus our attention on breathing takes daily practice, in which we develop new neural pathways that allow us to do it. And here is the punch line: these skills transfer to other automatic processes - benefiting emotional behavior awareness and eventually, in some people, impulse awareness.

For meditation, what has an amazing impact on me is listening to this theta metronom by Stuart Wilde (Meditation CD). The idea is that while listening to a beat of four ticks per second, what first appears intuitively as fast paced and aggresive, it syncs your brain waves (the things that get measured by an EEG) to the same state you have when in a normal sleep state. Other people I gave the CD to were either also excited or very annoyed by its sound.


Here is a recent study about Achieving sustainable gains in happiness: change your actions not your circumstances by Sheldon and Lyubomirsky from 2006.

And, seen 2007-01-19: