Peace Of Your Mind

Dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt, Matthew Johnstone doesn't look like a meditation guru. He isn't bald, claims to know nothing of chakras and has never been to an ashram. But he has written and illustrated Quiet the Mind, a beginner's guide to meditation.


Johnstone is the creative director of the Black Dog Institute, which raises awareness of mood disorders. He discovered the benefits of meditation when he was working in advertising and took a course to cope with stress.


''Advertising is like a never-ending sand dune,'' he says. ''You get to the top and fall back to the bottom. There are never-ending deadlines and there was pressure to be creative, win awards, be relevant and contemporary.''


Twenty years later, he says his life is definitely better when he meditates than when he doesn't: ''It's like cleaning the windows and turning down the volume.''


Illustrated by Johnstone in the style of a beautiful children's picture book, Quiet the Mind is a kind of ''Meditation for Dummies''. ''People often have a bit of fear of the unknown and associate meditation with airy-fairy, fringy-hippie stuff. They don't want to waste time. I wanted the book to be pragmatic.'' (MORE)

Source: Stock and Land

Daily Inspiration

Brain Scans Prove Meditation `Effective In Curing Mental Illness`

Mediation, an eastern philosophy which was once dismissed as pretentious, can be effective in treating mental illness, brain scans have proved.

The buzzword is mindfulness. Meditation, which is practised a lot in India and in parts of Islington, is an NHS-approved treatment that combines conventional psychotherapy with meditation techniques, breathing and yoga.

It is sitting around trying to think about nothing and letting out the occasional “ommmm”.

Meditation has been around since the Seventies, but in the past decade there has been growing evidence that it is highly effective. Researchers at Britain’s most respected medical centres have found that it can halve the risk of relapse for those with depression.

“Psychotherapy involves patients analysing thoughts and feelings, with the hope that by understanding them some kind of change can be made. Mindfulness has some of this but it also involves meditation,” the Daily Mail quoted Mark Williams, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Oxford’s Department of Psychiatry and co-developer of one of the many variants, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), said. (MORE)

Source: Zee News

Daily Inspiration

Meditation and Stress Relief

Every time your heart beats, it sends blood filled with oxygen and nutrition through the arteries to reach your entire body. By the time you reach age 80, your heart will have done this more than three billion times. Your entire cardiovascular system, which includes the heart and blood vessels, works in harmony to send blood to every part of your body. When stress occurs, your body releases hormones (epinephrine and norepinephrine), which causes your heart to pump faster, your arteries to constrict, and raise your blood pressure. Prolonged periods of stress can cause permanent damage to the cardiovascular system.

Researchers have suggested at least six different ways that psychological stress can kill you, all of which involve some sort of damage to the heart or arteries.[1] Cardiovascular disease (CVD) occurs when damaged arteries impact the amount of blood reaching the heart, making it so the heart itself is not getting enough blood. One common cause of CVD is stress.

The American Heart Association and other professional organizations recommend non-drug lifestyle changes as the first line of treatment for people with high blood pressure and as part of treatment for cardiovascular diseases. Transcendental Meditation (TM) has been suggested in a variety of studies to help reduce blood pressure, hypertension and other symptoms of psychological stressors.[2][3] (MORE)

Source: Huffington Post

Daily Inspiration

Prayer Versus Meditation? They’re More Alike Than We Realize

You could call it a religious war of words, with the West Coast serving as one of its most intense battlegrounds.

The bid to win hearts and minds pits Buddhist meditation against Christian prayer, with meditation, especially so-called “mindfulness,” seeming to be gaining ground.

It’s been the focus of more than 60 recent scholarly studies. It’s being embraced by hundreds of psychotherapists, who increasingly offer Buddhist mindfulness to clients dealing with depression and anxiety. It’s been on the cover of Time magazine.

Even though polls show there are 10 times more Christians in the Pacific Northwest than Buddhists, the forms of meditation associated with those on the opposite side of the Pacific Ocean are rising to the fore in North America.

Buddhist meditators, who tend to think of themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” claim what they do is not “religious.” That’s part of the appeal of mindfulness. Such medita-tors complain that Christian (as well as Jewish and Muslim) prayer over-emphasizes pleading with, confessing to or praising a God.

But meditation, Western Buddhists maintain, is simply a “practice.” It’s “secular,” with no traditional God, even while it may also be “spiritual.”

It turns out, however, that the gap between Buddhist meditation and Christian prayer might not be so huge. Indeed, some forms seem almost identical. (MORE)

Source: Vancouver Sun

Daily Inspiration

Mindfulness Meditation Is Rediscovered

Mindfulness meditation is being rediscovered as a very modern—and medical—path to personal nirvana.


In July 2008, I retired from my job as editor in chief of O, the Oprah Magazine , a move that mystified a lot of people. Editors tend not to exit willingly. They’re usually ripped out of their magazines, like pages. Their sales go south, and so do they. A media reporter wasn’t buying my “retired” line. He called to get the real story. “You can tell me,” he said. “Are you being pushed out?” The truth, I told him, was that I’d been doing Buddhist meditation for years and ached to dive into practice. My job was getting in the way of my life.

That answer didn’t explain anything to a business friend. “What is so compelling,” she asked, “that you would leave all this?”

“All this” encompassed powers and perks universally acknowledged to be worth killing yourself for. The magazine was a big hit. We were putting good ideas and good writing into the culture. We respected each other, we won awards, and we were paid well enough. I couldn’t have been happier.

And then things changed, as things do. (MORE)

Source: thedailybeast.com