Meditation Notes

A very good 10 minute introductory video on how to meditate in the Vipassana style.

A new meditation study has found that daily meditation can improve memory in individuals with memory complaints. The study, which doesn’t elaborate on the kind of meditation practice involved, found “dramatic increases in blood flow… to the region of the brain associated with learning and memory.” This area is the first to decline [...]

Another report on the anti-aging effects of meditation; this time specifically related to Zen:
Zen meditation, a Buddhist practice, is centered on attentional and postural self-regulation and scientists believe that its regular practice may affect the normal age-related decline of cerebral gray matter volume and attentional performance observed in healthy individuals.

In Being Zen, Ezra Bayda introduces a meditation exercise called Three-By-Three, in which you bring three different sources of sensory input into awareness simultaneously, and maintain awareness of all three for three full breaths. You then continue on, using different collections of sensations, physical, visual or auditory, for each round of breaths.
This practice allows [...]

In this video Bhante Vimalaramsi discusses Vipassana meditation and Loving Kindness meditation. It contains some good general instructions that can be applied to both styles of meditation.

An interesting recollection from Paul Wilson about one of the physiological effects of meditation: retaining youthfulness. I have read, from another source, that 5 years of in-depth practice can take up to 12 years off of your biological age.

The Toronto Star reports on two Buddhist researchers from the University of Toronto who asked a group of meditators to keep a Mindfulness Diary in which they rated “their meditating behaviour as soon as they open their eyes and stop practising.” They found a huge amount of variability in the responses, but discovered [...]

Beliefnet has an interesting and unexpected interview with musician Lou Reed about his latest album, Hudson River Wind Meditations. Reed has quit smoking and taken up tai chi and meditation. On the form of meditation he practices, he says ‘My original meditation was taken from an herbalist acupuncturist named Dr. Shelly Peng. The [...]

In this follow-up video, Gudo Nishijima explains the meaning of zazen. He gives more practical advice on sitting (”it is necessary for us to practice zazen two times a day, at least.”) and delves into some of the scientific understanding of meditation that has been uncovered in the 20th and 21st centuries.
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In this video Gudo Nishijima, a zen meditation teacher in his 80s shows the proper way to practice zazen. What I find interesting about this video is the amount of time he devotes to the purely practical instructional aspects of sitting. Unfortunately the camera is not mounted perfectly horizontally, so Master Nishijima is [...]