Eat better, drink less, exercise more, sleep enough: It's common advice for heart health - and it's frequently ignored. Just 3 percent of American adults meet the standards for healthy levels of physical activity, consumption of fruit and vegetables, body fat and smoking, according to recent study.

But a major lifestyle overhaul isn't the only way to help your heart, studies suggest. Even small changes can make substantial differences.

Eventually, little changes can add up, says David Goff, director of the cardiovascular sciences division at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda.

"Any small change you make in a positive direction is good for you," he says. "It's not an all-or-nothing phenomenon."

Physical activity is a perfect example, Goff says. Official guidelines, which recommend 30 minutes of moderately intense activity on most days, are based partly on evidence of substantial health benefits from doing 150 to 300 minutes of exercise each week, according to a 2011 review study by researchers at the University of South Carolina at Columbia. Those benefits include reduced risks of coronary heart disease, stroke and high blood pressure.

But the guidelines also come out of an assessment of what is obtainable for most people, Goff adds. And while it would be ideal to get at least 150 minutes of exercise weekly, getting less than that also has benefits. When the researchers looked at deaths from all causes, they saw the sharpest drop in mortality when exercise jumped from half an hour to an hour and a half each week.

Just getting up for a minute or two to interrupt bouts of sitting may also improve health, the study noted. And moving for as little as eight minutes a few times a day provides the same cardiovascular benefits as 30 uninterrupted minutes.

"If you can't find 30 minutes a day, try to find five or 10 or 15," Goff says. "Anything is better than nothing."

The "some is better than none" philosophy applies to dietary improvements, too, Goff says. According to the National Institutes of Health, an ideal meal plan includes lots of fruit, vegetables and whole grains, with limited amounts of fatty meat and tropical oils.

But eating an imperfect diet with more of the good stuff is better than giving up entirely. That's a conclusion from a 2016 study that created food-quality scores from the self-reported diets of about 200,000 people. Over about 25 years, the study found, people whose diets scored lowest had a 13 percent higher risk of coronary artery disease than did people in the second-worst group.

Even just switching out soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages can help eliminate a couple hundred calories a day and control weight. That helps lower blood pressure, levels of harmful cholesterol and the potential for diabetes - all risk factors for heart disease, Goff says. Large long-term studies have shown that people who average one sugary drink a day have a 20 percent higher risk of heart attack than people who rarely drink any.

It's not just food and diet, adds Michael Miller, director of the Center for Preventive Cardiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in and author of "Heal Your Heart: The Positive Emotions Prescription to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease." Heart strength can also come from battling stress by boosting emotional health in simple and unexpected ways, he says, such as enjoying a good laugh.

In a small 2005 study, Miller played movie clips for 20 people. When participants watched a scene that made them laugh, 19 of them experienced dilation of the blood vessels. In contrast, a stressful scene led to constriction in 14 of the 20 viewers. Since then, Miller says, other small studies have found similar results, including one showing that vessels stayed dilated for 24 hours. Dilation allows more blood to flow, decreasing blood pressure and heart rate.

"Cross-talk" between the brain and heart explains the potential long-term benefits of laughter, Miller says, particularly when laughter is intense enough to induce crying. Belly laughing releases endorphins, triggering receptors in blood vessels to produce nitric oxide, which in turn, dilates blood vessels, increases blood flow, reduces the risk of blood clots, and more.

People are far more likely to laugh when they're with friends, Miller adds, adding yet more evidence of the health benefits of being social.

Accumulating evidence suggests that another easy and enjoyable way to help your heart is to listen to music. During recovery from surgery, several studies have shown, listening to relaxing music leads to a reduction in anxiety and heart rate. And in a 2015 study, Greek researchers found reductions in how hard the hearts of 20 healthy young adults were working after 30 minutes of listening to rock or classical music.

"I tell my patients to dust off their old LPs now that LPs are coming back and listen to a piece of music they have not heard in a long time but in the past made them feel really good," Miller says.

Also on his list of recommendations: mindfulness meditation and hugging. Both, he says, look promising in studies of heart health and heart repair.

"Considering that stress probably accounts for a third of heart attacks," he says, "it can have a dramatic effect if you do all of these things in sync."

Small lifestyle change help at any age, suggests a 2014 study that started by assessing cardiovascular risks in more than 5,000 young adults in the mid-1980s. Twenty years later, people who had made even small but positive changes - such as losing a little weight, exercising a bit more or smoking a little less - showed less coronary artery calcification than people who didn't change or changed in a negative direction. Coronary artery calcification is a risk factor for heart disease.

For the best chance of success, Goff suggests taking on one little change at a time.

"The idea is to make a small change and then make another small change," he says. "It's about changing the way you live over years and years, not hours and days."

The rest is here:

To take care of your heart, even little changes can help - SCNow

YouTuber and musician Dodie Clark. (Rebecca Need-Menear, Wikimedia Commons)

Cute English accent. Adorable human being. Ukulele player. One year ago, I stumbled across Dodie Clark in my recommended YouTube feed most likely because her video featured a collaboration with Jon Cozart (widely known as Paint on YouTube), a favorite of mine. I clicked on my first Dodie video, An Awkward Duet, in which she sings a silly song with Jon, and together they fulfill the titles promise. Ive been hooked ever since.

Dodie has two channels, doddleoddle and doddlevloggle. Most of the videos on her first channel are covers and original songs while the videos on her second channel feature personal chats with her audience about her struggle with mental disorders, sexuality and her life. Dodie has an uncanny ability to connect with people, especially those with mental disorders. She seems genuine and vulnerable in most of her vlogs about mental health issues and about the YouTube community, which is probably why she has gained a huge following online.

Additionally, her songs have a simple but moving quality to them. Her lyrics prick you because of their ability to mix metaphors and descriptive words and to take a look into the human soul. The uncomplicated riff in Secret for the Mad and Human creates space in the song, which makes the listener listen more closely to the soft melodies and piercing lyrics. Her ukulele also makes it perfect to listen to on a relaxing day.

Like many other upcoming musicians on YouTube, late last year, Dodie released an EP called Intertwined. She includes six of her original songs that vary in length, style and theme. Every song seems like a little snippet into Dodies mind, including contradictions about what she wants in life. For example, theres a clear juxtaposition between When and Absolutely Smitten, where the former is a ballad about lying to yourself about finding love and enjoying dating, while the latter is a playful song about finding love in an instant and holding onto it. I think that speaks to the genius of Dodie. She is able to write from multiple lenses about complicated things, like love, to silly things, like not being able to see a dentist.

So how did Dodie become so successful? Aside from her talent, her success has comes from the loyalty of her fans. Because of Dodies honesty and vulnerability, she has gained a huge fanbase that supports her tours, EP and other social media outlets. She interacts with her fans as much as possible and makes videos about topics that concern her and her audience. She also often collaborates with other artists on YouTube, growing the audience she reaches. Through her music, she was able to gain a manager that helped organize her Intertwined EP and tour.

YouTubers often work with other YouTubers, who may be producers, directors or musicians, in order to learn the skills necessary to make high-qualityYouTube videos. YouTube is a great outlet for starting ones creative endeavors into the music and film industry. As Dodies career shows, it allows you to experiment and develop an audience all under your own control.

Contact Jourdann Fraser at jourdann at stanford.edu.

Link:

Dodie Clark and the power of YouTube to launch music careers - The Stanford Daily

Once upon a time, every farmer on earth practicedsomething called organic agriculture, although they never bothered to coin the phrase.

The cultivators of this amazing pre-industrial concept spent their days diligently tending and harvesting their cropswithout the aid of manufactured products. They protected their plants with things no longer in abundance: worms, snails, ladybugs, and a full arsenal of homeopathic concoctions passed down from hundreds of years of ancestral heritage. And it was, for sure, a tough row to hoe.

Todays natural agricultureis still organic by definition, but the mechanics to raising that chemical-free produce are a world away from what your parents might have tried in their backyard.

Most states have regulations and long lists that define organic agricultureand what can, by law, be used during large-scale organic farming. And while todays organic farms may skillfully manage to avoid the use of controversial chemical sprays with complicated names like permethrin and thiamethoxam (which have both been suspected of contributing to the decline in bee colonies), theytypically rely on concentrated non-chemical fungicides and pesticides for large-scale production.

An entrepreneur in Kearny, New Jersey, thinks hes found the next evolution for agriculture: post-organic. If that doesnt sound like a very inventive name for a process, the system itself makes up for it.

Irving Fains concept of farming does away with the swaths of green space we normally associate with wholesome agriculture. He traded acreagefor an urban warehouse, a carefully-managed environment and a proprietary technology that produces food 100 times faster than conventional farming. And all of that without pesticides, soil stimulants or other additives, Fain and his company claim.

Warehouse-based vertical farming isnt entirely new. Farmers have been dabbling in various versions of indoor farming for centuries, finding new ways to capitalize on its water-saving techniques and, in so doing, finding faster ways to ensure quality production.

But Fains company,Bowery Farming, uses its own self-automated technology to respond to and manipulate the environmental factors upon which plants rely.

And unlike most full-scale indoor farming operations, Bowerys system can sense when its time to pluck the crops something that is usually done by sight and schedule in conventional farms. That means less wasted product and more predictable harvesting seasons. It also means a more predictable bottom line.

The company shared this glimpse insideits vertical farm on Instagram:

So far the companys post-organic greens are available in two Manhattan restaurants, a pair of Whole Foods Market stores in New Jersey, and Foragers Market in New Yorks Chelsea neighborhood.

With increasing concerns about drought and climate change, vertical farms that can operate in limited space with less water and virtually no natural sun may become the next stage in agriculture.

Whether the post-organic concept will eventually be able to overtake the organic markets sizable revenues ($43 billion yearly), remains to be seen. But in theres something to be said for an industry that uses 95 percent less water than conventional farming and wont wither with climate change.

Image credit:Pixabay

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This Vertical Farm Wants to Pioneer 'Post-Organic' Food - Triple Pundit (registration) (blog)

For years, Whole Foods has been the place to go to find the crme de la crme of fresh, organic vegetables outside of a farmers market. And while many other grocery stores have tried to one up Whole Foods and dominate the industry, few have been able to. But recently, earnings reports surprisingly putCostco, the bulk discount supplier, ahead of Whole Foods with a reported $4 billion in organic food sales last year compared to $3.6 billion that was raked in by Whole Foods.

You May Also Like:Theres Now an Easy Way to Find Out If the Food Youre Eating Contains Toxic Chemicals

Rumors have always swirled around the freshness of Costcos produce department and whether or not their items were really organic or not. By the looks of it, the American consumer is picking Costco over the pricey Whole Foods. For starters, the price of organic food at Costco versus Whole Foods is dramatically less. And everyone wants good quality food at a lower price point.

But thats not all. Costco has plans to set up its own organic chicken farms over the next few years and supports independent farms, as well as promotes small, emerging, sustainable brands.

So, next time you write out your grocery list and decide to visit your regular grocery store (or local Whole Foods), think twice about what its going to really cost you.

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Costco Outsells Whole Foods in Organic Produce Sales - Health + ... - NewBeauty Magazine (blog)

Yuval Noah Hararis first book, Sapiens, was an international sensation. The Israeli historians mind-bending tour through the trump of Homo sapiens is a favorite of, among others, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama. His new book, Homo Deus: a Brief History of Tomorrow, is about what comes next for humanity and the threat our own intelligence and creative capacity poses to our future. And it, too, is fantastically interesting.

Ive wanted to talk to Harari since reading Sapiens. Ive had one big question about him: What kind of mind creates a book like Sapiens? And now I know. A clear one.

Virtually everything Harari says in our conversation is fascinating. But what I didnt expect was how central his consistent practice of Vipassana meditation which includes a 60-day silent retreat each year is to understanding the works of both history and futurism he produces. In this excerpt from our discussion, which is edited for length and clarity, we dig deep into Hararis meditative practice and how it helps him see the stories humanity tells itself.

To listen to my whole conversation with Harari which delves into AI, the future of work, Hararis favorite books, and more subscribe to my podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your fine audio programming, or stream it off SoundCloud.

You told the Guardian that without meditation, you'd still be researching medieval military history but not the Neanderthals or cyborgs. What changes has meditation brought to your work as a historian?

Two things, mainly. First of all, it's the ability to focus. When you train the mind to focus on something like the breath, it also gives you the discipline to focus on much bigger things and to really tell the difference between what's important and everything else. This is a discipline that I have brought to my scientific career as well. It's so difficult, especially when you deal with long-term history, to get bogged down in the small details or to be distracted by a million different tiny stories and concerns. It's so difficult to keep reminding yourself what is really the most important thing that has happened in history or what is the most important thing that is happening now in the world. The discipline to have this focus I really got from the meditation.

The other major contribution, I think, is that the entire exercise of Vipassana meditation is to learn the difference between fiction and reality, what is real and what is just stories that we invent and construct in our own minds. Almost 99 percent you realize is just stories in our minds. This is also true of history. Most people, they just get overwhelmed by the religious stories, by the nationalist stories, by the economic stories of the day, and they take these stories to be the reality.

My main ambition as a historian is to be able to tell the difference between what's really happening in the world and what are the fictions that humans have been creating for thousands of years in order to explain or in order to control what's happening in the world.

One of the ideas that is central to your book Sapiens is that the central quality of Homo sapiens, what has allowed us to dominate the earth, is the ability to tell stories and create fictions that permit widespread cooperation in a way other species can't. And what you count as fiction ranges all the way from early mythology to the Constitution of the United States of America.

I wouldn't have connected that to the way meditation changes what you see as real, but it makes sense that if you're observing the way your mind creates imaginary stories, maybe much more ends up falling into that category than you originally thought.

Yes, exactly. We seldom realize it, but all large-scale human cooperation is based on fiction. This is most clear in the case of religion, especially other people's religion. You can easily understand that, yes, millions of people come together to cooperate in a crusade or a jihad or to build the cathedral or a synagogue because all of them believe some fictional story about God and heaven and hell.

What is much more difficult to realize is that exactly the same dynamic operates in all other kinds of human cooperation. If you think about human rights, human rights are a fictional story just like God and heaven. They are not a biological reality. Biologically speaking, humans don't have rights. If you take Homo sapiens and look inside, you find the heart and the kidneys and the DNA. You don't find any rights. The only place rights exist is in the stories that people have been inventing.

Another very good example is money. Money is probably the most successful story ever told. It has no objective value. It's not like a banana or a coconut. If you take a dollar bill and look at it, you can't eat it. You can't drink it. You can't wear it. It's absolutely worthless. We think it's worth something because we believe a story. We have these master storytellers of our society, our shamans they are the bankers and the financiers and the chairperson of the Federal Reserve, and they come to us with this amazing story that, "You see this green piece of paper? We tell you that it is worth one banana."

If I believe it and you believe it and everybody believes it, it works. It actually works. I can take this worthless piece of paper, go to a complete stranger who I never met before, give him this piece of paper, and he in exchange will give me a real banana that I can eat.

This is really amazing, and no other animal can do it. Other animals sometimes trade. Chimpanzees, for example, they trade. You give me a coconut. I'll give you a banana. That can work with a chimpanzee, but you give me a worthless piece of paper and you expect me to give you a banana? That will never work with a chimpanzee.

This is why we control the world, and not the chimpanzees.

But there are ways in which those stories create fragility, too. You take something like the 2008-09 financial crisis. What happened there was the global financial markets had told themselves a story. They had told themselves a story about how much risk there was, in particular subprime mortgage debt, and that story turned out to be wrong. All of a sudden, they had to tell themselves a different story, and then all the stories built on that story collapsed stories about how stocks in the lumber industry would do, and how many people would have jobs in a year. And eventually that changed reality.

A fragility here is when you begin to mistake your stories for reality, and you overestimate both their permanence and how difficult it would be for them to be changed or moved.

Yes, it goes both ways. Because it is based on stories, human society is far more flexible and dynamic than any other society on earth, and at the same time, it's also far more fragile.

Think, for example, about revolutions. Among other animals, it's very difficult to change the social system overnight. It's almost impossible. If you think about, for example, a beehive, the bees have had their social system for millions and millions of years, and they cannot change it unless through a very slow and very complicated process of natural selection and evolution. The bees cannot just wake up one morning, execute the queen bee, and establish a communist dictatorship of worker bees.

But among humans, we do have such social revolutions. Exactly a century ago, 1917, you had the communist revolution in Russia, where the revolutionaries executed the czar and established a completely different social system in Russia within a few years just by changing the story Russians believed. They no longer believed in the divine right of the czar. Instead, they now believed that authority comes from the workers, from the people.

This is why every society invests so much effort in propaganda and brainwashing people from a very early age to believe in the dominant story of the society, because if they don't believe, everything collapses.

Before we leave the topic of meditation, I read that you do routinely 60-day retreats. That is an experience that I cannot imagine, so I would love to hear what those are like for you and what role they serve in your life.

First of all, it's very difficult. You don't have any distractions, you don't have television, you don't have emails, no phones, no books. You don't write. You just have every moment to focus on what is really happening right now, on what is reality. You come across the things you don't like about yourself, things that you don't like about the world, that you spend so much time ignoring or suppressing.

You start with the most basic bodily sensations of the breath coming in and out, of sensations in your stomach, in your legs, and as you connect to that, you gain the ability to really observe what's happening. You get clarity with regard to what's happening in your mind. You cannot really observe anger or fear or boredom if you cannot observe your breath. Your breath is so much easier than observing your anger or your fear.

People want to understand their anger, to understand their fear. But they think that observing the breath, oh, this is not important at all. But if you can't observe something as obvious and as simple as the breath coming in and out, you have absolutely no chance of really observing your anger, which is far more stormy and far more difficult.

What happens along the 60 days is that as your mind becomes more focused and more clear, you go deeper and deeper, and you start seeing the sources of where all this anger is coming from, where all this fear is coming from, and you just observe. You don't try to do anything. You don't tell any stories about your anger. You don't try to fight it. Just observe. What is anger? What is boredom? You live sometimes for years and years and years experiencing anger and fear and boredom every day, and you never really observe, how does it actually feel to be angry? Because you're too caught up in the angry.

The 60 days of meditation, they give you the opportunity. You can have a wave of anger, and sometimes it can last for days and you just, for days, you do nothing. You just observe. What is anger? How does it actually feel in the body? What is actually happening in my mind when I am angry? This is the most amazing thing that I've ever observed, is really to observe these internal phenomena.

It impresses me that you have the presence or the commitment to continue doing this. Sapiens was an international runaway best-seller. It's a huge hit in Silicon Valley. When I had Bill Gates on this podcast, he recommended Sapiens to me and to the audience. Mark Zuckerberg has talked about Sapiens. Barack Obama has talked about Sapiens. I imagine the demands of your time, the speaking engagements, the paid speaking engagements, the conferences and meetings that you get invited to now, I'm sure there's vastly more than you can do. I'm curious if your relationship to meditation has changed at all in the past couple of years after your success.

There is always temptation to take another speaking engagement or another conference, but I'm very disciplined about it because I know this is the really important stuff. This is the source of my scientific success, so when I plan the year in advance, the first thing I do is I already know that in 2017 I'm going from the 15th of October to the 15th of December to India to sit at a 60-day meditation retreat. That's the first thing I put in the schedule. Everything else has to be arranged around that. It was the same last year in 2016.

Actually I heard about Trumps election only on the 20th of January, because this is when I came out of the retreat. I entered in early November, and I missed the elections. As I said, you have absolutely no distractions. You have no connections with the outside world, no emails, no television, no nothing, so you don't know what's happening on the outside, but what's happening on the inside is so interesting.

Beyond the two hours of meditation you do daily, how do you structure the information you receive during the day? How do you separate what is real and important and what is ephemera or mere stories?

I try to set my own agenda and not to allow technology to set the agenda for me. I tend to read books, long books, rather than short passages or tweets. I think another thing that has happened over the last century is that we have moved from an information scarcity to a deluge of information. Previously the main problem with information for people was that they didn't have enough of it, and there was censorship, and information was very rare and hard to obtain. Now it's just the opposite. We are inundated by immense amounts of information.

We really lose control of our attention. Our attention is hijacked by all kinds of external forces. For me, not just in meditation, but when I work, I try to be very, very disciplined with my attention not to allow external forces to take control of my attention.

It's surprising to me how much context this gives me for Homo Deus. To give a very capsule summary of the book, you're arguing that human beings used to have a society centered around stories about God. They moved to one in the last couple hundred years centered around stories about human beings. And now they're moving to one that is centered around stories about data.

To the degree that we will be honored for our contributions to society, you say it will be for the contribution we make to the data streams that various computer-assisted algorithms are using to generate value and create production. I felt, reading the book, that that scenario looks more plausible to you than it does to me, but perhaps it is because you are stepping a little bit further out of the daily cacophony, and so the change and the degree to which everybody is obsessed and immersed in a lot of data all of the time is more clear.

Yeah, I think it's a very good summary of the new book. The way that I live influences the way I think, and hopefully the conclusions I reach in my research fit back into the way that I live because just to reach a theoretical conclusion that has no influence on how you actually live, what's the point?

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Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens, on how meditation made him a better historian - Vox

Meditationprovides investors with many benefits. Below are meditation tips from the newly releasedMeditation Guide for Investment Professionals, the full version of which isavailable online for CFA Institute members.

The initial installment of this series offeredgeneral tips to help with almost any meditation practice.

The focus in this edition is open-monitoring meditation. Why? Because the world has gone mindfulness crazy in the last several years, and mindfulness is a common termfor open-monitoring meditation.

Open monitoring has a long secular history and has been the most widely and statistically researched form of meditation.

The descriptor open-monitoring comes from the scientific literature that seeks to classify meditation styles. Many similar meditation practices go by different names. In addition to mindfulness, open-monitoring meditation may also be called insight meditation, Shamatha, or Vipassana.

One thing to remember: Open-monitoring meditation is basic to its individual meditation style. There are more comprehensive techniques scaled to the experience of the meditator. After all, meditation has thousands of years of documented history, and the depth of individual practices can be enormous. A parallel: Beginning research analysts dont start off learning trinomial options pricing models. Rather they receive an overview of financial theory, including arbitrage. Then they may proceed on to probability theory, Black-Scholes, binomial trees, and so on.

So it is with basic open-monitoring meditation. Think of it as one of the initial and critical steps to developing a robust meditation practice.

The scholarship provided below and in each of the forthcoming articles on meditation types isderived from the combined research efforts of neuroscientists, psychologists, and practitioners.

Open-Monitoring Meditation

What It Is:Open-monitoring meditation seeks to cultivate metacognition,a state of consciousness innate to every person. What is metacognition? The awareness of awareness itself. Those who achieve it describe it as the development of a purely objective witness consciousness that has the ability to watch all of the rest of their mental processes with non-attachment.

Non-attachment is a Western attempt to translate a specific meditation term for which there is no exact corollary. Non-attachment is nonjudgmental awareness that borders on pure objectivity. Put another way, non-attachment minimizes subjectivity. It is different from detachment, which is active disengagement from something. Non-attachment is similar to readiness. Hopefully, as investment professionals, we understand the benefit of minimizing subjectivity as we each strive to see the world for what it is, rather than what we prefer it to be.

Metacognition is cultivated, enhanced, and improved through meditation. Open monitoring asks that practitioners focus their awareness on the present moment rather than on mental distractions. Practitioners should accept their stray thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations without judgment. Eventually, with practice, their consciousness achievestotal awareness of their thoughts rather than just being lost in in those thoughts.

Mindfulness has been transformed into many formal training programs that you may have heard of, including the well-known Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).

Benefits

Among the many reported benefits of open-monitoring meditation are stress relief, better thinking, increased emotional intelligence, and the ability to overcome mental biases.

Steps

Below are steps for a generalized open-monitoring meditation.It may be useful to read these instructions into your smartphones Voice Notes function so that you can create your own guided meditation with your preferred pacing and duration.

In the next installment, the topic will be focused awareness meditation, which in technique is nearly opposite to open monitoring.

If you engage in this practice, feel free to share your experience in the comments section.

If you are a CFA Institute member and would like more information or support about meditation, then join our LinkedIn CFA Institute Members Meditation Group.

If you liked this post, dont forget to subscribe to the Enterprising Investor.

All posts are the opinion of the author. As such, they should not be construed as investment advice, nor do the opinions expressed necessarily reflect the views of CFA Institute or the authors employer.

Image credit: Getty Images/Kaligraf

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Meditation Tips for Investment Professionals: Open-Monitoring Meditation - CFA Institute Enterprising Investor (blog)

RANCHO SANTA FE Dr. Richard Scotti led a talk on meditation at the Rancho Santa Fe Library sharing how when individuals take part in it they have the ability to achieve happiness and peace in their own lives. During the Feb. 15 lecture, Scotti shared how when someone enters a place of quiet, it is also serves as a passageway to a completely different universe.

According to Scotti, having knowledge and wisdom can be attained when passing through that element of quiet. And that way is through mediation.

Scotti also noted how the world is dualistic.

When we want something to have or not to have we call it a desire, he said. Whenever we have a desire it creates a duality.

Scotti explained that the whole purpose of meditation was to allow things to go by and not react to them. Energy dissipates when a person learns to become non-reactive to it.

So what happens is when you sit for meditation for half an hour then your whole film strip of your chores for the day is taken out. The ends are put back together and you really are living a different way, he said. When you sit without reacting to have or not to have, youre nullifying the comic reaction; and, that nullification is like taking the filmstrip of your drama for the day and taking a chunk out of it and putting it back together so all of your relationships from then on are different.

Scotti compared it to shifting ones life from that amount of time describing it as pretty unbelievable. When one comes out of meditation their timeframe has shifted. For those with a complicated life, Scotti said how meditation will make their life more to their liking.

When youre calm, then your universe becomes calm because weve projected our emotions on our universe, he said. We see what we project.

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Scotti lectures on meditation The Coast News Group - Coast News

Theres a lot of confusion about Zen meditation, breath counting, just sitting, and koan introspection.

Zen teacher Dosho Ports talk, the Three Ways of Zen Meditation lays it out as well as Ive seen.

Out of my years of practice and study, I feel much of what is presented about Zen meditation is not very helpful. This talk, however, is about as clear an exposition of what I understand to be the discipline, presented clearly, and compassionately. The talk itself is about twenty-five minutes long, the balance is a question and answer section, which is also worth listening to.

The Reverends Dosho Port and Tetsugan Zummach guide the Nebraska Zen Center in Omaha, where they are co-conspiring to bring wisdom and compassion into the world.

If you find yourself in their neighborhood, you might consider dropping in and seeing whats going on. Well, obviously theres a lot of Zen meditation happening. But, something rich and powerful is going on along with all that meditation. I believe in the Heartland something a spiritual earthquake is shaking the very foundations of the world. And the epicenter may well be at that center.

Worth checking out.

And as long as were at it, at no extra charge I throw in a talk by Port Roshi. Its a bit older, and delivered before he and Tetsugan came to Nebraska, but it gives a pretty good sense of the roshis style as well as the breadth and depth of his teaching.

Go here to read the rest:

Zen teacher Dosho Port on the Three Ways of Zen Meditation - Patheos (blog)

Summary: Participants will have access to a list of music teachers located in various neighbourhoods where they can learn music further. Very soon, the Para team intends to head to various schools and colleges and highlight the advantages of learning music and meditation and their link to improve concentration level. Sangeetam (music) and dhyanam (meditation) are the two key components that keep ones mind stress-free. In a step towards bringing music and meditation closer to ones heart and making them an integral part of life, a campaign -- Para the supreme -- has been launched by Carnatic vocalist Pantula Rama along with her disciples in the city. A team of experts will train the participants in Sapta swaras-- seven notes of music and simplest way to meditate.

In a step towards bringing music and meditation closer to ones heart and making them an integral part of life, a campaign -- Para the supreme -- has been launched by Carnatic vocalist Pantula Rama along with her disciples in the city. Terming the objectives of Para a well-designed ones to draw the attention of people from all sections and introduce them to the domain of arts, Dr. Pantula Rama says a plethora of activities form a part it. The first step in line with the project is Swachh Swar, a two-day learning camp, which will be organised on March 3 and 4. A team of experts will train the participants in Sapta swaras-- seven notes of music and simplest way to meditate. While meditation techniques will be taught by Gopala Krishna, founder and CEO of Spiritual Tablets Research Foundation, I will impart basic concepts of music to the participants along with my disciples.

Sangeetam (music) and dhyanam (meditation) are the two key components that keep ones mind stress-free. The prime focus is to enable people learn, recognise, sing swaras and experiment with subtle variations. When you learn to sing and meditate in an appropriate manner, you are sure to strike a harmonious chord in life, Dr.

Source: http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Visakhapatnam/taking-meditation-music-closer-to-people/article17386344.ece

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Taking meditation, music closer to people - NYOOOZ

ROCKLAND On Thursday, March 2, from 6:30 to 8 p.m., Rockland Public Library and the Rockland Shambhala Meditation Center will present an evening talk "Why Meditate?" with shastri Christopher St. John. The program, which is free and open to the public, will take place at the Library.

St. John will open with a discussion about the benefits of meditation and a synopsis of the most common reasons people have undertaken meditation throughout history. He will introduce the Shambhala Buddhist teachings on basic goodness and mindfulness-awareness, as well as share a brief history of the Shambhala lineage. After a discussion of these topics, St. John will provide instruction on shamatha meditation; there will be time to practice and reflect on the experience together.

St. John has been meditating in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition since 1982, and he has been resident director of Shambhala Training at the Brunswick-Portland Shambhala Center since 1995. He was named shastri, or senior teacher, by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche in 2016.

The Rockland Shambhala Meditation Center is affiliated with the Brunswick-Portland Shambhala Center, as well as Shambhala International, a nonprofit organization with more than 200 Shambhala Meditation Centers worldwide. Chogyam Trunga Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist master, founded Shambhala in the United States in 1970.

For more information, visit maineshambhala.org or contact Rachel Nixon at rachelanixon@gmail.com or 594-1694.

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Why meditate? ... with Shastri Christopher St. John - PenBayPilot.com