If you name your emotions, you can tame them, according to new research that suggests why meditation works.
Brain scans show that putting negative emotions into words calms the brain’s emotion center. That could explain meditation’s purported emotional benefits, because people who meditate often label their negative emotions in an effort to ‘let them go.’
Psychologists have long believed that people who talk about their feelings have more control over them, but they don’t know why it works.
Tagmeditation
A Thai Buddhist monk cut off his penis with a machete because he had an erection during meditation and declined to have it reattached, saying he had renounced all earthly cares, a doctor and a newspaper said on Wednesday.
The 35-year-old monk, whose name was withheld for privacy reasons, allowed medical staff at Maharaj hospital, 780 km (480 miles) south of Bangkok to dress his wound, but refused reattachment, hospital chief Prawing Euanontouch said.
Full Story: Reuters (thanks, Trevor).
This looks like a good program of study – basically a condensed version of Hyatt’s “energized meditation” (itself based on Reichian therapy). I’d recommend doing this in tandem with some strenuous exercise (doing this every day along with martial arts seems ideal, but I haven’t tried it).
Nearly every tradition agrees that mastery over the body and mind precede effective spiritual development and advanced will-working. However even the most committed occultists have trouble sitting down for regular daily meditation. While intellectually magic!ians recognize the benefits of such mundane work few seem to understand the rich benefits and absolute necessity of daily body-mind work. The work is often seen as boring or lacking in purpose and worth. It is clearly time to provide fresh insights on the most basic of esoteric techniques, to demystify them and in the process make the benefits offered by basic meditation more accessible.
The passionate, sometimes rhythmic, language-like patter that pours forth from religious people who ‘speak in tongues’ reflects a state of mental possession, many of them say. Now they have some neuroscience to back them up.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania took brain images of five women while they spoke in tongues and found that their frontal lobes – the thinking, willful part of the brain through which people control what they do – were relatively quiet, as were the language centers. The regions involved in maintaining self-consciousness were active. The women were not in blind trances, and it was unclear which region was driving the behavior.
The images, appearing in the current issue of the journal Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, pinpoint the most active areas of the brain. The images are the first of their kind taken during this spoken religious practice, which has roots in the Old and New Testaments and in charismatic churches established in the United States around the turn of the 19th century. The women in the study were healthy, active churchgoers.
‘The amazing thing was how the images supported people’s interpretation of what was happening,’ said Dr. Andrew B. Newberg, leader of the study team, which included Donna Morgan, Nancy Wintering and Mark Waldman. ‘The way they describe it, and what they believe, is that God is talking through them,’ he said.
continue reading via the New York Times
Meditation is often credited with helping people feel more focused and energetic, but are the benefits measurable?
A new study suggests that they are. When researchers tested the alertness of volunteers, they found that the practice proved more effective than naps, exercise or caffeine. The results were presented at a recent conference of the Society for Neuroscience.
(via Danny Chaoflux)
Kylark is explains it thusly:
Sit in an alert but not uncomfortable position. I sit in a chair, feet flat on the floor, palms on my lap, facing east.
Set a timer for the amount of time you’d like to meditate. I recommend 12-15 minutes if you’re just starting.
Close your eyes.
Pay attention to your breath.
Notice your thoughts and sensations as they arise, but let them go. If you notice your mind wandering or your body becoming uncomfortable, silently name those states (‘thinking,’ ‘itching’) and gently return your attention to your breath.
That’s it!
Excellent!
Channel Null’s got a great post up exploring different concepts of enlightenment, and finds them both lacking. Towards the end he begins to explore the politics of enlightenment:
If any agenda comes out of transcendental practice, it feels outright fascistic. … Years sitting on a meditation mat, practicing mantra, making offerings and bargaining with all manner of strange spirit tend to give one a disposition against any manner of whining or weakness. While this may just take the form of tough love, it may also split off into fascistic wonderland.
This is a great point. There seems to be a tendency for people who are too far into their own magical or spiritual kick to begin ignoring the suffering of others and claim that the suffering of the world need to find the utopia in their minds and let go of their materialism, or whatever. “Let them eat enlightenment.”
The full story’s at Dark Science and Infernal Art, and is well worth reading. However, I’m going to go off on a tangent here.
One thing that’s really bothering me about ceremonial magical practice is the “control” mind-set of it. The goal is to take these entitities (be they psychological, or “real”) – angels, demons, and other spirits – and force them to do your bidding, generally by “binding” them in some way. That whole approach seems very flawed to me.
Equally flawed is the other end of the spectrum, worshiping and begging and sacrificing to a god form.
To draw analogies from the material plane: what motivates you to do things for people? Most of us would be happy to lend a neighbor a cup of sugar. But most of us would be happy to give a neighbor we’ve never met a cup of sugar if they asked. But we wouldn’t be happy about someone coming over and forcefully taking a cup of sugar. And we would probably be pretty weirded out if someone showed up and groveling at your feet and begging for sugar. Nor would we be happy with a neighbor who comes over all the time asking for small favors like cups of sugar, but never offeres to return the favor, and doesn’t make any effort to be social with you.
We’d find some way to deal with someone who stole from us on a regular basis (maybe through the police, maybe just getting together a group of friends, or maybe just sneaking into their place and stealing something of greater value. And as for creepy or annoying people who want favors from us, well we’d probabably start to avoid and ignore them. On a long term basis, the only people we’ll really be giving gifts to or doing favors for, are our friends. People we have relationships with.
I don’t know enough about other traditions to know if this is the case elsewhere, but that’s what really bugs me about the “western esoteric tradition.” A lack of emphasis on building relationships with the intelligences we invoke or evoke.
From a Yale University press release:
Meditation is known to alter resting brain patterns, suggesting long lasting brain changes, but a new study by researchers from Yale, Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows meditation also is associated with increased cortical thickness.
The structural changes were found in areas of the brain that are important for sensory, cognitive and emotional processing, the researchers report in the November issue of NeuroReport.
Although the study included only 20 participants, all with extensive training in Buddhist Insight meditation, the results are significant, said Jeremy Gray, assistant professor of psychology at Yale and co-author of the study led by Sara Lazar, assistant in psychology at Massachusetts General Hospital.
EurekAlert: Meditation associated with increased grey matter in the brain
Metachor’s overview of two new studies, one on meditation and the other on non-local consciousness:
Hypothetically, clusters of individuals with similar EM shifts result in ionic feedback, that is, individuals’ EM dynamics come to resonate with each other through similar patterns of ionized molecules surrounding the group. When this process occurs on the order of thousands or millions of individuals, perhaps the EM vibration resonates with the ionosphere, carrying the signal across the globe near instantly.
Full Story: Vortex Egg: Non-local Consciousness, Synchrony, Meditation and Resonance
“The cover of the book was rubbed with a patina made from lamp black, Yakskin glue, and brains. It was burnished to a gloss and inscribed with an ink made from crushed pearls and silver.” That is a description of the one of the Tibetan monastic manuscripts, or pothi, that Jim Canary discussed in his recent presentation, “The Tibetan Book: From Pothi to Pixels and Back Again,” at The Changing Book Conference (University of Iowa). Pothi were originally made of palm leaves. They are up to four feet in length and thin in shape; consisting of loose leaves in cloth covers pressed between wooden boards. They are sometimes housed in wooden boxes that resemble child-sized coffins. The Tibetan pothi are stored in long, narrow pigeon holes built into the walls surrounding the chanting area of the temple. Jim showed us a picture of these impressive libraries, with ceilings so high, the walls, and their overstuffed catacombs, disappear into darkness.
Jim Canary has over sixty of hours of video, taken during his trips to Tibet, documenting the monastic printing process. He plans to edit and publish the video as a CD Rom in tandem with a print book. He showed us some selections, which I do not have, so I will do my best to describe them. Video #1: a man sits on the stone steps outside the temple. There are two tall stacks of paper next to him and a bowl of water in front of him. He is preparing the paper for printing, taking one sheet from the top of the pile, passing it through a pan of water and placing it on top of the other pile. He has hundreds of sheets to dampen, so he is working in a brisk rhythmic manner. When he’s finished, the stack will be pressed between two wooden blocks. Video #2: printing takes place in a building across from the temple. The printing is done in teams of two. One man holds the hand-carved wooden block and prepares it with ink. His partner places each damp sheet on the wooden block for burnishing, then removes it and sets it aside to dry. The men work quickly in tandem, surrounded by the music of monks chanting in the temple next door. The tone and rhythm of the chant matches the rhythm of their work. It is designed to correspond with the heart beat, and it works to knit all participants together into a single, metaphorical “body” which is, in turn, joined to all humanity through the meditation. The result of all this unity is a book, shaped like a body, which will be housed, along with hundreds of others, in the temple walls.
Mr. Canary’s presentation was also about the future of these mystical books, which are being cataloged, preserved, reproduced and distributed using digital technology. Some monks are now working on laptops, transcribing text and burning DVDs. Here is an excerpt from a poem written by one of the monks in praise of digital materials, which, in his eyes, are as exquiste as a patina made from lamp black, Yakskin glue, and brains, burnished to a gloss and inscribed with an ink made from crushed pearls and silver are to me.
?The light of the disk is endless
like the light of the disks in the sky, sun and moon.With a single push of our finger on a button
We pull up the shining gems of text??Gelek Rinpoche
via Boing Boing and if:book
© 2025 Technoccult
Theme by Anders Norén — Up ↑