Meditating figures in Helsinki

Meditating figures in Helsinki
Ten Ways To Keep Your Parents From Moving In With You That You Never Thought Of
Habits: A Simple Change in Mindset Changes Everything
Early Morning Spiritual Consciousness Inspiration - 6/13/2013
The Dhammapada: “one of the greatest psychological works ever written”
Internalizing the seeker and the teacher
Religion: believing we know more than we really do
The power of gratitude
Transcendental meditation may boost student gra
Transcendental meditation may boost student gra
Transcendental meditation may boost student gra
Transcendental meditation may boost student gra
Transcendental meditation may boost student gra
Transcendental meditation may boost student gra
Transcendental meditation may boost student gra
Transcendental meditation may boost student gra
Transcendental meditation may boost student gra

Posted: 13 Jun 2013 11:00 AM PDT

Rafael Saifulin, "Onni"

Rafael Saifulin, "Onni." Photographed in Helsinki by Donald Farmer.

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Ten Ways To Keep Your Parents From Moving In With You That You Never Thought Of

Posted: 13 Jun 2013 09:00 AM PDT

One side effect of the recent recession has been young adults moving back in with their parents, or not being able to move out at all after college because they can't find a job.

Those who have successfully flown the coop can face a different problem—parents who want to move in with them. There can be numerous reasons for this. Maybe the folks have financial difficulties and lose their house, or one party dies, leaving the other unable to take care of the family home alone.

Some older people suffer from empty nest syndrome after all the kids grow up and move out, or become lonely and depressed from being alone.

For whatever reason, one or both of your parents may decide they want to move in with you. If this is the last thing you want, you'll need to think ahead and have ways to counteract their plan with one of your own. Before I get into the list I should note that my parents mean a lot to me. These are just some creative ways that may come in handy if you find yourself having this discussion with your parents.

By Leo Babauta

One of the best tricks I've learned to improve my likelihood of sticking to a habit is so simple it's sinful.

Stop thinking of a new habit as something you have to do, but as something you are allowed to do.

Let's say you're starting a workout. Many people think, "OK, I gotta do this. It's good for me, I'm way too lazy, I need to burn off my fat, if I do this I'll feel better about myself." This is wrong, because then the workout is a chore you have to get through to get the benefits, and so you struggle through this boring, hard, sucky thing in order to get to the goal.

Instead, you can simply think, "I'm allowing myself to do this. It's a treat."

And it is. A workout can be a lovely thing, where you feel your body moving, you push against the forces of gravity, you triumph despite the difficulty, you get fresh air and gorgeous nature and you are treating your body and being good to it. This is a rare treat.

Once you shift from "have to" to "allowed to", you now feel good about the activity. It's not a chore, but a treat. It's not something you struggle through to get the benefit — it is the benefit.

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Early Morning Spiritual Consciousness Inspiration - 6/13/2013

Posted: 13 Jun 2013 07:00 AM PDT

"You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection."

~The Buddha

Technorati Tags: Buddha Buddhist Buddhism Meditation Dharma

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The Dhammapada: “one of the greatest psychological works ever written”

Posted: 13 Jun 2013 01:00 AM PDT

Dhammapada Fronsdal The Dhammapada, translated by Gil Fronsdal. Available from Amazon.Jonathan Haidt, who studies morality and emotion, at the NYU-Stern School of Business, discusses the Meditation classic, The Dhammapada, on Five Books:

The Dhammapada is one of the greatest psychological works ever written, and certainly one of the greatest before 1900. It is masterful in its understanding of the nature of consciousness, and in particular the way we are always striving and never satisfied. You can turn to it – and people have turned to it throughout the ages – at times of trouble, at times of disappointment, at times of loss, and it takes you out of yourself. It shows you that your problems, your feelings, are just timeless manifestations of the human condition. It also gives specific recommendations for how to deal with those problems, which is to let go, to accept, and to work on yourself. So I think this is a kind of tonic that we ambitious Westerners often need to hear.

Is there a specific saying that you particularly like?

There are two big ideas that I found especially useful when I wrote The Happiness Hypothesis. One is an idea common to most great intellectual traditions. The quote is: 'All that we are arises with our thoughts, with our thoughts we make the world.' It's not unique to Buddha, but it is one of the earliest statements of that idea, that we need to focus on changing our thoughts, rather than making the world conform to our wishes.

The other big idea is that the mind is like a rider on an elephant. Buddha uses this metaphor: 'My own mind used to wander wherever pleasure or desire or lust led it, but now I have it tamed, I guide it, as the keeper guides the wild elephant.' That's the most important idea in The Happiness Hypothesis – I just adapted the metaphor slightly. What modern psychology shows us is that our minds are like a small rider on the back of an elephant: the rider doesn't have that much control even though he thinks that he does.

And once you accept that you are much closer to understanding happiness?

Exactly, because it helps explain why you can't just resolve to be happy. You can't just resolve to quit drinking, you can't resolve to stop and smell the flowers – because the rider does the resolving but it's the elephant that does the behaving. Once you understand the limitations of your psychology and how hard it is to change yourself, you become much more tolerant of others, because you realise how difficult it is to change anyone…

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Internalizing the seeker and the teacher

Posted: 13 Jun 2013 12:00 AM PDT

When we go to a good university, we assume that our teachers are top notch. We can trust them to be on the cutting-edge, so to speak. Eventually, many of us find out that our teachers were not so smart. Their main advantage over us, when we first began our class, is they've read a lot more books on the subject than we have. These same teachers were also, at the time, better at explaining the subject.

When Buddhists say they have a 'teacher' they are assuming a great deal, perhaps too much. When I first began to study Zen with my teacher, like a tyro (which I was!) I made huge assumptions about his knowledge of Zen. He wasn't even the Buddhist equivalent of a Christian seminary graduate. What he did know is how to conduct Japanese funerals and do rituals.

Why, as beginners, we are credulous probably has more than one answer—in fact, many answers. In a way, being credulous is not a positive path to learning. It is almost being downright block headed. The only way to overcome this—and I know it sounds a bit strange—we, ourselves, have to internalize the role of teacher and student. One has to be a seeker, and a teacher who has the ability to find the adequate answer and know also what the inadequate answer is. Again, it may sound strange to say this, but we also need to cultivate our non-knowledge of Buddhism so as to ask the right questions, hopefully, to find the adequate answer. In this respect, an external teacher is of limited help. Some can point the Way, others are not so good at it.

The only advantage with having a teacher (and it's really no long term advantage), we can defer our lack of wisdom to our teacher. He alone knows everything about Buddhism; we know nothing. This is a dangerous position to fall into. One can easily become a Zen center Buddhist who has reverence for the teacher but much less reverence for the Buddha's words even though the Buddha is supposed to be the supreme teacher. This situation easily becomes a cult.

It really means nothing to have a Buddhist teacher if all one can manage to do is sit on a zafu, do a ritual or two, and have little or no background knowledge in the Buddha's discourses which includes the Nikayas, the Agamas, and also Mahayana Sutras. Following and defering our ignorance of Buddhism to a teacher, really not learning anything of what the Buddha actually taught, leads inevitably to failure.

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Religion: believing we know more than we really do

Posted: 12 Jun 2013 11:00 PM PDT

My wife and I are enjoying "Brain Games," a National Geographic channel program about how the brain works.

Every episode features exercises that viewers can take part in. An episode we watched a few nights ago was called What You Don't Know. Short answer: a lot.

But most of us mistakenly believe that we know more than we really do. So says a summary of that episode:

Bet you could explain something as basic as how a zipper works? Or correctly draw something as simple as a bicycle? If you said yes, you likely bet wrong... but don't worry it's not just you! When you stop and think about it, you're probably not that aware of all of the things you don't understand.

The fact is we go through our daily lives feeling pretty confident in our knowledge and understanding of the world, but that confidence is mostly an illusion. In this episode of Brain Games, we'll show you firsthand just how the "illusion of knowledge" plagues the human brain and why we fall victim, again and again, to the notion that we understand more than we actually do.

Seemingly evolutionary pressures have been a balancing act. Early humans who weren't sufficiently in touch with reality didn't live long enough to reproduce. So their reality-denying genes were lost.

However, too much pondering -- "Hmmmm... what is true and what is false?... is that really a tiger in the bushes or a rabbit rustling around?... I feel like running away, but I'm not sure if this factually is the right thing to do..." -- that can be a ticket to an early grave also.

The Brain Games host explained that we need to feel sure about our knowledge, or we wouldn't have the confidence to act decisively. Doing something often is preferable to analysis paralysis.

Still, the point of What You Don't Know was to provide research-based insights into our tendency to be overly confident that what we think we know, truly is true. Sure, it's good to act decisively.

Davy Crockett famously said, "Be always sure you're right, then go ahead!" Problem is, usually we aren't sure that we're right, yet we still go ahead. This, of course, explains why religions are so appealing.

They feed into our craving for illusory certainty. We're much more bothered by feeling "I don't know," than by feeling "I could be wrong." So when in doubt we choose, "Don't doubt."

Again, this is natural. Probably can't be avoided. It's just good to recognize that even in the midst of acting with a feeling I know what I'm doing, we might be wrong. Maybe really wrong.

David Chapman, one of my favorite writers/bloggers, addresses a similar subject in "I get duped by eternalism in a casino." Well worth a read. Here's some excerpts:

I upped my bet from one to five cents—and won again.

As I consistently won more than I lost, I was gradually suffused with a warm glow. I felt safe and at home in the world. What a blessed relief!

I realized that the universe loved me, and that everything was going to come out well after all. My ever-present nagging sense of vague wrongness disappeared, and I recognized that it had always been a misunderstanding. Everything is as it should be; everything is connected; everything makes sense; everything is benevolently watched over by the eternal ordering principle.

This was eternalism straight-up, purely at a bodily, felt level.

I'm disposed to nihilism; so, at the same time, I was running a sardonic mental commentary. The cognitive dissonance between feeling unquestioned confidence in the All-Good Cosmic Plan, and my intellectual confidence that casino operators ensure that their slot machines are a losing bet, was extremely funny. That humorousness fed back into my bodily enjoyment.

It didn't take long to conclude that I had gained all the knowledge I had asked for, and far more. The universe, in its infinite generosity, had gifted me with profound insight.

...Actually, winning thirty-seven cents was not going to make a such a big difference in my life.

Discovering universal love would. That was a really great feeling. Experiencing that all the time—the way some mystics supposedly do—would be fabulous.

That sense of safety, understanding, and certainty could be addictive. I think that's part of why we all frequently fall into the eternalist stance—even when we know better.

Eternalism feels right—absolutely right. And when we lose it, we'll do almost anything to get it back. We'll pretend not to see obvious randomness, and take up arms to destroy evidence of it.

"Patternicity" is the brain's built-in tendency to perceive patterns that don't exist. An example is the experience of seeing a face in the light and dark patches on a rock, or splotch of paint, or piece of toast. It's often impossible to not-see them, even when you are undeceived, and know perfectly well there's no face there.

Eternalism is patternicity for broad dimensions of meaning—purpose, value, ethics—rather than physical objects.

Our brains seem to have evolved to find patterns of meaning, too. In the casino, the intellectual understanding that my feelings were ridiculous did not make them any less profound. Runs of unexpected good or bad luck trigger the eternalist stance automatically.

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The power of gratitude

Posted: 12 Jun 2013 10:00 PM PDT

100 Days of Lovingkindness Robert A. Emmons, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, the founding editor-in-chief of The Journal of Positive Psychology, the author of Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier, and is the world's leading scientific expert on gratitude. And he's written a lot about the benefits of gratitude.

Gratitude is, of course, an important aspect of joyful appreciation, or mudita, which is the practice that we're exploring at the moment as part of our 100 Days of Lovingkindness. So let's take a look at how gratitude can enhance our lives.

Gratitude enhances positive emotions. Emmons points out, as I have elsewhere, that we quickly habituate to pleasant circumstances, and that our positive emotions tend to wear off quickly. We're wired as novelty seekers, and while we may celebrate some new development in our lives — a nice spell of weather, returning to health after an illness — the enjoyment quickly wears off, and we're left with the existential "meh" that is so familiar to many of us. But when we consciously practice gratitude, we appreciate its benefits and are less likely to take it for granted. We find that we celebrate the many ways that goodness is woven into the fabric of life, and that we feel more joyful and engaged.
"Gratitude blocks toxic, negative emotions, such as envy, resentment, regret — emotions that can destroy our happiness," Emmons says, using language almost identical to Buddhist teachers of the last 2,500 years. He points to research suggesting that gratitude reduces the frequency and duration of period of depression, and that people who are more grateful are less prone to envy and resentment. And this is exactly what we'd expect; resentment and envy are the direct emotional opposites of joyful appreciation. If you're experiencing appreciation and gratitude, it's impossible to feel envious or resentful at the same time.
Gratitude protects against stress. People who tend to be grateful bounce back more quickly from adverse circumstances, loss, suffering, and injury. They're more emotionally resilient. Their ability to seek the good prevents them from focusing too much on the negative in situations. Someone who's of a grateful disposition who suffers a disability is more likely to focus on the things they can do rather than to dwell on the things they can no longer do.
Grateful people have a higher sense of self-worth. When we lack gratitude, we're more likely to think that the world is against us, that nothing is going right in our lives, that we're not worth much. Gratitude makes those kinds of cognitive distortions less likely. When we're grateful we value what we have rather than focusing on what we don't have. We may feel grateful just for being, for having air to breathe. We recognize that even when some things are not going the way we want them to, the vast majority of circumstances are conspiring to support us. When we look at ourselves, we appreciate our own qualities, and see someone who is basically loved and supported by the universe.

I'd add to this that gratitude is a powerful reinforcer of social connections. People love to be appreciated and rejoiced in. When we expression our gratitude and appreciation of others, we cement powerful bonds, and feel connected. Those social connections are not only of practical benefit — people who like us are more likely to help us, but those people are more likely to be there for us emotionally. And feeling that we're a part of a rich social network, which is more likely if we're grateful to others, helps us to feel less alone with our problems. Studies have shown that feelings of isolation are actually as damaging for our health as cigarette smoking, so feeling connected to others provides valuable benefits to our physical and mental health.

Traditionally there are eleven benefits for the one who practices gratitude: "Happily he sleeps; happily he awakes; he does not see bad dreams; he is dear to humans; he is dear to non-humans; deities protect him; fire, poison, sword and stick come not near him; he concentrates his mind quickly; the colour of his face is pleasingly bright; at the time of death he is not bewildered; if he attains not the sublime state, he is reborn in the world of Brahma."

I can't vouch for your having a good rebirth as a result of practicing gratitude, but I do know that it will help you be healthier and happier.

PS. You can see all of our 100 Days of Lovingkindness posts here.

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Transcendental meditation may boost student gra

Posted: 12 Jun 2013 09:00 PM PDT

Transcendental meditation may boost student gra

Posted: 12 Jun 2013 08:00 PM PDT

Transcendental meditation may boost student gra

Posted: 12 Jun 2013 07:00 PM PDT

Transcendental meditation may boost student gra

Posted: 12 Jun 2013 07:00 PM PDT

Transcendental meditation may boost student gra