health

by Ram Yellow Leaves by Melina Meza Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an irreversible, progressive neuro-degenerative disease that is characterized by severe memory loss, unusual behavior, personality changes and a decline in thinking abilities. Death of neurons in key parts of the brain harms memory, thinking, and behavior. Neuronal death in the hippocampus area of the brain triggers short-term memory failure, and often the person's ability to do familiar tasks begins to decline as well. Alzheimer's disease also attacks areas of the cerebral cortex responsible for functions such as language and reasoning. Thus AD patients gradually lose language skills and judgment. Personality changes, emotional outbursts and disturbing behavior, such as wandering and agitation, appear and can happen more and more often as the disease runs its course. People with AD eventually require comprehensive care, so the disease presents a considerable problem in patient management. It is believed that t...

by Nina   Lake Tahoe by Melina Meza �Nonetheless, the current finding is the first to clearly show the power of meditation to increase compassionate responding to suffering, even in the face of social pressures to avoid so doing. As such, it provides scientific credence to ancient Buddhist teachings that meditation increases spontaneous compassionate behavior.� �Paul Condon, et al Just a quick heads-up today about a recent scientific study about the effects of meditation practice on compassion that was written up in last Sunday�s NY Times The Morality of Meditation . In my post Practicing Yoga Off the Mat , I wrote about my desire to cultivate compassion toward others in my life to foster better relationships. In that post, I cited Yoga Sutra 1.33 in describing my off-the-mat practice: By cultivating an attitude of friendship toward those who are happy, compassion toward those in distress, joy toward those who are virtuous, and equanimity toward those who are nonvirtuous, lucidity...

by Timothy Berries by Melina Meza In my last blog post ( Is Meditation an Essential Part of Practicing Yoga? ), I wrote about why meditation may be the most powerful tool in the yoga toolbox for improving health and well-being. Yet meditation is not part of most yoga classes, which tend to focus almost exclusively on asana. Indeed, many yoga practitioners who have become interested in meditation have looked to Buddhism or elsewhere to learn how to meditate because they weren�t finding it in the yoga world. But, as I mentioned previously, meditation was traditionally an integral part of yoga practice, and within the yoga tradition there are dozens of different techniques. Contrary to popular belief, in yogic meditation you are usually not trying to make your mind empty, but instead the process begins by learning how to concentrate your focus. To facilitate this, it helps to focus your attention on one thing, perhaps a word or phrase (a mantra), an object like a candle or a picture of a ...

by Nina Patterns in the Sand 2, by Brad Gibson Okay, I admit it. It�s probably my fault. I�ve been going around saying that you can trigger the Relaxation Response (see The Relaxation Response and Yoga ) using any of the following: restorative yoga, inverted poses, Savasana, pranayama, meditation, and yoga nidra, etc. as if all those practices were somehow interchangeable. This has led to questions like the following comment left on a Friday Q&A: Yoga Nidra, Restorative Yoga, Meditation and Savasana : It is very helpful to read the distinctions between these four practices as I try to practice all of them, but it's hard to find the time. I'd be really interested to get your thoughts on whether it's important to do all four? For example, if you do restorative while listening to a nidra CD, do you also need to meditate? I'm interested to know what the various benefits are of these four practices, or are the benefits all the same? Let me start by saying that what I sai...

by Timothy Patterns in the Sand by Brad Gibson Do you need to meditate? Can you achieve all or most of the same benefits from just practicing asana, restorative yoga, Savasana, and/or pranayama? Is it worth even trying if you feel like you're no good at it? We get questions like these at the blog from time to time, so I figured I'd tackle them today. I can't help but notice that people often talk about yoga and meditation as two separate practices. But according to Patanjali, the great codifier of yoga, meditation was an integral part of the practice. By yoga, of course, most people in the U.S. mean asana, which is why people say yoga and meditation. And since most asana classes don't include any meditation, many yoga practitioners have looked outside of yoga, often to Buddhism, if they're interested in learning more. There's nothing wrong with that, but I think people forget that the Buddha was a yogi before he became the Buddha! Meditation gets a lot of press ...