Hope amid hard time

Arriving at the Alabama maximum security prison, Jenny Phillips brought inmates three things rarely found behind bars: a movie crew, Buddha's teachings and the prospect of inner peace.

The Concord psychotherapist and first-time filmmaker offered murderers and violent criminals a reprieve from the despair of hard time and life sentences by organizing a 10-day meditation retreat in the Donaldson Correctional Facility.

Working with two meditation teachers, Phillips filmed prisoners' efforts to strip away layers of anger and self-deception to discover a calmer, better person deep within themselves.

Instructors Bruce Stewart and Jonathan Crowley taught Vipassana meditation, which required total silence throughout hours of sitting. Based on Buddha's 2,500-year-old teachings, Vipassana means to "see things as they really are" in the Pali language.

Working with inmates, Stewart and Crowley of the Vipassana Meditation Center of Shelburne Falls transformed prison space into a makeshift retreat center.

From these experiences, Phillips made "The Dhamma Brothers," a fascinating look into the hearts and even souls of violent criminals. It is a thought-provoking documentary that raises serious questions about the nature of current correctional practices.

Read more: http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/entertainment/movies/x489647519

Staring at Death, and Finding Their Bliss

As Buddhism inches toward the pop culture mainstream, practitioners are taking its tenets of mindfulness, acceptance and compassion to populations in need of spiritual guidance, namely prisons and centers for troubled youths.

Prisoners have been practicing meditation on their own through outreach programs for years. The Prison-Ashram Project began in 1973 and in 1989 the Prison Dharma Network was founded, an umbrella organization now encompassing over 100 prison volunteer groups from different Buddhist traditions. Donaldson’s 10-day course would mark the first time that an intensive retreat would be held in such a high-security prison in the United States, Ms. Phillips said.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/movies/13dhar.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

How to succeed in business: Meditate

(Fortune Magazine) -- The crowd of Harvard Business School alums who gathered at their reunion to hear networking expert Keith Ferrazzi speak earlier this summer might have expected to pick up strategies on how to work a room, remember people's names, or identify mentors. But tactical skills, it turns out, aren't what turned Ferrazzi into a bestselling author or sought-after speaker.

Instead Ferrazzi let his fellow alums in on a little secret. The key to connecting, he told the group, is "not being an a**hole." And the most effective path he's found? Meditation. Exercise and prayer work too, he said, but meditation has been so effective that he now spends ten days every year at a silent meditation retreat. In other words, the man whose latest book is "Never Eat Alone" credits much of his success to alone time.

Like Ferrazzi and Shapiro, the most intrepid corporate types gravitate toward vipassana meditation centers (the term translates to "insight"), founded by S.N. Goenka, an 83-year-old ex-Burmese businessman. Though inspired by Buddhism, Goenka centers are secular, and the introductory retreat features ten days spent in "noble silence." "It takes that much time for people to calm down," says Andrew Cherng, the chairman of Panda Restaurant Group (as in Panda Express).

Read more: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/07/23/100135590/?postversion=2007072009

Meditation may fine-tune control over attention

Everyday experience and psychology research both indicate that paying close attention to one thing can keep you from noticing something else.

However, a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests that attention does not have a fixed capacity - and that it can be improved by directed mental training, such as meditation.

The new study, which appears online May 8 in the journal PLoS Biology, examined the effects of three months of intensive training in Vipassana meditation, which focuses on reducing mental distraction and improving sensory awareness.

The research group found that three months of rigorous training in Vipassana meditation improved people's ability to detect a second target within the half-second time window. In addition, though the ability to see the first target did not change, the mental training reduced the amount of brain activity associated with seeing the first target.

Read more: http://www.news.wisc.edu/13762

Meditation Sharpens the Mind

Three months of intense training in a form of meditation known as "insight" in Sanskrit can sharpen a person's brain enough to help them notice details they might otherwise miss.

These new findings add to a growing body of research showing that millennia-old mental disciplines can help control and improve the mind, possibly to help treat conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

"Certain mental characteristics that were previously regarded as relatively fixed can actually be changed by mental training," University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson said. "People know physical exercise can improve the body, but our research and that of others holds out the prospects that mental exercise can improve minds."

Read more: http://www.livescience.com/1488-meditation-sharpens-mind.html

Buddha Battles Dragon Of Addiction At UW

That's how we'd put it. But the snorer terminology that University of Washingon researchers are using is mindfulness-based relapse prevention (MBRP). Scientists do not know how to package things, that's all. The short story is that meditation is being studied as an alternative to Christian-based 12-step programs and their higher power, says the UW Daily:

Read more: http://seattlest.com/2007/05/03/buddha_battles_dragon_of_addiction_at_uw.php

What’s New in Science

UW scientists are testing a new approach to drug and alcohol addiction treatments, called mindfulness-based relapse prevention (MBRP), which melds Buddhist meditation techniques with traditional therapeutic approaches.

Many people use drugs or alcohol to self-medicate underlying psychiatric conditions like anxiety or depression, according to an article in the April 2007 issue of the Southern Medical Journal.

“We found that the number-one trigger for relapse for people who have been through treatment for alcohol and drugs is negative emotional states,” said G. Alan Marlatt, a psychology professor and the director of the Addictive Behaviors Research Center. “If people are feeling bad, and if they’ve used drugs in the past to make themselves feel better in the short term by getting high, then, unless they’ve figured out or been taught other ways to cope with these negative emotions, they’re a big trigger.”

The MBRP program helps people cope with these emotions by teaching them Vipassana, a Buddhist meditation that emphasizes mindfulness, said Sarah Bowen, a psychology graduate student involved in the research. Mindfulness is the ability of the meditator to be “in the present moment,” observing his or her thoughts without judging them, said Neharika Chawla, another psychology graduate student who works on the treatment.

Read more: http://dailyuw.com/2007/5/2/whats-new-in-science/

Seeing things as they are

I SPENT 12 days and 11 nights in a mango orchard in Dasmariñas, Cavite this March reflecting on my miseries and learning a meditation technique to bring back the balance in my life.

I spent 10 of those precious days and nights hugging trees, picking flowers, avoiding eye contact and literally not speaking a word, eating only vegetarian meals twice everyday (no more meals after noon, just tea and fruit at 5pm) and meditating at least 8 hours a day.

I didn’t know that learning how to meditate properly would be this lonely and difficult but I was determined to do it and have been signing myself up for this 10-day course for the last 2 years so I knew what I was getting into.

Now, 14 days later, I’m happy to report that I got more than what I bargained for.

The technique I’m talking about is Vipassana meditation. The word Vipassana is a Pali term (a language spoken in Northern India during the time of Siddharta Gautama) which means “seeing things as they really are.”

The technique teaches us to use “insight” –– to look inside ourselves and how we directly experience the world and to use this to cultivate personal wisdom.

Read more: http://www.dhammaweb.net/dhamma_news/view.php?id=274

Learning equanimity: Being happy in spite of daily tragedies

You feel like the world is punishing you for all the bad things you've done in the past and has chosen this day to hand you retribution.

Can you imagine yourself staying balanced and "happy" even if everything in your day has gone absolutely wrong, such as the one above?

No way!

Ok, maybe for some loosing a wallet, a cellphone and a cat is not such a big disaster. Some people have lost more than these, in bigger disasters. But does it really matter?

The point is, when we experience pain or suffering, do we lose the balance of our minds such that we are overwhelmed with grief, or fear and become paralyzed? Do we become self-destructive or abusive? Do we react with anger towards ourselves and others?

Is it possible to see through this pain and suffering objectively? Is it really that hard to remain calm, peaceful? Act with love and compassion?

What if I tell you that YES, it is possible and YES, we can all learn to stay balanced and happy even when in the midst of life's tragedies, big or small.

How?

By learning a technique called Vipassana meditation.

Read more: http://www.dhammaweb.net/meditation/view.php?id=72

"This isn't meditation; this is boot camp for your brain"

When my old flatmate told me about a Vipassana meditation course she'd been on while traveling in New Zealand, I found myself listening properly rather than cynically. She said it had taught her how to stand back from negative situations and people, just observing instead what was happening. She didn't have to say that she was happy; it came off in waves.

Read more: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7852554@N03/498880358/sizes/l/