My Experience with Vipassana Meditation

Many friends are curious about my 10-day meditation experience. Some of them even worried that I would become a nun after these 10 days.

10 days of meditation? What do you do besides meditation? Just sit and meditate the whole day? And you can’t talk at all in these 10 days? Not even during lunch or dinner?What? You don’t even have dinner? Oh my god… You sure you want to do this to yourself? Girl, you will go crazy… (and on and on my family and friends worried…)

Read more: http://traveloncloud9.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/my-personal-experience-with-vipassana-meditation/

Vipassana Brings Peace And Self-knowledge

To say that economic progress does not necessarily bring about a corresponding increase in happiness is to state the obvious. But the reasons for this are not so obvious. Whenever we experience agitation, frustration and disharmony, we tend to look for their causes outside of ourselves or in some instances we tend to even blame ourselves. In either case there is lack of objectivity.

Further, whenever we become un-happy, we spread our unhappiness to the environment and to others. The Buddha observed this phenomenon objectively. In the process he discovered a technique that brought peace and harmony to its practitioners. The technique, Vipassana, was based on truth as revealed to oneself and thus free from any dependence on others' imposition or biases. Because of its scientific nature, it appeals to many across countries for centuries after Buddha taught it.

Read more: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2008-01-09/holistic-living/27780481_1_vipassana-buddha-happiness

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/

rivers in the stream

“My goal was to purge myself of all weakness so that I could write ‘perfect’ songs as reliably as a machine."

...... His relationship with his mother, Beverly Shoenberger, was strained. “He was in a difficult situation, and we had gotten to the point where we couldn’t even really talk,” she says. “I loved him, but I didn’t understand him or how to reach him.” When he started Vipassana, she was concerned. “Rivers had been going through a lot of problems in the prior few years, and I was concerned that it might be harmful for him,” she says.

  But then one day, after going months without speaking, Cuomo sent his mom an email after returning from a ten-day course. He apologized for anything he had done that might have hurt her and said he now understood that he was 100 percent responsible for his own life. This simple sentence, Shoenberger says, was the turning point. The changes she then began to see in Cuomo were dramatic. “I don’t even have words for it. It was huge. I felt like I had my son back. He was becoming more deeply himself, like this was the grown-up Rivers of the boy that I knew.”

Read more: http://web.mac.com/karafin/iWeb/amykarafin.com/Articles_files/karafin161.pdf

Asia's spectacular monument of gratitude

Which two persons are rare in the world? One who serves others selflessly without expecting anything in return; and one who is grateful toward anyone who does one a kindness. These two persons are rare in the world. - Gotama the Buddha


The Global Pagoda symbolizes the resurgence and quiet but rapid worldwide spread of Vipassana, the practical quintessence of the Buddha's non-sectarian, universal teachings. Residential Vipassana courses, from beginners' 10-days to advanced 60-days, are being offered without charge from more than 130 established Vipassana centers and innumerable non-center venues. Courses are run on voluntary donations and services of grateful previous students who wish to share the benefits with others.

An instance of Vipassana as a catalyst for peace is its growing popularity in both Israel and Iran, where demand for courses outruns supply. "Peace in the world is not possible without peace within the individual," Goenkaji said. For millennia, Vipassana has proved to be a powerful mind-purification tool to inner peace, by leading the practitioner to "egolessness"


Read more: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HJ25Df03.html

Sitting still: Boot camp of quiet self-discovery

This season some regional business people will elect to spend 10 days of their annual vacation time this way: in silence, eating just two meals a day, sleeping in a dorm, and meditating for most of their waking hours from 4:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.

They won't have anything to read or access to the Internet or television. They won't be able to snack between meals.

And while they're usually busy business people, they won't be able to answer e-mails or go to meetings or write memos or make phone calls.

In one sense, nothing will happen during those 10 days. In another sense, the people will emerge transformed.

..........When cut off from constant entertainment and input, and required to do something that seems as simple as watching the breath, the mind can suddenly start to look like a upended cauldron of memories, desires, frustration and anticipation. The center's boot-camp environment is structured to support people as they wade through the deluge, and out the other side.

"It's facing those internal reactive habit patterns that we carry around with us day in and day out, learning to face our own reactions with a balanced mind, that's what's a challenge," Crutcher said. "This is an intensive practice where a lot of deep turbulent stuff comes welling up, and sometimes it's more than a person can face at the moment."

Read more: http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2006/07/03/focus2.html

Info regarding center: http://www.kunja.dhamma.org/

Victories in India's war on corruption

In addition, recognizing that the corruption problem is as much a moral as a governance issue, Indians have tapped the country's spiritual traditions to beat corruption. For example, business leaders ranging from Fortune 500 company managers to business students have studied an ancient system of mind purification called Vipassana; research suggests that Vipassana is effective in helping to understand the self-destructive nature of corruption.

A senior Indian government official, D R Parihar, in his research study "The Impact of Vipassana on Government", concluded that Vipassana has a direct role to play in improving public administration. Leading Indian corporates such as ONGC, Indian Railways, auto maker Mahindra & Mahindra, and nuclear facilities such as the Bhabha Atomic Research Center regularly send employees to attend Vipassana courses.

Read more: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HF29Df03.html

GOD'S DOMINION (excerpt)

Since the retreats offer almost no opportunity to break the vows, keeping them is seldom a problem. But, once outside again, the world presents more than enough opportunities; it presents encouragement and even pressure to break them. When I spoke to Goenka about how difficult it was to stop drinking altogether for personal and social reasons, he advised me not to force it, since force would only increase the craving which was at the core of drinking. Be aware, be moderate, keep meditating — he said — and when that particular habit was ready to surface, as a sensation, it would be erased naturally. And, despite my scepticism, that is what happened. I came out of a twenty-day retreat in 1982 and found, in the weeks and months and years that followed, I had not the least desire for a glass of beer or a sip of champagne.

"I’m worried I’m being brainwashed," I said to Goenka in a state of panic midway through my second retreat.

"You are being brainwashed," he answered. "Your brain is being washed!"

It was a matter of faith again, I suppose, but faith tested rigorously, suspiciously, against what it promised and what it delivers. "Do not simply believe whatever you are told, or whatever had been handed down from past generations, or what is common opinion, or whatever the scriptures say," Buddha — is reputed to have — said. "Do not accept something as true merely by deduction or inference, or by considering outward appearances, or by partiality for a certain view, or because of its plausibility, or because your teacher tells you it is so. But when you yourselves directly know that these principles are unwholesome, blameworthy, condemned by the wise — when adopted and carried out they lead to harm and suffering — then you should abandon them. And when you yourselves know that these principles are wholesome, blameless, praised by the wise — when adopted and carried out they lead to welfare and happiness — then you should accept and practise them."

Read more: http://web.archive.org/web/20061015235040/http://rongrahamcanada.com/books/gods.html

Vipassana: Notes from Spiritual Boot Camp

I recently returned from a ten day meditation "retreat" at one of S.N. Goenka's Vipassana Centres. This was no relaxing vacation. At Vipassana, I delved into the dark depths of my psyche and came out with a profound attitude adjustment that helped me to find the root cause of a mysterious illness and improved my ability to stay calm. Making the choice to attend Vipassana was one of the most important things I have ever done. This essay is my attempt to encourage readers to consider giving it a try. Courses are offered all over the world for free on a donation-only basis (including room and board!)

Read more: http://liveweb.archive.org/http://www.margonaut.com/vipassana.htm

Where management meets Vipassana : SCMHRD Director’s interview

According to Director Prof KS Subramanian, SCMHRD differs from other b-schools of its league in that it looks upon students as individuals who are giving a last shot at professional education in their life.

“It is not going to happen that these students will go back to organized learning on a two year basis again in their lives. Having said that, we want to build as many competencies as possible in them and contribute talented individuals to the society and industry,” says Prof Subramanian.

Perhaps the most talked about dimension of SCMHRD is its stress on spiritual learning and yoga, Vipassana sessions and a strict code of conduct on campus. Mobile phones are banned on campus and there are strict restrictions on public display of affection. Prof Subramanian strongly advocates these rules.

“You have come here to learn in a personal teaching environment. Why carry a mobile phone and let yourself and others be disturbed? It frustrates the teachers also disturbs others.”

Read more: http://www.pagalguy.com/?p=396

Alt Rocker Finds Inner Peace

Take Weezer's frontman, send him to Harvard, and have him meditate for two hours a day. What do you get? One calm Rivers.

Meet Rivers Cuomo, the famously self-tortured lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter of the Grammy-nominated band Weezer. They're the alternative-rock band who sing "Beverly Hills" and who made that great Spike Jonze-directed video "Buddy Holly." In the last few years Cuomo has been practicing Vipassana meditation , whose goal is, according to the Vipassana Mediation website, "the total eradication of mental impurities and the resultant highest happiness of full liberation.

Read More: http://www.beliefnet.com/Entertainment/Music/2006/06/Alt-Rocker-Finds-Inner-Peace.aspx