Walk The Talk with S N Goenka

In this episode of Walk the Talk, Shekhar Gupta talks to Satya Narayan Goenka, Principal Teacher of Vipassana - a meditative technique of self-observation.

Watch online: http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/walk-the-talk/walk-the-talk-with-s-n-goenka/149260

The prison of Nirvana

Vipassana meditation camps in Tihar jail have tangibly transformed lives and minds: from anger to tolerance, violence to ahimsa, hatred to love. Hardnews interviewed five 'hardcore' accused in jail, who seem to have come a long way from condemnation to inner peace
Shaweta Anand

In a heart-to-heart conversation with five prison inmates - two murder convicts, one rapist and two undertrails - in Tihar's Jail No. 4 in Delhi, what struck me most was that there was not one moment during our intense, three-hour session that I felt uncomfortable in their presence. Despite bearing the tag of 'hardcore criminals', they came across as ordinary, peace-loving people, almost fated by destiny as much as their own actions. What followed, as they shared bananas with this reporter, are intensely complex and tragic accounts of their private histories, their prison-life and their unexpected tryst with 'Vipassana'.


.... Mahavir is a murder convict facing life penalty, who meditates regularly and volunteers cheerfully to serve at Dhamma Tihar. "I was a modest businessman but a feud ensued between some business parties that led to murder. Extreme anger has always been my problem. Even after conviction, I used to be sent to kasuri ward (sinner's ward) because I used to pick up fights with everyone, including with the jail administration. That ward is a small room in which troublesome inmates are kept locked for 23 hours and let out only for one hour as punishment. But after Vipassana camps, I hardly get angry; everyone can see the difference and they keep complimenting me."

By some quirk of fate, those who were involved in the conflict with Mahavir, landed in jail too, for some other petty offence. "No matter how much they wanted to provoke me or pick up a fight, I kept giving them mangal maitri and slowly, we became friends," he said.
My final question to him was about God and this is, by far, the best answer I have ever heard: "God is anyone who is able to work on his mind (patterns) and improve it not only for his own good but also for that of the society."

Read more: http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/2010/04/3524

A Little Reflection… Vipassana Meditation: Was it Worth It?

In the months and years since I took a ten-day Vipassana Meditation course in Nepal,  friends and readers have asked me to share my thoughts, now that I have distance from the experience. I jotted a few sparse notes during the course, and journaled on Day Eleven to chronicle my ten-days in a Vipassana course. Those entries shared the raw thoughts and feelings as I processed each day of meditation and course teachings. During the course, I was deep in the middle of the pain and difficulty. There was little room for reflection.

What the Heck is a Vipassana Meditation Course?
I dubbed my time in Vipassana meditation as my ten day stint in “solitary confinement.” It’s how it felt at the time. And even in retrospect this intense mediation course as one of my wackier decisions. It’s one of the most structured and regimented forms of meditation. The rules are strict and the entire process is tightly control. This course was the hardest thing I have ever voluntarily chosen. More than six months later, I was endlessly thankful that I was able to complete it, that I had the support and stamina during the course finish. And now, seven years later I still look at that course as a formative foundation on how I approach life.

A few of the strict rules:

• You cannot speak or communicate (non-verbal communication like eye-contact is a no-no)
• No reading or writing
• Food is restricted after the mid-day meal
• You must adhere to the meditation schedule of 10+ hours of meditation and an hour of discourse in the evening

More Info: http://alittleadrift.com/vipassana-meditation-course-nepal/

Main website: https://www.dhamma.org

Nepal Center: https://pokhara.dhamma.org/

Rivers Cuomo and Vipassana Meditation

Weezer's Rivers Cuomo discusses meditation with Dan Harris.

Watch online: www.abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/rivers-cuomo-meditation-weezer-frontman-singer-musician-punk-rock-11598553

Inner space: The power of solitude

When Tom Darling told his friends he planned to spend 10 days in silent meditation with a group of strangers, they joked that he was joining a cult. But the experience – gruelling and profound – offered an extraordinary antidote to the modern world

.......... He's not the only one smiling: there's a general sense of achievement flowing through most of us, the type that comes from completing something difficult that you suspect will benefit you for some time to come. Some of the students I talk to describe the feeling as having undergone a deep cleansing, a re-evaluation of their priorities, even a rebooting of the system. It's odd suddenly to be able to speak to my roommates after so many days of silent cohabitation. The young guy from Manchester smiles ruefully when I see him. "Yeah, mate, that was no holiday." Anik and I sit on a bench outside the old farmhouse, the paint flaking off onto the ground beneath us. So was it all he hoped it would be? "No question," he says without a moment's hesitation. "I've been looking for something to help me achieve certain goals, and I think this is it. I don't know about the others, but for me this was always about improving myself, about becoming more successful."

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/healthy-living/inner-space-the-power-of-solitude-1705207.html

Jenny Phillips on Oprah

Cultural anthropologist, writer and psychotherapist Jenny Phillips has been working in the field of mental health for more than 15 years. Much of her work has been with male prisoners, teaching inmates courses on emotional literacy and vipassana meditation, an ancient meditation technique based on the teachings of Buddha. Her work has helped inmates—many serving multiple life sentences—transform their lives, face their pasts and become more peaceful, purposeful people.

In 2008, Jenny released the self-produced documentary The Dhamma Brothers, which followed 36 prisoners at the Donaldson Correctional Facility in Alabama through a 10-day silent vipassana meditation course. Her book Letters from the Dhamma Brothers: Meditation Behind Bars is a collection of letters and interviews from inmates who took part in the meditation course. The book depicts prison life and the journey many of the prisoners took to better understanding the teachings of Buddha and achieving inner peace.

See more: http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Jenny-Phillips-on-Oprahs-Soul-Series-Webcast

Pecatonica meditation center helps people find balance

..... Once participants enter the site, they are asked to leave behind religious objects, intoxicants, tobacco, iPods, cell phones and reading or writing materials. Participants also are asked to observe the “Noble Silence,” or to abstain from talking.

Kate Anderson, center manager for Pecatonica, said only then can people understand what silence really is. Students are asked to suspend other forms of prayer or worship, meditation or yoga. Anderson said this is advised in order to fully experience and understand Vipassana and not impede upon the meditation. She said monks, priests and nuns from a variety of religions have taken courses at Vipassana meditation centers.

“Everyone who comes here, they have their own religion – they’re Jewish or they’re Catholic or Muslim,” Anderson said. “They come here to learn this technique.”

Students of the course learn techniques to change their reactions in daily life from anger, negativity, misery and other stressful situations to positive ones, Anderson said.

Days begin with the low resonating of a Burmese-style gong at 4:30 a.m. Each day ends at 9:30 p.m. Students are required to meditate in the meditation hall three times a day, with other time slotted for meditation either in the hall or their room throughout the day.

Read more: http://www.rrstar.com/news/yourtown/x415953142/Pecatonica-meditation-center-helps-people-find-balance

Meditation - A CLOSE ENCOUNTER WITH THE NON-SELF

Oddly enough, the course's monastic severity is largely responsible for its popularity; since the results, judging by the responses, are commensurably high. Mohan Nathani, 63, a retired income tax officer who has repeated the course five times, reveals: "It was during my first course that I really experienced bliss."

Christians, including priests and nuns, come regularly for vipassana. Sister Regina Rosario of the order of the Sisters of Mary of the Cross, says: "Being used to meditation, I didn't find it too difficult. It has made me more aware of my actions and reactions." She feels that vipassana has brought her closer to a spiritual goal. "Compassionate love for crucified Christ, and thus for my neighbors."

N. Vaghul, a financial wizard who meditates for three to four hours daily, feels that vipassana has changed his relationship with people and his views. "Best of all, I no longer look for professional recognition or rewards. I work in order to contribute."

Moushomi Chatterjee, who took a course in early March, is raring to go again. "It makes you realize who you are, that you can also be a Buddha."

Read more: http://www.lifepositive.com/Spirit/meditation/vipassana/vipassana-meditation.asp#goenka

State of Grace: How Buddhist Teachings Transformed a Maximum Security Prison in Alabama

“The stories of The Dhamma Brothers ring with the truth and power of their experiences, and offer the hope for renewal and rehabilitation within a dismal and punishment-oriented correctional system. It gives you hope for the human race.” —Sister Helen Prejean, author, Dead Man Walking

In her new documentary, The Dhamma Brothers, Phillips frames the daily, shackled grind of the prisoners’ lives with these social injustices, but also investigates, with a fresh, clear perspective, what it is like to be a prisoner doing hard time in the South choosing to practice guided Buddhist meditation techniques.

Deep within this facility’s walls, an unlikely group of inmates (some on death row) are challenging all of the stereotypes and misconceptions about the South, about prisoners, about masculinity, and about the modern spirituality of the incarcerated. They, in fact, were transcending these trappings by practicing Vipassana, an intense, silent, ten-day crash course induction into a sacred world many of the inmates had likely never even heard of until Donaldson became the first prison in the United States to give it a try.

In a region where anything other than Christianity is predictably labeled “witchcraft” (as one woman interviewed called Buddhism—“I don’t believe it will help at all”), Dr. Ron Cavanaugh, Director of Treatment for the Alabama Department of Corrections, decided to throw caution to the wind and try something revolutionary and unprecedented. In short, mainly, because there wasn’t anything to lose.

Read more: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/state-of-grace-how-buddhist-teachings-transformed-a-maximum-security-prison/

Movie Review—The Dhamma Brothers

While admittedly far different than your typical film about prison, The Dhamma Brothers is also far more deserving of your time.  If you’re looking for the elements you’d usually expect from a documentary about life “behind bars,” yes, you’ll find some of them of here, but they’ve mostly been drained of their lurid aspects.  At one point the setting, Donaldson Correctional Facility, is compared to the fictional Shawshank, and certainly the crimes of which its inmates have been convicted are horrendous, but the first clue that the tone and emphases will be atypical here is provided by the title itself.  “Dhamma” (in Sanskrit: “dharma”) refers to the Buddha’s teachings, and this thought-provoking film concerns the struggles, both internal and external, that occurred when they were introduced to a group of lifers serving time in the heart of the Bible Belt.

Read more: http://firefox.org/news/articles/1388/1/Movie-ReviewThe-Dhamma-Brothers/Page1.html

The Dhamma Brothers Film Review

A maximum security prison isn't the sort of place you'd expect to find a bunch of men mutely contemplating their navels and the meaning of life. But that's what we find Alabama's Donaldson State Penitentiary, where Warden Stephen Bullard opted to allow Jonathan Crowley to introduce an East Indian brand of meditation known as Vipassana to volunteers plucked from among the institution's most hardened criminals.

The participants adopting the ascetic regimen understood that the initiation meant that for ten days straight they would not be allowed to talk, watch TV, use a phone, have sex or imbibe intoxicants. Those able to meet the challenge discovered that they emerged from the program calmer and with a new sense of purpose when they rejoined the general population.

The Dhamma Brothers, directed by Andrew Kukura, Jenny Phillips and Anne Marie Stein examines the before and after mindsets of the cons converted to the Eastern spiritual path. This fascinating film focuses on a quartet of contrite individuals, starting with Edward Curry Johnson, a once-promising student-athlete who was being scouted by pro baseball when, against his better judgment, he foolishly took part in a gang-related homicide.

Read more: http://newsblaze.com/story/20080408060021tsop.nb/topstory.html

The Dhamma Brothers Trailer

The Dhamma Brothers tells a dramatic tale of human potential and transformation as it closely follows and documents the stories of the prison inmates at Donaldson Correction Facility who enter into this arduous and intensive program. This film, with the power to dismantle stereotypes about men behind prison bars also, in the words of Sister Helen Prejean (Dead Man Walking), "gives you hope for the human race." http://www.dhammabrothers.com

Watch online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA8XFEyeMi8&e

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