This is a great active meditation practice to learn and add to your meditation toolbox. Exercising the lungs is important for maintaining good health. If you do not actively exercise the lungs they become stiff this lack of activity can lead to disease. Then average adult uses about 10% of their lung capacity in a single breath. This is called tidal volume, which is about .5 liters of air. But the lungs have the capacity to hold about 4-6 liters of air, which is close to 10 times the tidal volume or average breath. This will vary from person to person depending on their health, level of physical activity, gender, size, age, smoking habits and even will vary according to the elevation they live in. If you work at a desk for example and spend 8 hours a day hunched over a computer with poor posture and no regard to your breath you are suffering whether you see it or not. If this is you this exercise will be life changing for you. By having poor posture in a stationary position such as this you will only be using the front side of your lungs and a small percentage at that. This can lead to respiratory disease, allergies, asthma and even lung cancer. To begin this practice start by establishing a deep relaxed breath expanding the lungs and stretching the lung tissue.  Inhale and bring in as much […]

  The first step   Developing the right mindset is essential for you to find success with your meditation program. Having the right mindset means to have a clear understanding of all of the mental and emotional realizations and transformations that are needed in order to have a fulfilling practice and reach your goals with the training. When beginning your meditation planning the first and very important step is to clearly understand WHY you are taking up this practice. What is it that sparked your interest? What benefits are you working towards? And what is your vision of how things will be when you have achieved success with your practice? This is important because it is so easy to become distracted and lose consistency when starting anything new.   By having a clear understanding of your “why” or what your purpose is will give you positive momentum to stay strong with your development? What is it that is driving you to follow through with your goals remember to be clear and specific?   To experience internal motivation and keep your momentum moving forward through the ups and downs it is crucial to have a meaningful “Why”. Coming back to this purpose will often give you the strength needed to achieve what you set out to do. If you have a […]

A Moral life through Meditation According to Plato the human soul strives for three things: wisdom, conquest and gratification. Plato believed that a righteous life is controlled by reason and all three of these elements help one to live a good moral life. Plato’s metaphor of humans living chained in a dimly lit cave facing a blank wall with fire at our back, means to see the truth of reality one needs to turn away from the wall and its shadows escaping the cave. “Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light,” Plato commented. You will often here the comments “I see the light” or “That was an enlightening moment”. Having a moment of clarity and witnessing a true reality offers a solid foundation for making the right choice to create a good and moral life.

In the fast pace society we live in today it is easy to become distracted and lose our awareness. So many of life’s hidden treasures come from the subtle often over looked gifts that we are presented with daily. Through teaching meditation anxiety, depression, stress and other negative distractions will fade and have less of an influence on our emotional states. As adult’s we understand that these distractions occur and have the intelligence to make adjustments to help keep them at bay. Children however often do not understand when they are stressed or distracted and this can lead to misbehavior, poor performance and unhappiness. Teaching Meditation is one of the best solutions for this problem. It will allow them to increase their awareness, focus and concentration giving them a clear mind to be happy and present. A school district in San Francisco started teaching meditation programs to help troubled teens. The goal was to have them using meditation for short periods to help them reduce their stress levels and build their focus in hopes to improve their performance at school. The results of the program were awesome. The attendance rate of the students increased by 98% and there was a 79% decrease in suspensions. There was also a noticeable improvement in the students grade point average at the end of the […]

If you are following this blog you have seen many examples of how the benefits of meditation are enhancing peoples lives. You have also heard me say before that peoples biggest excuse not to meditate is that they do not have enough time. How many minutes every day do you sit in front of the TV, on Facebook or surfing the web? Most who say they do not have the time just need to prioritize what it is that they are doing with their time. We have looked at some active meditations in previous blog posts that take as little as 2-3 minutes that you can work in to your day and will offer many benefits. Sometimes these active meditations can be used as a gateway to building a more in depth meditation practice.

How many times have you had an inspiration, an idea or something you wanted to do, but never followed through and made it a reality? Maybe you told yourself I will do it tomorrow, or someday that would be great. Often what holds us back is our lack of confidence in what it may take to accomplish or be successful with this new adventure or direction in life. In psychology there is a phrase called the confidence-competence loop. If you do not ever take action you will never gain the confidence to achieve or develop high levels of competence with anything in life. Lets take a look at a task most of us do well. Like riding a bike. More often than not this is a simple task that involves no fear at all. So if I were to hand you a bicycle you would get on and take it for spin with out even thinking twice about it. But if I gave you a unicycle instead, fear would often set in and many of us would not even give it a try. The only way to over come this fear is to get on and practice. We may fail ten times, one hundred times, but eventually we learn to ride and confidence would set in. This displays how action […]