Buddhist meditation teacher and psychologist Tara Brach has become popular in her hometown of Washington, D.C., especially among high-powered urban professionals. As a new profile from The Washington Post told us this weekend, she’s a “Type-A go-getter” whose weekly meditation classes and dharma talks draw people from many religions and walks of life. Click here [...]
Mark Sanford‘s name has, for better or worse, become quite well known. He’s the former governor of South Carolina, and is now a Republican House candidate making the rounds. But then there was his famous affair — and Sanford’s defiant statements of loyalty to his new flame. Surprisingly, he’s weathered the scandal quite well. Also [...]
A guest post by Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald, author of Pictures of the Mind: What the New Neuroscience Tells Us About Who We Are. I saw my dad a month before he died. We went for breakfast at the restaurant where he liked to meet when I came through town — a place by the highway with [...]
April 25, 2013 – 11:00 am
Free the Mind is a new documentary about the ability of meditation to rewire the brain. Featuring neuroscientist Dr. Richard Davidson, the film follows two veterans grappling with post-traumatic stress disorder from serving in Iraq and Afghanistan as Davidson teaches them meditation to ease their pain and help them return to the lives they had [...]
There’s just a week left to help support the birthing of On Meditation, a beautiful documentary-in-progress on, well, meditation. “Our goal is simple,” write the filmmakers, “and ambitious: to demystify meditation and make it more accessible to a mainstream audience.” The film follows 5 principals so far: Congressman Tim Ryan, actor Giancarlo Esposito, Buddhist monk [...]
March 28, 2013 – 10:59 am
Made by Canadian filmmaker David Cherniack, the new documentary film Retreat follows thirty-five Westerners — some who are beginners at meditation — “as they attempt an intense, eight-week, silent retreat in Thailand with the American Buddhist teacher, B. Alan Wallace. The meditation practice they’re learning is shamatha, or calm abiding, stilling the mind with sustained, one-pointed, [...]
You know meditation really is being embraced by the culture at large when different-thinking companies begin to hire “mindfulness ambassadors” to reach and teach their customers. That’s just what the climbing and yoga gear company Prana has done, picking Mark Coleman for the gig. You might remember Mark for his Shambhala Sun story, “Awake in [...]
Naked Mind is a new documentary that explores the effects of meditation and its potential to change society, asking the questions “What does mindfulness mean, how does it relate to human happiness, and what does it mean to practice mindfulness in today’s society?” To make the film, filmmakers Sarah Barab and Paxton Winters traveled to [...]
By Richard Schiffman There have been some fascinating studies about the effects of meditation in recent years. Buddhist monks and Trappist friars have been hooked up to EEG machines to record subtle changes in their brainwaves during their spiritual practices. Scores of clinical trials have also been conducted to assess the impact of meditation and [...]
February 19, 2013 – 11:53 am
Rather than try to escape from painful feelings, Alixa Doom started practicing tonglen at her job at a psychiatric hospital, breathing in the pain and fear she witnessed there. A panic button at eye level, beneath the shelf bordering my desk, provides me with a sense of security. The touch of a finger and I [...]
February 1, 2013 – 7:19 am
Comedy fans are mourning the loss of NBC’s 30 Rock, a show that shot jokes so quickly that having the remote in hand was often necessary to rewind and catch them all. But the show, whose last episode aired last night, was way more than rapid-fire one-liners: Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon was the relatable cynic, [...]
January 25, 2013 – 11:30 am
You may recall that we posted here last summer about reports that former US president Bill Clinton had not only become a vegan, but had taken up Buddhist meditation, studying closely with a Buddhist monk. (Here‘s that post.) We’ve always wondered if it was true, and now it seems we have the answer. So: is [...]
January 24, 2013 – 5:07 pm
For the past few months, we’ve been sharing videos from Tara Brach’s Finding True Refuge project, which features stories of people’s intimate journeys into meditation; what they’ve learned, how they’ve struggled, why they began and how it’s transformed their lives. Now, Brach’s new book, True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart, [...]
January 17, 2013 – 1:12 pm
As the country struggles with debates over gun rights and President Obama’s newly proposed gun control policies, school shootings are still happening — at least four more have been reported since last month’s deadly massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. And goodness knows that other forms of violence at school persist. The end to this violence may [...]
January 2, 2013 – 2:04 pm
Before heading off on a week-long Vipassana retreat last month, Atlantic senior editor Robert Wright asked readers to submit their questions about meditation so he could reply to them after his return. Here’s his response — “Should Buddhist Meditation Make You Happy?” It’s a valuable question, and it’s worth reading. Buddhist teachers Gaylon Ferguson, Andrew [...]
