It is absolutely fundamental that we learn, that when difficult situations and feelings arise, they are not obstacles to be avoided, but rather these very difficulties are, in fact, the path itself
Ezra Bayda
Month: April 2011
Sunlight, the cherry tree, the goodness of life, this Saturday morning…
Hundreds of open flowers
all come from the one branch.
Look, all their colours appear in my garden.
I open the door, and in the wind
I see the spring sunlight.
Already it has reached
worlds without number.
Sekiso, Worlds without number
Keeping our view of life fluid
Meditation better than morphine for relief of pain
A new study conducted by Dr. Fadel Zeidan at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and published on Tuesday in the Journal of Neuroscience, has found that meditation is very effective for pain relief even in people who have just learned how to practice it, better than some of the most powerful drugs.
The study used 15 volunteers who had never meditated before. They attended four, 20-minute classes to learn a meditation technique known as focused attention. In these training sessions the participants were taught simply to concentrate on their breathing and to let go of distracting thoughts and emotions. Then a heated probe was pressed against their leg, steadily raising the skin temperature to a painful 32C, while scans measured activity in the brain. It was found that the perception of pain and its unpleasantness was greatly reduced.
According to lead author Dr Zeidan, the effect was a 40% diminution in intensity of pain and 57% reduction in pain unpleasantness. This compares with the effects of powerful drugs such as morphine, as Dr Zeiden went on to say: Meditation produced a greater reduction in pain than even morphine or other pain-relieving drugs, which typically reduce pain ratings by about 25 per cent. One of the reasons that meditation may have been so effective in blocking pain was that it did not work at just one place in the brain but instead reduced pain at multiple levels of processing.
Today, can you….
Right now, can you make an unconditional relationship with yourself? Just the height you are, the weight you are, with the intelligence that you have, and your current burden of pain? Can you enter into an unconditional relationship with that?
Pema Chodron, Comfortable with Uncertainty
Just let go and fall into the now
If we can let go for just a moment, if we can relax, if we can fall into the center of now, we can encounter directly the freedom that we’ve all been seeking. It is right here, right now. It doesn’t lie in the future. It’s not going to come when life changes, when the circumstances of our day-to-day reality become different. Freedom is something that’s right in the midst of this moment. When we begin to surrender our demand that life change, that life alter itself to suit our ideas, then everything opens. We begin to awaken from this dream of separateness and struggle, and we realize that the grace we were always seeking is actually right there at the center of our own existence. This is the heart of spiritual awakening: to realize that what we have always yearned for is the very thing, in our deepest source, that we have always been. Freedom is always available to us. In those very moments when we know we don’t know, when we take the “backward step,” heart wide open, we fall into grace. Adyshanti
Mindfulbalance 