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Health

 Buddhist practice begins with mindfulness of the body
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    Winter Paid Member

    By Rick Bass
    Night Skiing The girls and I wander out onto the marsh to go for a ski while the moon is still full. The clouds are gone and the night is cold. Due to some random sequence of the frost-thaw cycle—warm snow followed by repeated nights of intense cold and, who knows, perhaps even influenced by the solstice, the eclipse, and other rare phenomena—the snow out on the marsh has rearranged itself into a flat skiff of broad plates, each snowflake now recrystallized into a perfectly planar structure. The entire snowscape before us appears to have been converted into a land of fish scales, three feet deep, each one silver-blue in the light of the moon. More »
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    Mind on the Run Paid Member

    By Michael Hoffman
    The Buddha never joined a health club. He never pedaled furiously on a Lifecycle trying to shed body fat, worrying that his blood pressure was too high. No cardiologist ever advised him to lose those “extra” pounds and lower his cholesterol. These days, though, people are constantly bombarded by media messages about the body beautiful and the health risks of a sedentary lifestyle; so they join health clubs. Some of the 22 million Americans exercising in gyms every day grit their teeth and suffer through their workouts, and more than 50 percent of all new members drop out after just a few months. More »
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    Eating and the Wheel of Life Paid Member

    By Sandra Weinberg
    Knowing how much is enough when eating...This is the teaching of the buddha. —Dhammapada “Knowing how much is enough when eating.” It sounds so simple. Yet how often the matter of “enough” trips us up. For much of the world, getting enough to eat is the problem. Here in America we eat too much. Two-thirds of the population is overweight, nearly a third clinically obese; meanwhile, our ideal of physical beauty keeps getting thinner and thinner. More »
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    What Is True Happiness? Paid Member

    For more than three decades, scholar and contemplative B. Alan Wallace has considered the perennial question What is happiness? from the dual perspectives of modern science and traditional Buddhist meditation practice. These two disciplines are at the heart of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, launched by Wallace a year ago to conduct rigorous scientific study of contemplative methods in collaboration with established investigators in psychology and the neurosciences. Initial research co-sponsored by the Institute includes the Shamatha Project, a long-term study of the effects of intensive shamatha—tranquility—practice on cognition and emotion, and the UCLA Mindful Attention Program (MAP), which is evaluating mindfulness training as treatment for Attention-deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). More »
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    Commit to Sit: Eating Paid Member

    Guided Meditation: Eating Eating is a common daily activity that provides a very good opportunity for us to practice bare attention, free from the many concepts that may arise around it. Typically, the mind is quite heavily conditioned in various ways around food. Our conditioning may include desire, greed, fear, or anxiety -- perhaps even revulsion. So it’s very helpful to learn how to be with this essential aspect of our lives simply and directly, free of the conditioning or habituated concepts that may cause us suffering. More »
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    Strong and Silent Paid Member

    By Jennifer Sokolov
    I just signed up for my first weeklong meditation retreat. I have a history of back pain and am a little scared of all that sitting. Is there anything I can do to prepare? WHEN I ATTENDED my first meditation retreat, I had the exact same issue. Within two days of sitting, my lower back began to hurt. I tried to sit ramrod straight and stretch on every break, but no amount of adjustment seemed to ease what was progressing from an intermittent discomfort to a constant ache. At the meditation interview, I threw all hopes of profundity out the window and shared my back troubles with the sensei. He offered me a simple piece of advice: "Get to know this pain." More »