Yuval Noah Hararis first book, Sapiens, was an international sensation. The Israeli historians mind-bending tour through the trump of Homo sapiens is a favorite of, among others, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama. His new book, Homo Deus: a Brief History of Tomorrow, is about what comes next for humanity and the threat our own intelligence and creative capacity poses to our future. And it, too, is fantastically interesting.

Ive wanted to talk to Harari since reading Sapiens. Ive had one big question about him: What kind of mind creates a book like Sapiens? And now I know. A clear one.

Virtually everything Harari says in our conversation is fascinating. But what I didnt expect was how central his consistent practice of Vipassana meditation which includes a 60-day silent retreat each year is to understanding the works of both history and futurism he produces. In this excerpt from our discussion, which is edited for length and clarity, we dig deep into Hararis meditative practice and how it helps him see the stories humanity tells itself.

To listen to my whole conversation with Harari which delves into AI, the future of work, Hararis favorite books, and more subscribe to my podcast, The Ezra Klein Show, on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your fine audio programming, or stream it off SoundCloud.

You told the Guardian that without meditation, you'd still be researching medieval military history but not the Neanderthals or cyborgs. What changes has meditation brought to your work as a historian?

Two things, mainly. First of all, it's the ability to focus. When you train the mind to focus on something like the breath, it also gives you the discipline to focus on much bigger things and to really tell the difference between what's important and everything else. This is a discipline that I have brought to my scientific career as well. It's so difficult, especially when you deal with long-term history, to get bogged down in the small details or to be distracted by a million different tiny stories and concerns. It's so difficult to keep reminding yourself what is really the most important thing that has happened in history or what is the most important thing that is happening now in the world. The discipline to have this focus I really got from the meditation.

The other major contribution, I think, is that the entire exercise of Vipassana meditation is to learn the difference between fiction and reality, what is real and what is just stories that we invent and construct in our own minds. Almost 99 percent you realize is just stories in our minds. This is also true of history. Most people, they just get overwhelmed by the religious stories, by the nationalist stories, by the economic stories of the day, and they take these stories to be the reality.

My main ambition as a historian is to be able to tell the difference between what's really happening in the world and what are the fictions that humans have been creating for thousands of years in order to explain or in order to control what's happening in the world.

One of the ideas that is central to your book Sapiens is that the central quality of Homo sapiens, what has allowed us to dominate the earth, is the ability to tell stories and create fictions that permit widespread cooperation in a way other species can't. And what you count as fiction ranges all the way from early mythology to the Constitution of the United States of America.

I wouldn't have connected that to the way meditation changes what you see as real, but it makes sense that if you're observing the way your mind creates imaginary stories, maybe much more ends up falling into that category than you originally thought.

Yes, exactly. We seldom realize it, but all large-scale human cooperation is based on fiction. This is most clear in the case of religion, especially other people's religion. You can easily understand that, yes, millions of people come together to cooperate in a crusade or a jihad or to build the cathedral or a synagogue because all of them believe some fictional story about God and heaven and hell.

What is much more difficult to realize is that exactly the same dynamic operates in all other kinds of human cooperation. If you think about human rights, human rights are a fictional story just like God and heaven. They are not a biological reality. Biologically speaking, humans don't have rights. If you take Homo sapiens and look inside, you find the heart and the kidneys and the DNA. You don't find any rights. The only place rights exist is in the stories that people have been inventing.

Another very good example is money. Money is probably the most successful story ever told. It has no objective value. It's not like a banana or a coconut. If you take a dollar bill and look at it, you can't eat it. You can't drink it. You can't wear it. It's absolutely worthless. We think it's worth something because we believe a story. We have these master storytellers of our society, our shamans they are the bankers and the financiers and the chairperson of the Federal Reserve, and they come to us with this amazing story that, "You see this green piece of paper? We tell you that it is worth one banana."

If I believe it and you believe it and everybody believes it, it works. It actually works. I can take this worthless piece of paper, go to a complete stranger who I never met before, give him this piece of paper, and he in exchange will give me a real banana that I can eat.

This is really amazing, and no other animal can do it. Other animals sometimes trade. Chimpanzees, for example, they trade. You give me a coconut. I'll give you a banana. That can work with a chimpanzee, but you give me a worthless piece of paper and you expect me to give you a banana? That will never work with a chimpanzee.

This is why we control the world, and not the chimpanzees.

But there are ways in which those stories create fragility, too. You take something like the 2008-09 financial crisis. What happened there was the global financial markets had told themselves a story. They had told themselves a story about how much risk there was, in particular subprime mortgage debt, and that story turned out to be wrong. All of a sudden, they had to tell themselves a different story, and then all the stories built on that story collapsed stories about how stocks in the lumber industry would do, and how many people would have jobs in a year. And eventually that changed reality.

A fragility here is when you begin to mistake your stories for reality, and you overestimate both their permanence and how difficult it would be for them to be changed or moved.

Yes, it goes both ways. Because it is based on stories, human society is far more flexible and dynamic than any other society on earth, and at the same time, it's also far more fragile.

Think, for example, about revolutions. Among other animals, it's very difficult to change the social system overnight. It's almost impossible. If you think about, for example, a beehive, the bees have had their social system for millions and millions of years, and they cannot change it unless through a very slow and very complicated process of natural selection and evolution. The bees cannot just wake up one morning, execute the queen bee, and establish a communist dictatorship of worker bees.

But among humans, we do have such social revolutions. Exactly a century ago, 1917, you had the communist revolution in Russia, where the revolutionaries executed the czar and established a completely different social system in Russia within a few years just by changing the story Russians believed. They no longer believed in the divine right of the czar. Instead, they now believed that authority comes from the workers, from the people.

This is why every society invests so much effort in propaganda and brainwashing people from a very early age to believe in the dominant story of the society, because if they don't believe, everything collapses.

Before we leave the topic of meditation, I read that you do routinely 60-day retreats. That is an experience that I cannot imagine, so I would love to hear what those are like for you and what role they serve in your life.

First of all, it's very difficult. You don't have any distractions, you don't have television, you don't have emails, no phones, no books. You don't write. You just have every moment to focus on what is really happening right now, on what is reality. You come across the things you don't like about yourself, things that you don't like about the world, that you spend so much time ignoring or suppressing.

You start with the most basic bodily sensations of the breath coming in and out, of sensations in your stomach, in your legs, and as you connect to that, you gain the ability to really observe what's happening. You get clarity with regard to what's happening in your mind. You cannot really observe anger or fear or boredom if you cannot observe your breath. Your breath is so much easier than observing your anger or your fear.

People want to understand their anger, to understand their fear. But they think that observing the breath, oh, this is not important at all. But if you can't observe something as obvious and as simple as the breath coming in and out, you have absolutely no chance of really observing your anger, which is far more stormy and far more difficult.

What happens along the 60 days is that as your mind becomes more focused and more clear, you go deeper and deeper, and you start seeing the sources of where all this anger is coming from, where all this fear is coming from, and you just observe. You don't try to do anything. You don't tell any stories about your anger. You don't try to fight it. Just observe. What is anger? What is boredom? You live sometimes for years and years and years experiencing anger and fear and boredom every day, and you never really observe, how does it actually feel to be angry? Because you're too caught up in the angry.

The 60 days of meditation, they give you the opportunity. You can have a wave of anger, and sometimes it can last for days and you just, for days, you do nothing. You just observe. What is anger? How does it actually feel in the body? What is actually happening in my mind when I am angry? This is the most amazing thing that I've ever observed, is really to observe these internal phenomena.

It impresses me that you have the presence or the commitment to continue doing this. Sapiens was an international runaway best-seller. It's a huge hit in Silicon Valley. When I had Bill Gates on this podcast, he recommended Sapiens to me and to the audience. Mark Zuckerberg has talked about Sapiens. Barack Obama has talked about Sapiens. I imagine the demands of your time, the speaking engagements, the paid speaking engagements, the conferences and meetings that you get invited to now, I'm sure there's vastly more than you can do. I'm curious if your relationship to meditation has changed at all in the past couple of years after your success.

There is always temptation to take another speaking engagement or another conference, but I'm very disciplined about it because I know this is the really important stuff. This is the source of my scientific success, so when I plan the year in advance, the first thing I do is I already know that in 2017 I'm going from the 15th of October to the 15th of December to India to sit at a 60-day meditation retreat. That's the first thing I put in the schedule. Everything else has to be arranged around that. It was the same last year in 2016.

Actually I heard about Trumps election only on the 20th of January, because this is when I came out of the retreat. I entered in early November, and I missed the elections. As I said, you have absolutely no distractions. You have no connections with the outside world, no emails, no television, no nothing, so you don't know what's happening on the outside, but what's happening on the inside is so interesting.

Beyond the two hours of meditation you do daily, how do you structure the information you receive during the day? How do you separate what is real and important and what is ephemera or mere stories?

I try to set my own agenda and not to allow technology to set the agenda for me. I tend to read books, long books, rather than short passages or tweets. I think another thing that has happened over the last century is that we have moved from an information scarcity to a deluge of information. Previously the main problem with information for people was that they didn't have enough of it, and there was censorship, and information was very rare and hard to obtain. Now it's just the opposite. We are inundated by immense amounts of information.

We really lose control of our attention. Our attention is hijacked by all kinds of external forces. For me, not just in meditation, but when I work, I try to be very, very disciplined with my attention not to allow external forces to take control of my attention.

It's surprising to me how much context this gives me for Homo Deus. To give a very capsule summary of the book, you're arguing that human beings used to have a society centered around stories about God. They moved to one in the last couple hundred years centered around stories about human beings. And now they're moving to one that is centered around stories about data.

To the degree that we will be honored for our contributions to society, you say it will be for the contribution we make to the data streams that various computer-assisted algorithms are using to generate value and create production. I felt, reading the book, that that scenario looks more plausible to you than it does to me, but perhaps it is because you are stepping a little bit further out of the daily cacophony, and so the change and the degree to which everybody is obsessed and immersed in a lot of data all of the time is more clear.

Yeah, I think it's a very good summary of the new book. The way that I live influences the way I think, and hopefully the conclusions I reach in my research fit back into the way that I live because just to reach a theoretical conclusion that has no influence on how you actually live, what's the point?

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Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens, on how meditation made him a better historian - Vox

Meditationprovides investors with many benefits. Below are meditation tips from the newly releasedMeditation Guide for Investment Professionals, the full version of which isavailable online for CFA Institute members.

The initial installment of this series offeredgeneral tips to help with almost any meditation practice.

The focus in this edition is open-monitoring meditation. Why? Because the world has gone mindfulness crazy in the last several years, and mindfulness is a common termfor open-monitoring meditation.

Open monitoring has a long secular history and has been the most widely and statistically researched form of meditation.

The descriptor open-monitoring comes from the scientific literature that seeks to classify meditation styles. Many similar meditation practices go by different names. In addition to mindfulness, open-monitoring meditation may also be called insight meditation, Shamatha, or Vipassana.

One thing to remember: Open-monitoring meditation is basic to its individual meditation style. There are more comprehensive techniques scaled to the experience of the meditator. After all, meditation has thousands of years of documented history, and the depth of individual practices can be enormous. A parallel: Beginning research analysts dont start off learning trinomial options pricing models. Rather they receive an overview of financial theory, including arbitrage. Then they may proceed on to probability theory, Black-Scholes, binomial trees, and so on.

So it is with basic open-monitoring meditation. Think of it as one of the initial and critical steps to developing a robust meditation practice.

The scholarship provided below and in each of the forthcoming articles on meditation types isderived from the combined research efforts of neuroscientists, psychologists, and practitioners.

Open-Monitoring Meditation

What It Is:Open-monitoring meditation seeks to cultivate metacognition,a state of consciousness innate to every person. What is metacognition? The awareness of awareness itself. Those who achieve it describe it as the development of a purely objective witness consciousness that has the ability to watch all of the rest of their mental processes with non-attachment.

Non-attachment is a Western attempt to translate a specific meditation term for which there is no exact corollary. Non-attachment is nonjudgmental awareness that borders on pure objectivity. Put another way, non-attachment minimizes subjectivity. It is different from detachment, which is active disengagement from something. Non-attachment is similar to readiness. Hopefully, as investment professionals, we understand the benefit of minimizing subjectivity as we each strive to see the world for what it is, rather than what we prefer it to be.

Metacognition is cultivated, enhanced, and improved through meditation. Open monitoring asks that practitioners focus their awareness on the present moment rather than on mental distractions. Practitioners should accept their stray thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations without judgment. Eventually, with practice, their consciousness achievestotal awareness of their thoughts rather than just being lost in in those thoughts.

Mindfulness has been transformed into many formal training programs that you may have heard of, including the well-known Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).

Benefits

Among the many reported benefits of open-monitoring meditation are stress relief, better thinking, increased emotional intelligence, and the ability to overcome mental biases.

Steps

Below are steps for a generalized open-monitoring meditation.It may be useful to read these instructions into your smartphones Voice Notes function so that you can create your own guided meditation with your preferred pacing and duration.

In the next installment, the topic will be focused awareness meditation, which in technique is nearly opposite to open monitoring.

If you engage in this practice, feel free to share your experience in the comments section.

If you are a CFA Institute member and would like more information or support about meditation, then join our LinkedIn CFA Institute Members Meditation Group.

If you liked this post, dont forget to subscribe to the Enterprising Investor.

All posts are the opinion of the author. As such, they should not be construed as investment advice, nor do the opinions expressed necessarily reflect the views of CFA Institute or the authors employer.

Image credit: Getty Images/Kaligraf

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Meditation Tips for Investment Professionals: Open-Monitoring Meditation - CFA Institute Enterprising Investor (blog)

Theres a lot of confusion about Zen meditation, breath counting, just sitting, and koan introspection.

Zen teacher Dosho Ports talk, the Three Ways of Zen Meditation lays it out as well as Ive seen.

Out of my years of practice and study, I feel much of what is presented about Zen meditation is not very helpful. This talk, however, is about as clear an exposition of what I understand to be the discipline, presented clearly, and compassionately. The talk itself is about twenty-five minutes long, the balance is a question and answer section, which is also worth listening to.

The Reverends Dosho Port and Tetsugan Zummach guide the Nebraska Zen Center in Omaha, where they are co-conspiring to bring wisdom and compassion into the world.

If you find yourself in their neighborhood, you might consider dropping in and seeing whats going on. Well, obviously theres a lot of Zen meditation happening. But, something rich and powerful is going on along with all that meditation. I believe in the Heartland something a spiritual earthquake is shaking the very foundations of the world. And the epicenter may well be at that center.

Worth checking out.

And as long as were at it, at no extra charge I throw in a talk by Port Roshi. Its a bit older, and delivered before he and Tetsugan came to Nebraska, but it gives a pretty good sense of the roshis style as well as the breadth and depth of his teaching.

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Zen teacher Dosho Port on the Three Ways of Zen Meditation - Patheos (blog)

RANCHO SANTA FE Dr. Richard Scotti led a talk on meditation at the Rancho Santa Fe Library sharing how when individuals take part in it they have the ability to achieve happiness and peace in their own lives. During the Feb. 15 lecture, Scotti shared how when someone enters a place of quiet, it is also serves as a passageway to a completely different universe.

According to Scotti, having knowledge and wisdom can be attained when passing through that element of quiet. And that way is through mediation.

Scotti also noted how the world is dualistic.

When we want something to have or not to have we call it a desire, he said. Whenever we have a desire it creates a duality.

Scotti explained that the whole purpose of meditation was to allow things to go by and not react to them. Energy dissipates when a person learns to become non-reactive to it.

So what happens is when you sit for meditation for half an hour then your whole film strip of your chores for the day is taken out. The ends are put back together and you really are living a different way, he said. When you sit without reacting to have or not to have, youre nullifying the comic reaction; and, that nullification is like taking the filmstrip of your drama for the day and taking a chunk out of it and putting it back together so all of your relationships from then on are different.

Scotti compared it to shifting ones life from that amount of time describing it as pretty unbelievable. When one comes out of meditation their timeframe has shifted. For those with a complicated life, Scotti said how meditation will make their life more to their liking.

When youre calm, then your universe becomes calm because weve projected our emotions on our universe, he said. We see what we project.

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Scotti lectures on meditation The Coast News Group - Coast News

Summary: Participants will have access to a list of music teachers located in various neighbourhoods where they can learn music further. Very soon, the Para team intends to head to various schools and colleges and highlight the advantages of learning music and meditation and their link to improve concentration level. Sangeetam (music) and dhyanam (meditation) are the two key components that keep ones mind stress-free. In a step towards bringing music and meditation closer to ones heart and making them an integral part of life, a campaign -- Para the supreme -- has been launched by Carnatic vocalist Pantula Rama along with her disciples in the city. A team of experts will train the participants in Sapta swaras-- seven notes of music and simplest way to meditate.

In a step towards bringing music and meditation closer to ones heart and making them an integral part of life, a campaign -- Para the supreme -- has been launched by Carnatic vocalist Pantula Rama along with her disciples in the city. Terming the objectives of Para a well-designed ones to draw the attention of people from all sections and introduce them to the domain of arts, Dr. Pantula Rama says a plethora of activities form a part it. The first step in line with the project is Swachh Swar, a two-day learning camp, which will be organised on March 3 and 4. A team of experts will train the participants in Sapta swaras-- seven notes of music and simplest way to meditate. While meditation techniques will be taught by Gopala Krishna, founder and CEO of Spiritual Tablets Research Foundation, I will impart basic concepts of music to the participants along with my disciples.

Sangeetam (music) and dhyanam (meditation) are the two key components that keep ones mind stress-free. The prime focus is to enable people learn, recognise, sing swaras and experiment with subtle variations. When you learn to sing and meditate in an appropriate manner, you are sure to strike a harmonious chord in life, Dr.

Source: http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Visakhapatnam/taking-meditation-music-closer-to-people/article17386344.ece

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Taking meditation, music closer to people - NYOOOZ

ROCKLAND On Thursday, March 2, from 6:30 to 8 p.m., Rockland Public Library and the Rockland Shambhala Meditation Center will present an evening talk "Why Meditate?" with shastri Christopher St. John. The program, which is free and open to the public, will take place at the Library.

St. John will open with a discussion about the benefits of meditation and a synopsis of the most common reasons people have undertaken meditation throughout history. He will introduce the Shambhala Buddhist teachings on basic goodness and mindfulness-awareness, as well as share a brief history of the Shambhala lineage. After a discussion of these topics, St. John will provide instruction on shamatha meditation; there will be time to practice and reflect on the experience together.

St. John has been meditating in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition since 1982, and he has been resident director of Shambhala Training at the Brunswick-Portland Shambhala Center since 1995. He was named shastri, or senior teacher, by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche in 2016.

The Rockland Shambhala Meditation Center is affiliated with the Brunswick-Portland Shambhala Center, as well as Shambhala International, a nonprofit organization with more than 200 Shambhala Meditation Centers worldwide. Chogyam Trunga Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist master, founded Shambhala in the United States in 1970.

For more information, visit maineshambhala.org or contact Rachel Nixon at rachelanixon@gmail.com or 594-1694.

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Why meditate? ... with Shastri Christopher St. John - PenBayPilot.com

If youre harried and distracted, meditation can help calm your mind and body.

But thats the rub. Some say theyre so harried and distracted that they cant possibly meditate to quiet the mind, regain focus and ease anxiety. Within moments, theyre ruminating on the noise of extraneous thoughts or uncompleted daily to-do lists.

Too many people have tried meditation and have given up. Theyve concluded, Im just not that kind of person, says Belisa Vranich, a clinical psychologist in New York City and author of the new book Breathe. But they dont have to be thinking about Gandhi or world peace or absolutely nothing to reach a meditative state. Its not that complicated. In fact, its bizarrely simple.

All you need do is breathe.

In her book, Vranich recommends a type of controlled breathing she calls Recovery Breath. The two-part breathing exercise, she says, is a form of active meditation that can reset the body after a stressful day at work, a disagreement with your spouse or partner, a test or a competition any demanding situation. It can be done for as little as five minutes in a day.

The good news for people over 50 whove been frustrated in their attempts to meditate is that it gets easier with age.

Belisa Vranich, author of 'Breathe'

The subtitle of her chapter on Recovery Breath is Meditation for People Who Cant Meditate. Controlled breathing or breathwork is among a variety of practices to achieve a meditative state of mindfulness focusing your awareness on the present moment, free of the distraction of the past and what might lie ahead.

Other popular meditation practices include guided meditation either in-person or digital versions yoga, stretching, visualization, chanting and walking meditation.

The good news for people over 50 whove been frustrated in their attempts to meditate is that it gets easier with age, Vranich contends. In your 50s and beyond, you understand the importance of being able to quiet your mind. Thats not a priority when youre in your teens. Our values change with age, she notes.

Breathing the right way becomes more important with age, says Vranich, who advocates breathing from the belly rather than taking short, quick breaths from the chest. She says belly or horizontal breathing maximizes oxygen intake and slows the heart rate, helping reduce stress. Horizontal breathing also helps maintain the muscles in a persons pelvic region, which are important for maintaining balance as people age.

While some say theyre often too agitated to meditate, others say their attempts to tame their stress put them to sleep. One solution is to keep moving while meditating through walking meditation, says Gil Fronsdal, a Buddhist teacher, scholar and guiding teacher at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, Calif.

Some people say they would like to meditate, but theyre too tired, Fronsdal says. Walking meditation keeps them alert enough so that they can meditate. The kinesthetic movement from point A to point B engages their body and their mind.

Walking meditation can take many forms and a variety of paces. When he was studying Buddhism in Burma in the 1980s, Fronsdal says one of the monks power-walked his way through his paces. But most meditative walking has a slower, more deliberate pace.

To settle into the moment, most people find its best to walk slowly back and forth on a straight line thats about 20 to 30 paces long. Soon, you know the route and your mind is not thinking about where to walk and what to avoid along the way. You can be fully there in the experience of walking, says Fronsdal.

Walkers should focus on saying a single word like stepping each time they plant their foot on the ground. That gives the mind something to do because an idle mind will wander off, Fronsdal says.

The setting can be indoors or outdoors and pastoral or urban. Although he doesnt recommend walking meditation in a busy city for beginners, Fronsdal enjoys doing it occasionally in downtown San Francisco. Its good to learn how to incorporate walking meditation into your daily life. I recognize that I am better off walking in a mindful, meditative way. It makes the whole experience so much nicer, he says.

For some, a yoga class is the first time they unwittingly slip into a meditative state. A class typically ends with students assuming a corpse-like pose (lying flat on their back) on the floor called savasana. A students mind, body and breath come to a deep state of relaxation after the exertion of a series of physical poses known as asana.

Yoga asana practice combined with pranayama (yogic breathing) prepares the body for the state of meditation the purpose of yoga. For many, practicing yoga helps them to progress toward meditation when they may initially think, Im too busy to meditate. My mind is active all the time, or I cant just sit here and think about nothing, says Caroline Ramsay, a registered yoga teacher and certified yoga therapist in New Buffalo, Mich. Its an amazing feeling when students find themselves in a subconscious state, she says.

Breathwork can also help lead to a meditative state because it triggers a response in the parasympathetic nervous system, which can slow the heart and create a sense of stillness, Ramsay says. But yoga, thanks to its physical element, deepens the sense of relaxation for both body and mind.

Ramsay took up yoga to help undo the physical damage caused by the stress of 25 years in a managerial role for a multinational corporation. Discovering that yoga helped calm her mind was an unexpected fringe benefit. You certainly dont have to practice yoga to meditate, but it certainly helps many to reach that state, she adds.

Twin Cities Public Television - 2017. All rights reserved.

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Meditation for People Who Think They Can't Meditate - Next Avenue - Next Avenue

You've no doubt heard about all the benefits of meditation, and how mindfulness can improveyour sex life, eating habits, andworkoutsbut meditation isn't one-size-fits-all.

If other types of meditation aren't clicking for you, japa meditationa meditation that uses mantras and mala beadscould be the key to really tuning into your practice. Mantras (which you might be familiar with as a sort of inspirational call to action) are a word or phrase you say either internally or out loud during your meditation practice, and malas (those gorgeous strings of beads you might see on your fave yogi or meditation Instagram accounts) are actually a way to count those mantras. Traditionally, they have 108 beads plus one guru bead (the one that dangles off the end of the necklace), says Ashley Wray, cofounder of Mala Collective, a company that sells sustainable, fair trade malas handmade in Bali.

"Not only are mala beads beautiful, but they're a great way to focus your attention while you're sitting in meditation," says Wray. "Repeating your mantra on each bead is a very meditative process, as the repetition becomes very melodic."

If you normally have trouble reining in a wandering mind during meditation, a mantra and malas provide both a mental and physical way to stay grounded in the moment. Not to mention, picking a mantra that's particularly relevant can help take your practice to the next level.

"Because affirmations are positive statements, they specifically help to interrupt the negative thought patterns we have and change them into positive beliefs," says Wray. "By simply repeating to ourselves, 'I am grounded, I am love, I am supported,' we start to take on those beliefs, and embrace them as truth."

1. Get comfortable. Find a place (on a cushion, chair, or the floor) where you can sit tall and comfortably. Hold the mala draped between your middle and index fingers on the right hand (above). Hold the mala between your middle finger and thumb.

2. Select your mantra. Choosing a mantra might seem the most important decision in the world, but don't over-think it: sit down to meditate, and let it come to you. "I let my mind wander and ask myself, 'what do I need right now, what am I feeling?'" says Wray. "It's a really simple and beautiful question to spark some self-reflection, and often a word, quality, or feeling will pop up."

An easy way to start is with an affirmation-based mantra: "I am _____." Choose a third word (love, strong, supported, etc.) for whatever you need at that moment. (Or try these mantras straight from mindfulness experts.)

3. Get rolling. To use the mala, you turn each bead in between your middle finger and thumb and repeat your mantra (either out loud or in your head) once on each bead. When you reach the guru bead, pause, and take that as an opportunity to honor your guru or yourself for taking the time to meditate, says Wray. If you wish to keep meditating, reverse the direction on your mala, doing another 108 repetitions in the other direction until you reach the guru bead once again.

Don't worry if your mind wanders; when you catch yourself straying, simply bring your focus back to your mantra and mala. "But make sure not to judge yourself in the process," says Wray. "Bringing yourself back to your focal point with kindness and grace is important."

4. Take your meditation to-go. Having a mala with you can turn any period of downtime into the perfect moment for meditation: "For a public practice, I recommend contemplating a quality you feel is particularly significant or important to you right now and, while you're waiting for a meeting or during a commute, slowly reciting that word or phrase," says Lodro Rinzler, cofounder of MNDFL, a meditation studio in New York City. And let's be honest, the beads probably lookgreat with your outfit.

Head to Mala Collective for a free audio series onhow to meditate and watch the how-to video below for more tips.

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How to Meditate with Mala Beads for a More Mindful Practice - Shape Magazine

Loren Dickson, Entertainment Reporter February 27, 2017 Filed under News, Online

Dating back thousands of years, meditation is one of the most common forms of relaxation.

To inspire students to try it out for themselves, Easterns own Meditation Club will be hosting a concert on campus featuring Ahl-e Qulub, a musical Persian group.

Several members of the Meditation Club are a part of the group, which has been around for about a year.

Ahl-e Qulub, which means people of the heart, will be performing 5:30 p.m. Tuesday in the University Ballroom of the Martin Luther King Jr. University Union.

The concert was moved from its original location in the 7th Street Underground.

This will be Ahl-e Qulubs first time performing on Easterns campus.

Ahl-e Qulub member Alex Hill said the group only uses percussion and vocals during its performance.

We dont use other instruments because the focus is more on the audience to make it an internal listening experience, Hill said.

The percussion instruments that will be played are congas, djembes and dafs.

A conga is a tall, narrow, single-headed drum that has origins from Africa and Cuba. A djembe is a rope-tuned, skin-covered drum that is played with bare hands, originally from Africa, and a daf is a large Persian frame drum that is usually made of hardwood with metal rings attached.

Hill said for some who are not familiar with meditation, the music can help enrich the experience and get them in the right mindset.

Ahl-e Qulub member Ali Fisher said although there are many different forms of meditation, the group never deviates from the form they use.

This particular meditation method we use has been around for about 1,400 years, and we teach it the same way every time, she said. We encourage, if you do want to try meditating, just try to choose one method and go deeper in that. Cultivate that one meditation method.

Meditation is really simple, Hill said.

There are a few preliminary steps to get you in the right mindset, he said. Like most meditations that you will find, you focus on your breathing and your words. Sometimes its known as positive affirmation.

Hill said the words people choose to focus on are completely applicable to anyone and anyone can use meditation to better themselves and find what is purposeful in their life.

Its really interesting because we are telling everyone in the audience to say the same thing, truth you are, but for each individual person that can mean something totally different, Fisher said. Its universal.

Fisher said the goal of the Meditation Club is to give students a tool to help themselves and enrich their lives.

When you close your eyes, you are imagining something that brings peace to your heart, Hill said.

The concert is free and open to the public.

Loren Dickson can be reached at 581-2812 or ladickson@eiu.edu.

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Persian meditation music group, to perform - The Daily Eastern News

Take Five Meditation in Dupont Circle is the latest meditation studio to open in the D.C. area. (Courtesy Take Five Meditation)

WASHINGTON Stress is on the rise in the U.S., up 6.25 percent from August 2016 to January 2017, according to a report from the American Psychological Association and stress levels in the nations capital are in linewith the national average.

Washingtonians are doers, and they do a lot, said Eldad Moraru, the co-founder and chief contentment officer at D.C.s Take Five Meditation.

[Theyre] a breed that seem to have every minute of the day accounted for, with very little free time to just relax. So yeah, I would say this is a pretty stressed-out city.

But Moraru and his business partner, Tara Huber, are hoping to change that, one breath at a time.

Their Dupont Circle studio is the latest in a recent wave of meditation centers to hit the D.C. area. Just Meditate opened its doors in Bethesda, Maryland, in November, followed by the downtown-based Recharj in December.

Moraru, who has lived in D.C. for more than 25 years, says the tranquil trend has been a long time coming. He compares meditations new moment in the mainstream to yogas first taste of fame.

Both are practices that have been around forever but have not been mainstream. Eighteen years ago, if you wanted to try yoga, you had very limited options, Moraru said.

Now, more than 37 million people practice yoga in the U.S., according to a 2016 study conducted by Yoga Journal and Yoga Alliance.

Probably in the next five to 10 years, youll see meditation studios everywhere just like you see yoga studios now.

There are a number of reasons why more people are dipping their toes into meditations waters. The practice has been endorsed by celebrities, adopted by schools and made more accessible by apps, such as Headspace, which has more than 5 million downloads.

But I think more importantly, a lot of scientists have done studies over the last few years that have proven scientifically the benefits of meditation, and I think thats helped bring this to the conscience of the general public, Moraru added.

A team of Harvard-affiliated researchers found that eight weeks of mindfulness meditation produced physiological changes in the brains gray matter and made measurable changes in the regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress.

The mention of meditation often comes with an onslaught of stereotypes, including chanting monks and cross-legged hippies, but Huber said thats not at all what it entails. Simply put, its the ability to sit with yourself and get to understand your mind, she said.

Similar to yoga, meditation focuses on the breath. It teaches one how to be present in the moment a skill that sounds more simple than it is.

Most people tend to have an overactive mind, Moraru said. Usually were either stressing about the future the to-do list, the unanswered emails, etc. or reliving past experiences and replaying things in our mind. What it usually means is were not in the present moment.

Through guided commands, movement and even music or scent, meditation instructors help students drown out the noise of the daily grind and be present if only for a few minutes.

I think were on a lot, and I think were losing the skill, were losing the ability to know our mind and know who we are. And [meditation] gives you command over your mind, Huber said.

The cost of meditation is comparable to yoga. Classes in the D.C. area range between $15 and $25 each, and class times range from 30 to 75 minutes. But Moraru said even five minutes of meditation can make a difference and the good news is, you dont have to wait for results.

The benefits actually come very quickly. If you start meditating daily, within two weeks you will see a noticeable difference. This is not like hitting the gym you will feel the effects pretty quickly, he said.

Take Five Meditation is located at 1803 Connecticut Ave. NW on the second floor. Classes run between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.

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The next yoga? Meditation studios multiply in DC area | WTOP - WTOP