A recent study published in Frontiers in Psychology sheds light on the distinct neural correlates of two primary types of meditation concentrative and analytical using electroencephalography (EEG). The researchers found that these meditative practices result in different patterns of brain activity, providing insights into how meditation affects cognitive and emotional regulation. This study involved monks from the Sera Jey Monastery in India, offering a unique glimpse into the neurophysiological effects of long-term meditation practice.

The researchers aimed to investigate how different forms of meditation influence brain activity. Despite the growing popularity of meditation in both clinical and secular contexts, there remains a lack of clarity regarding the specific neural mechanisms underlying various meditative practices.

By focusing on concentrative and analytical meditation, the study sought to delineate the distinct neurophysiological profiles associated with these practices. The researchers hoped to address gaps in the literature, particularly the need for more nuanced and contextually rich examinations of meditations effects on the brain.

Although I have been Professor of Electronics at the University of Pisa for over 40 years, the science of the mind and the investigation of consciousness have always been at the center of my interests and curiosity, explained study author Bruno Neri.

The first time I read about the Dalai Lama was in an adventure book when I was 14 years old: this figure of political and spiritual guidance of his people marked by boundless compassion struck me deeply. His reincarnation, and his return after each lifetime to continue leading his people, has always fascinated me. These two interests merged into a single thread when I found myself completely by chance at the Lama Tsongkhapa Institute, the largest center of Tibetan Buddhism in the West, about 40 kilometers from Pisa.

For this reason, a few years later, when the Dalai Lama, during a visit to the Institute that I had been attending for some time, asked the director to establish contacts with the University of Pisa and the Director spoke to me about it, I jumped at the chance occasion by promoting collaboration agreements both with the Institute itself and with the Tibetan Monastic University of Sera Jey in India.

The study was conducted over 12 weeks at the Sera Jey Monastery in India, involving 23 monks who varied in their meditation experience. The monastic university, located in Bylakuppe, is a prominent center for Buddhist learning and practice. It was reestablished by monks who escaped Tibet following the Chinese occupation in 1959.

The University of Sera Jey was destroyed 60 years ago due to the Chinese invasion and rebuilt in India: this is a great test of resistance, maturity and perseverance in peace on the part of a people who have never reacted to violence with violence and show how the aptitude for non-violence can be developed by educating the mind, Neri explained.

The participants were divided into three groups: beginners, intermediates, and advanced meditators. The researchers collected EEG data from these monks as they engaged in both concentrative and analytical meditation sessions. The sessions were not time-restricted, allowing each participant to meditate naturally and without external pressure.

The researchers found significant differences in EEG patterns between concentrative and analytical meditation. Concentrative meditation, which involves focusing attention on a single object (like the breath or a mantra), showed more pronounced changes in brain activity compared to analytical meditation. Specifically, concentrative meditation was associated with increased power in alpha and theta brain waves, particularly in frontal and posterior regions. These changes suggest enhanced attentional control and reduced mind-wandering during concentrative meditation.

In contrast, analytical meditation, which involves reflecting on specific concepts or teachings, showed less dramatic changes in brain activity. While both types of meditation led to some alterations in EEG patterns, the effects of concentrative meditation were more robust and consistent.

Neri was impressed by the monks ability to voluntarily induce different mental states that are easily recognizable with objective measuring instruments.

We must approach these people with great humility and the desire to learn from them, leaving typical Western arrogance at home and avoiding making them feel like guinea pigs.

The researchers also observed a unique phenomenon in advanced meditators: the presence of a marked peak in the beta frequency range during some sessions, which was not present in beginners. This suggests that long-term meditation practice might enhance specific cognitive and attentional processes.

The research highlights how a multidisciplinary contribution Western Neuroscience on the one hand and Contemplative Practices that have developed continuously for almost 3 millennia in the great Eastern traditions on the other is indispensable to overcome otherwise insurmountable obstacles to the understanding of enigma of consciousness, Neri told PsyPost

While the study provides valuable insights, it also has several limitations. The sample size was relatively small, and the distribution of participants across different levels of meditation experience was uneven. This makes it difficult to generalize the findings to all meditators. Future studies should aim to include larger and more balanced samples.

The researchers suggest that future studies should explore the long-term effects of meditation, particularly how sustained practice over years might lead to lasting changes in brain structure and function. Investigating the impact of meditation on specific clinical populations, such as individuals with anxiety or depression, could also provide valuable insights into its therapeutic potential.

The thing that fascinates me most are some types of esoteric meditations that allow practitioners to go to the roots of the mind/body relationship, showing a cause/effect relationship opposite to that recognized in the dominant vision of neuroscience, Neri said. It is not consciousness which presents itself as an epiphenomenon of the brain that generates it, but is itself capable of managing its relationship with the body.

An example of this is the g-tummo meditation in which the mind controls the body temperature until it reaches almost 39C. Another is the Mahamudra meditation through which meditators simulate the detachment of the mind/consciousness from the body by surprisingly lowering their metabolism until they appear dead. The next step will be to look for these two types of expert meditators during the next research mission to Sera Jey which will begin in a few weeks.

Francisco Varela understood the indispensability of combining the third-person approach, objective analysis, with the first-person approach, subjective analysis through contemplative practices, to progress in the investigation of consciousness, Neri added. Unfortunately he died prematurely. My experience with an ancient and authoritative tradition like that of Tibetan Buddhism showed me that Varela was right.

The study, Report from a Tibetan Monastery: EEG neural correlates of concentrative and analytical meditation, was authored by Bruno Neri, Alejandro Luis Callara, Nicola Vanello, Danilo Menicucci, Andrea Zaccaro, Andrea Piarulli, Marco Laurino, Ngawang Norbu, Jampa Kechok, Ngawang Sherab, and Angelo Gemignani.

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Study with Tibetan monks reveals how different types of meditation affect brain activity - PsyPost

Some of the rhetoric around meditation can get pretty extreme: awaken us from the illusion of selfhood, dissolve the mental habits that generate suffering, and maybe merge with the primordial oneness that our thinking minds make us feel separate from.

But of the 35 million Americans (as of 2017) who find some crevice of their day to practice some kind of meditation, including the sort of quick mindfulness meditation that tops app-store charts and bestseller lists, its unsurprising that many wind up concluding the hype is mostly bullshit or at least seriously overblown.

Instead of the deep psychological transformations detailed in Buddhist traditions, 10 minutes or so of meditation often gives rise to a sort of balmy uneventfulness that leaves the mind feeling like its had a nice, light massage. It has its effects: A growing heap of studies is finding these basic mindfulness practices can do all sorts of relatively beneficial things, from helping with depression to reducing blood pressure. But your basic understanding of how your mind works? That can remain relatively unchanged.

In the past few years, though, the study of more advanced meditation than basic mindfulness has been developing. So far, its most robust finding is that our scientific understanding of just how deep meditations effects can go has hardly scratched the surface.

In most circles, meditation is billed as this thing thatll help you relax a little bit, said Grant Belsterling, a machine learning engineer at Nielsen and avid meditator with a six-year practice. But there are a lot of states of meditation that blow anything you can get in the regular world of everyday life out of the water in terms of how pleasurable, meaningful, or absorbing they can be.

One series of eight meditative states the jhnas, often described as successive states of absorption into bliss, rapture, or ecstasy is now beginning to rise from obscurity, raising a powerful example of meditations more transformative potentials into mainstream attention across academia, tech, social media, and Western meditation communities. The jhnas are detailed in the Theravda Buddhist traditions of Southeast Asia and have their own particular meditation instructions, which typically involve sustaining attention on feelings of pleasure in the body.

Its a completely different mode of consciousness, said Paul Dennison, a former psychotherapist and meditation teacher who published a book about the jhnas in 2022. The sense of time disappears temporarily, the sense of why youre doing anything disappears ... and when you come out of that, the mind is so clear that you can get a lot deeper understanding of who we are and how we get caught up in the patterns that lead to suffering.

Neuroscientist Matthew Sacchet, who leads Harvards Meditation Research Program, published a study in January that stuck an advanced meditator with 25 years of jhna experience inside a massive fMRI machine to create a more robust map of what jhna experience looks like in the brain, homing in on changes in blood and oxygen flow. When I toured the lab earlier this year, he explained that while the study was just a first step, they found distinct patterns in brain activity that distinguished jhna meditation from non-meditative control states.

Activity decreased in the brain region that includes the prefrontal cortex, which drives complex functions like planning and self-referential thinking. At the same time, activity near the back of the brain increased, in older regions like the brainstem and visual cortex, which regulate more basic functions like awareness and arousal.

Sacchet emphasized to me that we still dont know much about the jhnas from a neuroscience perspective. But his findings support a growing theory in meditation research that some deeper meditative states like the jhnas cause a reduction in top-down processing, and gradually deactivate the minds habits of weaving narratives, orienting around goals, and keeping cognitive control over experience. As the theory goes, that allows for attention to more directly behold sensory experience as it is, rather than as the mind has evolved to construct it.

This is one of the biggest secrets on the planet right now, said Stephen Zerfas, who along with Alex Gruver is a co-founder of Jhourney, a meditation startup focused on bringing blissful meditative states like jhnas to the masses. Access to the jhnas is shockingly available to folks with all kinds of meditation backgrounds.

Neuroscientists, novice practitioners, established meditation teachers, and apparently Jhourneys angel investors all seem to agree that the mind can learn how to launch itself into deep states of unparalleled bliss basically on command. If thats indeed the case, instructions for doing so have been lying around for at least 2,000 years, and presumably longer in oral traditions. Because the Western mindfulness movement derives from Southeast Asian Buddhist traditions that largely ignore the jhnas, they are only now beginning to spread beyond yogic traditions and monastic chambers to reach wider audiences.

There are at least two very exciting things to note about the jhnas. The first is that basic mindfulness does not exactly topple ones understanding of how consciousness works the jhnas, however, do. Bliss is not forever elusive, but a trainable skill, and the mind is capable of far more than we yet understand.

Second, even though that the jhnas do seem to live up to their often hyperbolic reputations absorptions into boundless consciousness, for example most skilled meditators who learn to access them wind up moving on to explore other practices (like non-dual meditation). Meditators seem to lose interest in bliss alone because experiencing the jhnas makes a fascinating question come alive: If the mind can do this, what else can it do?

A particular understanding of the jhnas is crystalizing across Western interest today, largely inspired by the work of software engineer and longtime meditator Leigh Brasington, who was authorized to teach the jhnas by Buddhist Theravda nun Ayya Khema. In 2015, he published Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhnas, one of the first books dedicated to teaching a wide, Western audience how to access the jhnas.

But it takes very little digging to find that within and across Buddhist traditions, people disagree on what the jhnas are like and how long it takes to enter them. Some Theravda interpretations, like Bhante Vimalarasis Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation (TWIM), suggest that the jhnas can be entered relatively quickly. You could fit them into your half-hour morning meditation before heading to work. Others, like Pa-Auk Sayadaw, maintain that it takes highly specific conditions and hours of sitting before getting anywhere close to something like even the first jhna.

Daniel Ingram, author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha and the longtime meditator who Sacchets lab at Harvard stuffed in the neuroimaging machines when they wanted to study the jhnas, said he prefers to think about them dimensionally. Each of the eight jhanic states ranges from shallow, accessible entry points to deeper ends of absorption that require more time and preparation.

David Snyder, author of a number of books on Buddhism and founder of the Dhamma Wiki, has a usefully sparse list drawn from the Aguttara Nikya of the Pli Canon, a collection of Theravda Buddhist scriptures.

First jhna: Delightful sensations

Third jhna: Contentment

Fourth jhna: Utter peacefulness

Fifth jhna: Infinity of space

Sixth jhna: Infinity of consciousness

Seventh jhna: No-thingness

Eighth jhna: Neither perception nor non-perception

While each jhna seems to grow a little more difficult to describe than the last, even the first is not a mellow starting point. Descriptions range from a laser beam of intense tingly pleasurable electricity, similar to a sustained orgasm, to MDMA therapy without the drugs.

Reporting for this piece, I got the sense that the jhnas, like psychedelics, are things you cant really understand without having the experience for yourself. So I took on a jhna-specific practice for the first time (with about 10 years of not-always-consistent other meditation experience). I still dont know what to make of what happened.

Theres a variety of paths toward the jhnas. Most run through what Buddhists call pti, a sort of bodily zest. Belsterling described it as champagne bubbles, or like the feeling of goosebumps, except throughoutyour entire body, not just the surface of your skin.

In the past, Ive noticed random tingles in my body while meditating, usually in my hands or feet. I always figured I was just losing circulation. Id shift my body a bit and try to ignore them. But it turns out this was just me repeatedly ignoring the doorway to the jhnas because I didnt know any better.

The first time I was in the first jhna, I felt like I got dropped off a roller coaster, that sense of full-body exhilaration, said Belsterling, whod been meditating for about six years before trying jhna practice

Jhna instructions say that after reaching a stable degree of concentration, maybe through focusing on your breath, a mantra, or loving-kindness, youll begin to notice that tingling pti growing stronger and more stable. And if your foot is not in fact just falling asleep, that means the decisive moment has arrived. Instead of ignoring it, you shift your attention onto the pti.

I managed to find this on-ramp to the first jhna, and it was profoundly strange. The tingling sensations leaped from my fingers to envelop the entire frame of my awareness, like going from a few stray drops of rain on my hands to being fully submerged underwater, where I began to feel myself almost literally absorbing into a sort of vibratory expanse (this is what I mean by not being able to understand it unless you experience it).

Thats about as far as I went. Since the whole ordeal is so bizarre, lapses in concentration keep knocking me off the onramp. Apparently, getting a little too excited and losing the concentration that keeps things moving forward is pretty common in the early days of practicing jhna.

But if you manage to keep cool while the jhna ramps up, at some point, it can just take off like a rocket, said Zerfas.

The first time I was in the first jhna, I felt like I got dropped off a roller coaster, that sense of full-body exhilaration, said Belsterling, whod been meditating for about six years before trying jhna practice. It was super overwhelming, and I got dropped out of it immediately. But once he learned to stabilize it, the drop would lead to dwelling in a state of relaxed presence and unification, accompanied by tremendous joy and physical rapture.

While this probably all sounds strange (it should; the jhnas are), the mechanism may be a familiar one for many. Getting into the first jhna is like having a panic attack but for joy.

You can think about [the jhnas] as a positive feedback loop between attention and emotion, said Zerfas. When anxiety begins to set in, you can feel it. Your chest pulls tight or your palms go moist. If you focus on or obsess over any of these sensations, you might make them more intense. The most surefire way to sweat through your shirt is to become hyperconscious of the fact that your body is starting to go damp. The first jhna is a similar process but in the opposite direction.

Rather than focusing on the physiology of anxiety, you do enough concentration meditation that youre able to notice the early signs of a physiology of joy, or pleasantness, in your body: pti. Then you focus on it, and by doing so, make it more intense.

At this point, you may think meditators have really weird ideas about what feels pleasurable. But as this process escalates, so does the bliss.

Which, traditionally speaking, is beside the point. According to Theravda Buddhist texts like the Pli Canon and Visuddhimagga, the aim of doing jhna practice is to develop the mental clarity and concentration skills to go even further in insight practice, which, unlike the jhnas, is what actually leads to spiritual awakening. The jhnas are like an optional training program, and the bliss stuff is just a side effect that contemplative traditions have urged practitioners not to get caught up in. What matters is liberation from suffering, not vacations into rapture.

But if the jhnas gain traction in the West, they may well follow the path being forged by the mainstreaming of psychedelics, where wider spiritual and religious contexts are stripped away. What remains, whether drugs or a particular set of meditation instructions, gets packaged as a psychological treatment for a culture mired in mental health crises.

New treatments arent necessarily a bad thing. People with conditions like PTSD or depression (not to mention cluster headaches) are in urgent need of better medical interventions than what weve currently got. Psychedelic therapy can do serious amounts of good here, provided its done in ways that dont harm the cultures that have stewarded many of these substances for so long. Same with the jhnas and this whole business of being absorbed into bliss states. Even if the jhnas are decontextualized away from their traditional goal enlightenment learning access to blissful states could still deliver important benefits.

It is very possible that we might see the jhnas fitting into hospitals, clinics, and perhaps the public in general, said Sacchet.

While concerns about decontextualizing the jhnas leading to yet another sacrilegious Western perversion of long-running spiritual practices are important to engage with, the jhnas have this interesting quality of pointing beyond themselves. Among the Western meditators I spoke with who are trying them out, I encountered no so-called jhna junkies. You might suspect that one could become obsessed with unconditional access to bliss. And its not impossible. But for the few who do, I can think of worse compulsive habits. And for the others who dont, they wind up developing a natural curiosity toward the wider possibilities of the mind, which is conveniently aligned with the traditional context anyway.

Ancient Theravda texts can give the impression that the jhnas are really difficult to learn and that very few who try will succeed. That depends on your definition of jhna, but observations from this century suggest that at least the shallower ends of jhna are surprisingly accessible.

When I spoke with Ajahn Sona, a Theravda monk for over 30 years who runs the Birken Forest Buddhist Monastery in British Columbia, he said that at retreats he leads, hes seen people reach the first and second jhnas in as little as the fourth day of their first-ever retreat, though some may struggle to reenter the jhnas consistently (meditators may spend anywhere from six to 16 hours meditating per day, depending on the retreat).

Zerfas said that Jhourney is finding similar benchmarks at its retreats. After roughly 40 hours of meditation, some students begin reporting experiences that match descriptions of the first jhna. Its worth noting, though, that these are very rough approximations. Development along the meditative spectrum isnt always linear. The amount of time to reach various states differs across people. Not to mention that our methods for verifying whether someone actually went into a jhna mostly come down to a teachers intuition, or comparing someones subjective report of their experience to existing jhna descriptions.

Still, if jhna meditation can propel even novice meditators into incomparable states of bliss, it may seem strange that mindfulness practices claim the majority of mainstream attention. The global market for mindfulness meditation apps is booming, while theres comparatively zilch for the jhnas.

The absence of the jhnas in todays meditation discourse is made even stranger when you look back across Buddhisms history, where they played a major role. Few strategies are as central to the Buddhist path, and as little known to Westerners, as those called the jhanas, writes Mary Talbot, former executive editor of the Buddhist magazine Tricycle.

So why did Buddhisms spread across the West in the 20th century leave the jhnas out?

From the historical Buddhas time of roughly 500 BCE until the 19th century, Theravda, the oldest branch of Buddhism, taught two aspects of meditation practice: samatha (or concentration, which includes the jhnas) and vipassan (or insight). The two work together and were not generally considered separable. Samatha practices sharpen concentration, while insight practices wield that sharpened concentration to penetrate deeper into the nature of the mind.

By the early 20th century, reform movements had swept across the Theravda traditions of Thailand and Myanmar (then called Burma). Influential teacher Ledi Sayadaw taught vipassan as a style of meditation that could be separated from samatha and the jhnas. Vipassan was emphasized while samatha was not, in part because the reforms intended to make meditation practice available to laypeople living outside of monastic traditions, and the jhnas had acquired a reputation owing largely to a fifth-century text, the Visuddhimagga as being difficult to achieve.

The reform movements created a dry vipassan model dry, because as Dennison put it, it isnt moistened by the joy of jhna which saved meditators from the hard task of cultivating the jhnas but kept the road toward enlightenment offered by insight meditation. By the mid-1960s, any organized teaching of the old samatha practices had all but disappeared, writes Dennison. The new face of Buddhism had become vipassan.

Yet even while mindfulness began to take root as the Wests most common form of meditation through the end of the 20th century, a handful of teachers continued teaching the jhnas

And when the generation of American seekers who would eventually return to spread mindfulness across the West Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein went off to Asia in search of God or liberation or whatever esoteric interests impelled Americans to seek out meditation in foreign countries, they found teachers from this Burmese tradition of dry insight. These were practitioners like Mahs Syadaw (who taught in Burma) and S.N. Goenka (born in Burma but who taught primarily in India), whose meditation schemas became the blueprint for much of what came back to the US.

Yet even while mindfulness began to take root as the Wests most common form of meditation through the end of the 20th century, a handful of teachers continued teaching the jhnas, often surreptitiously. In the past decade, the teachings have started to spread across meditation communities, social media, and academia.

In 2013, the first EEG and fMRI academic study on the jhnas was published in the journal Neural Plasticity by Michael Hagerty and co-authors (including Brasington), focusing on changes in blood and oxygen flow in the brain regions associated with sensory and reward processing. Hagerty posits that meditators can internally trigger the brains dopamine reward system through sustained attentional skills, whereas ordinarily, pleasureful dopamine spikes have an external component, like chomping on a sweet doughnut or having sex.

Six years later, Dennison published his own EEG study of the jhnas in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, hypothesizing that EEG spindles little spikes of electrical activity and remarkably slowed brainwaves showed how the jhnas elicit a progressive disengagement from the human default consciousness. Then in the past year, Jhourney (the meditation startup Zerfas co-founded) was founded, and Sacchets lab published their paper on the jhnas, joining a swell of research on advanced meditation more broadly.

All of this raises questions without clear answers. Is there something perverse about turning deep meditative states into clearly defined goals that Americans will, inevitably, try to optimize? Will the drive to commodify ancient practices defile them? Are there risks to jhna meditation? The jhnas may offer something more powerful, interesting, and compelling than basic mindfulness does which makes the stakes of integrating and navigating them in a new cultural context that much more important.

We dont aspire to teach 1,000 people jhnas, Zerfas told me, we aspire to teach 10 million people jhnas. Which may encounter some obstacles.

First, no matter how much more accessible the jhnas may be than traditionally thought, 10 minutes of meditation a day probably wont get you there. Even if that 40-hour benchmark holds up, dividing it into 240 10-minute increments isnt a very promising strategy. Even for practiced meditators, it can take at least 10 minutes just to reach the kind of concentration you need to get started (Brasington calls this access concentration). Longer increments of practice are better, which is why retreats make for an easier place to start.

Thats still a remarkably low bar for learning to dwell in boundless ecstasy. But good luck scaling that commitment 40 or so tightly clustered hours across millions of Americans.

The first way to cut down on the time-to-jhna is simply to teach them directly something that until recently has been rare in the West. Jhourney approaches jhna instruction as Engineers, not Dharma Teachers, tinkering to find what methods seem to be most effective.

That may sound like a classic narrative of Western optimizers lifting spiritual practices from their traditional contexts, oblivious to the harms born of what they leave behind. But even Ajahn Sona, the abbot of the Birken monastery, told me that anyone seeking to spread the jhnas to more people needs to systematically plot out the optimal preconditions for getting into them. The Theravda texts still offer one blueprint for doing so. But its also possible that in the 2,000-plus years since they were written, as both new technologies and cultural sensibilities have developed, there might be some value in revisiting what those preconditions are and whether any new tools could help optimize them further.

If this acceleration of mainstream interest continues, the jhnas will likely face a similar gauntlet of questions that mindfulness began to wrangle with decades ago

While monks of old used singing bowls and monasteries as technologies to support meditation practice, Jhourney figures, why not neurotechnology? Why not, for example, strap a skullcap and sensors on advanced meditators in the jhnas, train algorithms on their biometric data, develop a consumer headset that can track the brain activity of novice meditators, and then use the algorithm to run a neurofeedback training program that helps guide users, via gentle audio cues, toward the jhnas, hopefully cutting down on the time it takes to get there? Jhourney is currently in the first phase, collecting data from experts while holding retreats to test what instructions seem to work best.

I think the real thing that stops us from taking this to true scale is good data, Zerfas said. If we can get the right quantitative tools ... then we may have what we need to share this thing that could be the well-being intervention of a generation.

If this acceleration of mainstream interest continues, the jhnas will likely face a similar gauntlet of questions that mindfulness began to wrangle with decades ago. And if we successfully developed technology that would allow anyone 10 million people to speed-run their way to the jhnas without first going on retreats and studying under teachers for years, a number of traditional harm reduction strategies could be lost.

You may not have access to a teacher who can monitor how things are going, and you may not be part of a meditation community that can offer you peer support and understanding, rather than Prozac, if you begin to experience what psychologist Willoughby Britton has called dark nights of the soul, or destabilizing meditation experiences that can last for months.

Its tempting to think that since the jhnas are bliss states, the risks are negligible. Whats so risky about teaching everyone how to access a mental state of extraordinary well-being? While there are increasingly well-known (and still generally rare) risks to meditation, theyre often associated with insight practice. But if 10-day vipassan retreats can prompt psychotic breaks, or deep and unwavering anxiety that lasts for months afterward, is jhna meditation really immune?

Ingram feels that the separation between jhanic bliss and destabilizing insight makes sense in theory, but it doesnt hold up in practice. Anyone on the path of jhna is risking insight. Which from a certain point of view is a beautiful thing. Except in the short term, every single one of the risks from insight applies, he said.

No one I spoke with felt that the jhnas hold any greater risks than other meditation practices. But scaling them means even rare consequences are meaningful at population levels. Ingram worries that the infrastructure to communicate informed consent, risks, benefits, and alternatives that can support millions of people getting into this territory at scale is dangerously lacking. Just like a bottle of aspirin provides risk estimates (one in a thousand people may experience ...), bringing advanced meditation to the masses should come with both clear information and clinical literacy for supporting those in need.

Ingram now runs an organization, the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium (EPRC), thats working on getting informed consent and clinical support to become the norm for states like advanced meditation experiences.

Then theres capitalism. Ingram also worries about profit as a motive underlying advanced meditation research and technology. This needs to be open source, open tech, open collaborative science for public benefit, he said.

Sacchet, who runs the Harvard lab, is conflicted by the tensions inherent in promoting the jhnas. On the one hand, my research has contributed to the hype, he said. I am deeply committed to raising awareness of these altered states. But he worries that literally selling the jhnas risks leaning too heavily on promising something in exchange, contributing to the idea of meditation as a goal-oriented practice.

Striving is the antithesis of jhna, he said. Touting the practice and its esoteric benefits may be anathema to the practice itself.

For Jhourney, though, Zerfas wants scale. And scaling meditation is not something that even traditional Buddhist cultures really did. Most Buddhists throughout history did not meditate.

It requires a bit of a stretch to imagine academic research on advanced meditation or nonprofit jhna teachers reaching tens of millions of people. On the contrary, Headspace alone reports over 70 million downloads of its meditation app. This tension between scale and authenticity to the original framing of the practice is nothing new mindfulness has been contending with this debate for years, where the mass-market version is often criticized as McMindfulness.

But given that the jhnas usually take more time than basic mindfulness, I dont think they threaten any greater commercial success than what weve already seen in the mindfulness industry. And the jhnas themselves are not at risk of being enclosed behind private property rights. Instructions and information on the jhnas are already freely available, and thats not going to change. Instead, just as with mindfulness, were more likely to see the logic of capital at play in building goods and services around the jhnas. For example, proprietary algorithms built on private biometric datasets that power commercial neurofeedback headsets.

Publicly available datasets, algorithms, and tools would be great, but nothing is stopping others from building their own versions in the public domain (if they can get the funding). Sacchets lab is working on exactly that. He told me that his team is in the process of developing such programs to make these kinds of practices more accessible to everyone who might be interested. This paints a picture where capitalism isnt swallowing the jhnas whole. Instead, theres a diverse and growing ecosystem of institutions getting involved, which helps mitigate the shortcomings of any one alone.

On a video call, Ajahn Sona seemed genuinely excited by the rising interest in jhna practice, both within his tradition and beyond (hes even been posting talks about the jhnas on YouTube).

Jhna is just staggeringly important because nothing like it is taught in Western philosophy, or in any university, he said. I went through all that stuff myself, and there is nothing equivalent to it, whatsoever. Its the only place youre going to find this alternative way of using your mind.

And while the jhnas themselves are only one among a great variety of baffling meditative states, they may prove tractable and accessible enough to further advanced meditations march into the mainstream. That, in turn, can help build a richer understanding of whats going on in the mind of someone absorbed into an electrical beam of bliss, roping these uncommon experiences closer into the ordinary fluctuations of human psychology.

But perhaps the most exciting thing about the jhnas is that despite their offering of an apparently unparalleled sense of bliss that requires no external trigger, skilled meditators tend to leave them behind and explore other practices. Pure bliss isnt the end of the road. As Belsterling said, Theres no way you could be in jhna without questioning what else might be possible.

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What are the jhnas? The meditative state breaking through the mainstream, explained. - Vox.com

You might have heard of the term mindfulness,a commonly known practice that involves maintaining attention or awareness of the present moment without making judgments.

More broadly, mindfulness and meditation research are on the cusp of a new wave of sciencefocusing on the deep end of practice, what researchers call advanced meditation, or states and stages of practice that unfold with increasing mastery and often with time.

This includes states and stages that have been described in ancient wisdom traditions like Buddhism and include experiences of ecstatic bliss, insight into different aspects of the mind, compassionate and empathic states, and others.

In this Q&A, Dr. Matthew Sacchet an investigator in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging expands on a recently published letter in the journal World Psychiatry, one of the highest impact journals in medicine.

In the letter, Dr. Sacchet discusses how advanced meditation and related experiences and changes to ways of being offer new possibilities for improving health and well-being in clinical and non-clinical contexts.

Studying its historical and cultural roots, mindfulness may be understood as a practice of maintaining a moment-by-moment nonjudgmental awareness of thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and the surrounding environment. Practitioners often focus on their breath or body to develop a stable and clear awareness.

Advanced meditation, however, takes mindfulness and mediation to a deeper level, incorporating practices such as advanced concentrative absorption meditation or ACAM, and advanced investigative insight meditation or AIIM.

Advanced meditation often involves protracted and more disciplined practice compared to conventional modern mindfulness practice. While mindfulness is generally focused on reducing stress related to daily life and work, advanced meditation is concerned with deeper and more profound meditative endpoints.

For example, the objective of advanced meditation may be to radically alter ordinary perception and to experience profound psychological transformation.

Self-transcendence is defined by ego dissolution, affective bliss, and a merging or softening of boundary between self and other/object (i.e., non-duality).

It is an experience that has been reported across many contemplative, philosophical, religious and spiritual traditions around the world, sometimes thousands of years ago. These types of experiences may foster compassionate behavior and reorientation of life goals to be more aligned with deeper, more altruistic values.

Self-transcendence may lead to profound sense of purpose and well-being, as individuals may experience a shift from self-centeredness to a broader perspective that includes a deep sense of connection and empathy with others and the world.

Studying self-transcendence and advanced meditation more broadly will inform mechanistic understanding and scientific models. These models can then be used to link to other fields of science and to develop treatments. Such models may provide important guidance for developing new, or improving existing, treatments for mental illness and practices for supporting well-being more generally. They may also be used to track change and determine best treatments.

Therapies centered on self-transcendence, such as meditation, may help patients experience fundamental transformation in how they perceive themselves and their place in the world. These therapies may foster states of unity and purpose that counteract feelings of isolation and meaninglessness that are associated with mental illness.

To develop therapies based on advanced mediation, including self-transcendence, interdisciplinary and foundational research is required. This includes neuroscientific studies to understand the brain mechanisms underlying meditative development and endpoints, psychological research to identify the most effective practices and conditions for inducing these states and stages, and clinical trials to test the safety and efficacy of these interventions.

Longitudinal studies are also essential to determine long-term benefits, safe implementation, and potential risks.

Meditation, and particularly advanced meditation that is aimed at achieving deep states and stages of practice, including self-transcendence, may help patients to develop resilience, emotion regulation, a sense of peace, flourishing, thriving, meaning in life, and wisdom.

Moreover, advanced meditation may help individuals overcome difficult emotions and psychological suffering through directly processing these experiences. Through meditation, individuals may experience self-transcendence, a profound shift in perspective that may foster a deep sense of interconnectedness, unity, and empathy.

Growing evidence suggests that psychedelics may alter perception and mood, cognitive processing including the sense of self, and elicit therapeutic effects in mood and anxiety disorders.

Psychedelics may facilitate experiences of unity and self-transcendence (or what has been called ego dissolution in the psychedelic literature) that can lead to profound experiences toward understanding and healing deep-seated psychological difficulties. These therapies could complement existing treatments and offer new possibilities for interventions.

As our understanding of mindfulness, meditation, advanced meditation, self-transcendence, and the therapeutic use of psychedelics grows, psychiatry may continue to integrate these insights toward increasingly powerful approaches to conceptualizing and treating mental illness.

For example, conventional treatments, including behavioral and pharmaceutical approaches, may incorporate new insights from advanced meditation research toward more effective and comprehensive care.

The development of new models of mental health that incorporate concepts from advanced meditation, such as human flourishing and self-transcendence, may drive this transformation. Existing mental health models may be updated to integrate core concepts from the science of advanced meditation, perhaps emphasizing the importance of experiences that promote human flourishing such as self-transcendence and overall well-being.

Psychiatrists may increasingly incorporate mindfulness, or other forms of meditation and training, to facilitate self-transcendent and other types of experiences as part of clinical care.

These possibilities have the capacity to significantly transform mental health care, promising to improve patient outcomes and promote a more integrative approach to psychiatry, and to suffering and happiness more broadly.

Originally published on Mass General Research Institute's Bench Press on May 24, 2024.

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A Closer Look into the New Wave of Research in Advanced Meditation - Mass General Brigham

Warning! This post contains SPOILERS for Darth Maul: Black, White, and Red #2

Darth Maul's new "Sith Meditation" scene flips his iconic Star Wars duel in The Phantom Menace. As seen in Marvel's Darth Maul: Black, White, and Red anthology series, the newly released second issue depicts a brutal mission before the events of the Skywalker saga when Maul was still training and apprenticed under Darth Sidious. To that end, Darth Maul takes a moment at the issue's start to center himself within the dark side of the Force.

As seen in Darth Maul: Black, White and Red #2 by Mark Russell and Carlos Nieto, the titular Dark Lord of the Sith has been tasked by his master to take control of the remote Moonbender Colony, a remote settlement on the outskirts of Republic space protected by a group of former bounty hunters and mercenaries known as the Remainders. To that end, the beginning of the issue sees Maul sitting down and meditating on the dark side's power before unleashing his brutal skills on Moonbender.

Once the Remainders choose to fight this strange outside sitting at the doors of their fortress-like facility, Maul's Sith mediation comes to a dark end as the Sith apprentice prepares to bring every one of these fighters to their deaths.

What's the best way to watch Star Wars? Here's everything you need to know to watch in release or timeline order, and how to include the TV shows.

In The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon Jinn takes advantage of the brief delay during his and Obi-Wan's duel with Darth Maul to meditate. This was due to the Jedi Master and Sith apprentice being temporarily separated by an energy force field. Kneeling and closing his eyes, Qui-Gon centered himself on the light side of the Force, seeking to restore his fatigue and gain greater focus while Maul simply stalked back and forth, impatiently waiting for the field to drop so the duel could continue.

Conversely, this new issue shows that Maul was indeed trained in the far darker art of Sith meditation. Drawing upon the darkest of emotions such as hatred, fear, and/or anger, a Sith Lord can focus that energy into a greater source of focused power in the dark side. They become stronger and far more ruthless, rather than finding peace and restoration as seen with Jedi meditation. As such, the same is true with Maul unleashing all his rage and fury in this new issue the moment his dark meditation is interrupted by the Remainders and their horrible decision to stay on Moonbender and fight him.

Despite being outgunned and outmanned, Maul systemically executes each member of the Remainders as he works his way through the facility, beginning with a magnetically sealed tunnel the Remainders hoped would have ended the Sith Lord following repeated waves of ricocheting blaster fire. Instead, Maul's power was on full display, cutting down all of his opponents before learning that this entire mission was a Sith trial designed by his master to test Maul's skills against a variety of different combatants. Regardless, it's impressive to see Darth Maul meditating through the power of the dark side, a Sith technique rarely seen in the canonical galaxy far, far away.

Darth Maul: Black, White & Red #2 is available now from Marvel Comics.

Darth Maul: Black, White & Red #1 (2024)

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Darth Maul's Sith Meditation Totally Flips Episode I's Duel of the Fates - Screen Rant

Of all the pillars of internet content, surely one of the strongest is the genre where people outline their morning routine in grave and sanctimonious detail. They exist in every medium, in every platform, among every internet subculture.

TikTok has its Get Ready With Mes, where influencers chat over their plethora of skin-nourishing unguents and artful makeup products. Beauty YouTube has the more glamorous cousin, Vogue Beauty Secrets, in which dewy-skinned celebrities walk us through the many things they do to their faces every morning.

Artist blogs swap tips about the best way to keep Morning Pages. Powerful women, titans of their respective industries, tell the Cut How I Get It Done. And on LinkedIn and YouTube, lifehackers share their morning tricks for maximizing productivity.

The productive morning is the one really taking off these days, beloved by the wellness world and the rise-and-grinders alike. The reigning king of the productivity ritual is Andrew Huberman, the controversial Stanford neuroscientist and podcaster whose routine is always being described in vlogs as scientifically perfect.

Hubermans morning routine straddles the thin line between sounding idyllic and torturous, depending on your proclivities. He awakens within an hour of sunrise every day, and then he goes outside for a 10-minute walk (30 minutes if its overcast) for optimum morning light exposure. He drinks electrolytes (for hydration) but abstains from food or caffeine while he performs 90 minutes of deep work (no emails, lots of in-depth research). Then he caffeinates, exercises vigorously, and cold plunges. (Cold showers will work too, he says). He doesnt eat until lunchtime.

At the beginning of the day, the strict capitalist clock demands forward momentum, but the soft animal of the human body wants nothing more than to doze comfortably in bed

This routine is internet catnip. Social media abounds with videos and essays about people following Hubermans routine for a day or a week or a month or a year and documenting the results. In one, the vlogger even tests his testosterone levels before and after his month-long experiment to prove that Hubermans protocols raised his levels. (Its worth noting at this point that not all of Hubermans ideas hold up to scrutiny.)

Hubermans ritual is intense, but the fascination it commands is not uncommon or new. Human beings have always been fascinated by the right way to spend a morning, and how everyone else is (allegedly) doing it. At the beginning of the day, the strict capitalist clock demands forward momentum, but the soft animal of the human body wants nothing more than to doze comfortably in bed. Perhaps because getting up is so difficult, it has become powerfully associated with virtue.

The association is telling. After all, how we spend our mornings determines how we intend to spend our days, and consequently our whole lives. Our aspiration for those sacred early daylight hours gives us a glimpse into what we actually value.

The idea that sleeping late is sinful has deep roots in Western culture. Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius spends much of The Meditations the notes he wrote to himself across his second-century reign, newly popular among tech bro enthusiasts chastising himself for his flaws. Those include having trouble getting out of bed in the morning. In the morning when you rise unwillingly, let this thought be present I am rising to the work of a human being, he instructs himself. While its true that lying in bed is more pleasant, after all, Do you exist then to take your pleasure, and not at all for action and exertion?

Jonathan Edwards, the influential early American theologian, agreed with Aurelius. I think Christ has recommended rising early in the morning, by his rising from the grave very early, he wrote in a diary entry in 1728; he himself got up at 4 am to devote 13 hour days to the study of Christ. When Benjamin Franklin plotted out his ideal schedule in his 1771 autobiography, he recommended waking up at 5 to pray, wash, have breakfast, and plan the day well.

You can see why so many of us have come to believe that mornings are more virtuous than afternoons or evenings and that its more important to spend the morning correctly than any other time of the day. The hours have a strict moral ranking kind of like the old saw that breakfast is the most important meal of the day (which, it turns out, was a myth propagated by cereal lobbyists and religious sects).

Thats more or less the logic behind the never-ending deluge of modern morning routine content, too: You have to optimize your morning, not your afternoon, because the morning is when its essential to (some would say ostentatiously) flex your discipline.

A morning routine is one of the most powerful ways of impacting your long-term success, a blog post for the AI productivity coach Rize explained in 2022. Morning hours are when you have a clean slate and are yet unimpacted by the days events. This means you can pick actions more consciously, deciding what serves you.

Many of us are busy, have a lot of responsibilities and obligations, and often feel strapped for time, admitted the wellness site VeryWell in 2023. Having a great morning routine can make all the difference in being productive, achieving goals, feeling organized, and doing all of this with confidence.

Or, as one Redditor put it, I want to have some productive routines I can follow to give me a reason to be up every morning.

There is some evidence for the idea that the way you spend your morning will influence the rest of your day. A 2024 Stanford Medical School study found that going to bed and rising early is associated with better mental health than going to bed late and rising late. Meanwhile, a 2016 study in Harvard Business Review (HBR) found that customer service representatives who started the day in a good mood usually stayed that way throughout the day, even when they had to deal with terrible customers. (Horrifyingly, the HBR takeaway is that managers should send their employees morale-boosting messages in the morning. Was there ever a surer way to kill a good mood than to hear that Steve in the C-suite wants you to have a terrific morning crushing those numbers?)

But do we really have to optimize the morning to maximize wellness so we can be better at business? Is being scrupulously healthy productivity machines what we actually want?

The routines of famous artists, which get repeated over and over again like little myths, tend not to be focused so much on cheerfulness as on cultivating intense emotional states. As such, they typically involve either monk-like asceticism or the ingestion of many, many stimulants. The idea with this sort of routine was to either discipline yourself into creativity or to evoke it by any chemical means necessary.

In his 2013 book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Mason Currey reports that author Patricia Highsmith, to make writing as pleasurable as possible, would begin her day writing in bed, supplied by cigarettes, coffee, vodka, donuts, and a saucer of plain sugar. Proust, he says, fueled his own work with opium, coffee, caffeine tablets, and then barbital sedatives to counteract the caffeine.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, Currey tells us that the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope would awaken at 5:30 am and knock out three hours of work at his desk before he had to go to his day job at the post office. Beethoven woke at dawn, counted out precisely 60 beans from which to make himself a cup of coffee, and then sat at his desk to work until 2 or 3 in the afternoon, periodically reviving himself with walks outside.

The morning wellness routine is rhetorically positioned as both indulgence and capitalist virtue

Todays most famous morning routines have landed in between the Beethoven and Highsmith camps. They focus heavily on wellness and self-care: the elaborate ritual patting in of skin care, the daily workout that has become as universally mandatory as bathing.

Arianna Huffington, Oprah, Steve Jobs, and Jack Dorsey all do some combination of meditating and gratitude journaling. Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Aniston drink lots of water. Everybody exercises. (No really everyone: Arianna Huffington, Oprah, Jack Dorsey, Tim Armstrong, Karen Blackett, Hans Vestberg, Vittorio Colao, Tim Cook, Barack Obama, Jennifer Aniston, Kim Kardashian, Martha Stewart, Giorgio Armani.)

The morning wellness routine is rhetorically positioned as both indulgence and capitalist virtue. By taking time to tend to your physical body and mental health first thing in the morning, the theory is, you will be able to do more later. That, in fact, is why Andrew Huberman does all that stuff: to optimize his productivity. (Could it be that some of these people are not being 100 percent transparent about their perfectly plotted morning routines? The thought has crossed my mind.)

A lot of times, people say, How can I lift more, focus better, remember things better? Huberman explains in one video. And its like, Well, lets think about the foundation of that. His morning is set up to make him better at lifting, focusing, remembering which is to say, doing work.

Ten years ago, morning routines were also about the rise and grind, but differently so. CEOs would report getting out of bed at 4 am and getting right to their emails. I cant stand having any not done! one CEO told the Guardian of her email routine in 2013. At the time, there was no mention of the wonders of screen-free mornings, the meditation, and the journaling that have become fundamental to todays high-productivity routines.

Perhaps our current moment is what rise and grind looks like a few years after the combined traumas of the Trump era and the pandemic sent everyone in search of new ways to cope, without betraying the capitalist imperative to achieve ever more. White-collar workers spent the better part of two years not allowed to do much of anything besides work and obsess over their health. Now we obsess over our health in order to work more.

Our morning priorities show us what we value. And what we value right now, it seems, is trying to keep our harrowed minds and bodies together, and to still give as much as we can of ourselves to the work our world demands of us. What more can we manage in a single mornings work?

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Why morning routines ranging from meditation to cold plunging are so popular - Vox.com

Features Newsday Reporter Yesterday Aaron Rampersadsingh also known as Ved Valmki launched his new book, Start Meditating Today, on June 8. Photo courtesy: Gareth Leigh Photography. -

BAVINA SOOKDEO

Aaron Rampersadsingh, also known as Ved Valmki, is preaching what he practises: he's launched a book, Start Meditating Today, on June 8.

Rampersadsingh, a 36-year-old from Preysal, began yoga and meditation in his childhood, heavily influenced by his mother.

My mom was a big part of learning yoga and my spiritual journey. She got both my sister and me involved in yoga when we were children. I have been steeped in yogic philosophy and spiritual practice (since) I was five years old.

After he went to Preysal Government School and Presentation College, San Fernando, his deeper engagement with yoga blossomed during his university years at Ramapo College, New Jersey, where he studied psychology and explored the impact of yoga on consciousness.

I returned home from the US because my mom had cancer and I wanted to be with her. During that time, I delved deeper into the spiritual aspects of yoga, especially meditation.

"When she passed in 2013, I had a hard time grieving.

"I would say that yoga rescued me from that, because I went to stay at an ashram.

At the ashram (a place dedicated to yoga and spiritual living), where he spent nine months, Rampersadsinghs guru guided him to explore yoga further, leading him to teach.

A pivotal moment in his life came during a pilgrimage to India in 2015. Visiting the ancient temple of Kedarnath in the Himalayas, Rampersadsingh experienced a profound spiritual change.

Before I entered that temple, I had always felt very uncertain about my life...When I was there I felt a shift: I did have a spiritual experience there.

This experience solidified his dedication to the spiritual practice of yoga and his mission to share it with others.

My whole life has been about spiritual exploration, he said when asked about his initial goals. I never had a clear goal about what I wanted to do until after the first time I went to India. I studied psychology in university because I wanted to understand myself and people better, but I really found that in yoga.

In 2017, he returned to India after qualifying for a scholarship to SVYASA University from the Indian High Commission. There he received his yoga certification and learnt more about the science behind yogic practices.

He's been a yogacharya (yoga teacher) since 2015, working from his studio in Preysal Village since 2017. It doesn't have an official name, but is mostly referred to as the Yoga with Ved Studio.

What is most rewarding for me in teaching yoga is seeing my students and clients begin taking charge of their lives, and to see the transformative power of these ancient spiritual practices.

Inspired by his students, Rampersadsingh decided to write Start Meditating Today as a comprehensive guide to meditation.

Meditation holds so much power in it. It transcends religion and helps us to get back to the spiritual core of our being, but it is practice, a journey that requires wisdom and guidance.

Realising he could not give as much as he wanted to just by teaching meditation classes, Rampersadsingh began writing this book to share some meditation techniques and concepts.

There is so much to explore in it, but we all have to start somewhere... hence the title, Start Meditating Today."

Writing it took about a year.

Sometimes I felt like the book was writing itself...Other times I really had to stay with it, be patient, and wait for the inspiration to enter my being to continue.

The process was both a learning experience and a testament to his discipline and dedication.

The book has three parts: the basics of meditation, deeper spiritual concepts, and the integration of meditation into daily life. It aims to reach anyone interested in meditation, from beginners to those seeking to deepen their practice.

Rampersadsingh hopes readers will find practical guidance and spiritual insight.

This book is for anyone who feels attracted to meditation but does not know how to start...and certainly it is for any person, of any religion, who sincerely desires spiritual growth in their lives.

Asked why yoga is important to him, he explained he believes it is crucial not only for his spiritual growth but also for societys future.

I see the power of yoga in its ability to bring back health, prosperity and harmony into people's lives. I believe that yoga, and its spiritual practices like meditation, have a place in ensuring a positive future for our society. And I am fully dedicated to my role in facilitating that.

Reflecting on how yoga has had an impact on his life beyond the physical practice, he said, Yoga has given me everything, and I am very grateful to my mom and my guru for guiding me on this path.

"Yoga showed me that peace of mind is not just an ideal, it is an achievable reality. Through yoga I have found a place in myself where I feel a deep sense of peace, connection and compassion and I strive every day to be conscious of that and to share that however I can.

Why is meditation important for today's people?

In this modern life we give our attention to everything outside...every problem and challenge we face is difficult because we have become disconnected from that inner source.

Through meditation, Rampersadsingh has found a deep sense of peace and aims to help others achieve the same.

He said the most immediate benefit of meditation for anyone, even if just starting off, is stress relief.

It gives a sense of relaxation and ease to help you rest and recover. As you go a little deeper it will help you to become healthier, manage your emotions, and uplift your thinking.

When you commit to yoga as a lifestyle, It will lead you to spiritual connection and insight to help you live in alignment with your life purpose and to reveal your full potential.

Looking ahead, he plans to continue writing and expand his teachings through coaching, workshops, and retreats. He hopes to see a greater appreciation for the spiritual aspects of yoga and meditation in the coming years, both locally and internationally.

To those new to yoga and meditation, he offered this advice: Practise, and all is coming to you.

For the hesitant, he encourages starting the journey with an open heart and finding a teacher who resonates with them, and he emphasises the importance of daily choices in cultivating wellness and spiritual connection.

Start Meditating Today is available in bookstores and directly from the author.

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Yoga instructor launches book on meditation - TT Newsday

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Meditation and AI as Paris Olympics embraces 'mindfulness' - The Elkhart Truth

Concerns are being raised over a new SNS trend currently spreading like wildfire among teens and youths.

In the midst of the ongoingfeud between HYBE Labels and Min Hee Jin of ADOR, recent rumors alleged secretive connections between HYBE Labels and a South Korean pseudoscience religious group, known as 'Dahnworld'. The rumors quickly spread indiscriminately, with many online users claimingthat HYBE was a company affiliated with a "cult" as if the rumors were confirmed facts.

Although 'Dahnworld' corporation has since released a statement denying any affiliation with HYBE and particularly BTS, the recent emergence of the pseudoscience organization in the spotlight has nonetheless birthed unpredicted consequences.

Currently, it has become an SNS trend for youths and teens to visit the numerous 'Dahnworld' meditation centers located across South Korea. Young SNS users are flocking to these nearby meditations centers with their phones and cameras, filming the interiors of the centers without permission, showing up during meditation sessions to sing or dance to songs like "Hype Boy"by NewJeans or "Magnetic" by ILLIT, and causing a disturbance.

Additionally, related SNS challenges centered around ILLIT's "Magnetic"are also gaining momentum, as it has mockinglybecome known among teens and youths as the "cult song". (On the other hand, "Hype Boy" by NewJeans is now being referred to as the "freedom song".)

Netizens reacted with comments like, "This looks dangerous TT", "People are approaching an organization that might be a extremist cult a little too lightly...", "Causing a disturbance in person can be really dangerous and might lead to physical collisions. If those centers claim that they are businesses, those people can face charges for obstruction of business", "Iwork at a tutoring school, and this is all that the kids are talking about these days...", "Do not approach cults lightly!! They have coercive tactics of converting you!!", "HYBE needs to take action somehow before something happens", and more.

SEE ALSO: ARMYs take stand against HYBE: Demands accountability amid BTS controversies

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Concerns raised as an SNS challenge visiting 'Dahnworld' meditation centers spreads like wildfire among teens and ... - allkpop

At an early screening of I Saw the TV Glow, the gentleman introducing the film told the audience that it was like writer-director Jane Schoenbruns first feature, Were All Going to the Worlds Fair, on steroids. Which prompted Schoenbrun to kindly correct him when they introduced the film: Its like Worlds Fair on HRT. A different sort of steroid, they suggested. It was a film written and created as Schoenberg navigated stages of their own transition, and bound to that journey at scale.

For all that is irrevocably the journey, I Saw the TV Glow defies easy categorization by its very nature. It is a film that can be read under a number of critical microscopes, and enjoyed for many more besides. It is about transness and queerness, certainly, but it is also about the ways in which fandom can anchor lives, and the places we find ourselves in life that dont fit. And it is a story about becoming and about the violence inflicted on anyone who attempts to become in direct defiance of the world that they are crammed inside.

The story unfolds like this: Owen (Justice Smith) meets an older teen at his school named Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) who loves a television series that he finds himself strangely drawn to, despite never having seen an episode. The show is called The Pink Opaque, the tale of two teen girls who are connected psychically and must use their joint abilities to battle the minions of Mr. Melancholy, the man in the moon. Maddy is obsessed with the shows complex lore, and invites Owen over to watch it. In the following years, she tapes the show off the TV for him and leaves the VHS copies at school (though they rarely speak) because Owens parents wont let him stay up late enough to watch it.

Maddy disappears one day, and everyone believes her to be dead. But eight years later, she shows up mysteriously to ask Owen a few questionshas he ever noticed that bits of fiction seem to bleed with their real lives? Does he ever feel like something about their world doesnt add up? Is he sure that the place where they exist is real, and that The Pink Opaque isnt who and where theyre supposed to be?

One might assume that this entire concept is metaphorical, that the whole conceit is just clever way to make a grounded statement using fantastical terms. But I Saw the TV Glow isnt interested in telling us where the line between fantasy and reality lies. Is this a sticking point for me, personally, having watched the internet slowly ply every reader with a million theories nabbed from Tumblr and Reddit and YouTube that X character is really dead the whole time! or A secret tragic backstory is obvious if you pay attention to the dogs scarf! Yes. Sink into the discomfort of never knowing. Let it rip at you like a cheese grater to the skin.

The fractured ambiance of this film deserves a concept album, and its soundtrack makes an incredible go of it, with songs from Sloppy Jane, yuele, Caroline Polachek, Florist, and more peppering the story. The performances are devastating: Lundy-Paine and Smith embody their own numbness to a haunting degree, a rippling tension running between them the whole film as they each wait for the other to act in a way that they can understand. (Or perhaps recognize?) It feels strange to admit that Ive been waiting for Justice Smith to receive a part worthy of him since Detective Pikachu, but Im glad that day has finally come. His frequent gasps of life, the moments when he comes up for air amidst the vacant lot that is Owens reality, are where the true horror of the movie lies. And there are many thoughts lying between all of the choices Smith makes, alongside the scripts depiction of Owenthoughts about queerness and neurodivergence and how often they exist in the same place. About how difference compounds until it becomes scaffolding that holds together rather than a renovation. About disconnection and how desperately we yearn for its inverse.

As an experience, the film is an exemplar of the form and proof that Schoenbruns powers are growing. The careful attention paid to film grain and aspect ratios, the flawless replication of goofy television tropes from three decades prior, the deadpan delivery of the actors creating a stylized atmosphere but also forcing the audience to listen to the content of the dialogue over the emotions present in the characters until emotion erupts into the narrative, so sharp and hot its like being flash-fried. Schoenbrun talked of what it was like to play with large sums of money after years on the New York DIY filmmaking scene, and this piece of cinema gives us a glimpse of what movies could be were the current model more willing to fund them. Fragments of the inner strangeness that reside in us all, brought into the dim glow of the screen.

The experience of the 90s is hyper-real in this rendering, from the font used on the cover of Maddys Pink Opaque Episode Guide (I had an X-Files version just like it) to the ridiculous prosthetics used on TV villains to the messages Maddy scribbles on the VHS tapes she leaves for Owen in pink gel pen. (My VHS-recorded shows were mostly Farscape and The Invisible Man.) My colleague and I had an entire conversation about the Fruitopia vending machine in the school lunchroom after we left the theater. The Pink Opaque itself is built on the bones of a number of 90s showsBuffy the Vampire Slayer being the most obviousbut also Charmed, Xena: Warrior Princess, Ghostwriter, The Secret World of Alex Mack, The Adventures of Pete and Pete, and several more besides. Then theres the anonymous sprawl of their hometown, which later prompts Owen to utter, This isnt the Midnight Realm. Its the suburbs.

Its the toughest balancing act of all to heap a story with nostalgia while you stitch it to something fledgling and painful that fights to stay alive. And perhaps thats why the setting of TV Glow never slips into the anodyne mistakes that many pictures fueled on our remembrance of the past offer. The 90s is where millennials like me grew up, but were a cynical bunch now, offered an optimistic glimpse of a future that never came to pass. And even while that future was held before us like a flickering candle in a ball pit, the persistent phobias of the era encouraged our conformity. We are, for the time being, the last generation that was widely, actively, and vehemently discouraged from coming out.

I Saw the TV Glow offers a glimpse into the places we retreated in order to find our own kind of comfort. Our safety. Our selves. It shows its audience what a lifeline these campy and clever worlds gave us when there was nothing else to model ourselves on. But these TV shows, with their punny dialogue and band cameos and haughty, attractive teens in belly shirts and moody lipsticks, could only provide a respite from the world. Not a cure for it.

The journey to being, to becoming, is far more agonizing than that. And not everyone makes it through. I Saw the TV Glow lives in that liminal space where you ask yourself the question: What would you risk for the chance to find out?

If you wont, will you survive the alternative?

Perhaps that is the reason why the film offers no answers to its own mysteries: The answer will be different to everyone sitting in that audience. All of us took different roads and will find ourselves at different points in the journey. And so we cant be given the conclusion. Theres an arcade game that blinks the words YOURE DYING late in the film. Startling, but also universally accurate: We all are. So how will we live? icon-paragraph-end

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I Saw the TV Glow Is a Meditation On Becoming That Will Haunt You - Reactor - Tor.com

As the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, the beach cool against my back, a voice invited me to scan my body for feelings of powerlessness. Then breathe in that area to help it release, said Sara Sofia Bousiali, the leader of the evenings sound bath.

Along with 21 other participants lying on the sand in Santa Monica this April, I listened as Ms. Bousiali played crystal singing bowls and chimes and guided us in an hourlong meditation. At the sound baths Ive attended, the bell-like sounds seemed to fill my body and melt away racing thoughts. I lost track of time.

Therapeutic sound baths have been around for a few decades, said Jamie Bechtold, the co-founder and owner of a sound bath studio in Los Angeles. But she has seen their popularity grow in the last five years, she said, and lately theyve spread beyond wellness hot spots like Southern California. Theyve popped up across the U.S., offered in a yoga studio in Cleveland and a barn outside of Raleigh, at corporate events and even onstage at Coachella.

During a sound bath, participants are immersed in tones and vibrations from instruments like gongs, chimes, bells and singing bowls. Some instructors also add guided meditations or wellness rituals like Reiki energy healing.

The name stems from the idea of waves of sound washing over people, said Tamara Goldsby, a research psychologist at the University of California San Diego who has studied sound baths. While sound baths draw inspiration and use instruments from various spiritual traditions, theyre part of modern wellness culture.

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What Are Sound Baths and Do They Have Mental Health Benefits? - The New York Times