In recent years, the practice of yoga has gained popularity worldwide. Multiple users have turned to their smartphones to aid in their yoga journey. Android apps have played a significant role in this trend, offering a plethora of options to help users of all levels improve their practice. Whether you're a beginner looking to learn the basics or youre a seasoned one seeking advanced guidance, these apps cater to a diverse range of needs and preferences. Heres a list of ten of the most popular Android apps (with more than a million downloads) that have made yoga accessible to smartphone users across the globe: Sadhguru - Yoga & Meditation (Isha Foundation -- 10 million downloads) The Sadhguru App offers Isha Yoga practices in 12 languages. This app caters to beginners and offers free yoga and meditation practices. Users can access daily quotes, articles, podcasts and videos on various topics. The app also features guided meditations and Inner Engineering Online sessions. With this app, users can wake up to chants to start the day. Yoga-Go: Yoga For Weight Loss (WellTech Apps Limited -- 10 million downloads) Yoga-Go is a weight loss workout app that is suitable for all levels. With 600+ workouts, including Somatic Yoga and Chair Yoga, it caters to various needs. The app offers personalised routines, quick 7-minute workouts and a range of yoga styles.

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10 Android apps popular among smartphone users across the world for yoga - The Times of India

Its Mental Health Awareness Month. If youre one of the 32 percent of US adults who experienced symptoms of anxiety or depression last year, your doctor or mental health care provider may have recommended you learn meditation to help manage your stress. But how exactly does this age-old practice change the brain? Neuroscientist Richard Davidson, PhD 76, the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of WisconsinMadison, discusses his decades of research on meditationenabled in part by a collaboration with the Dalai Lamaand dispels myths about how it works and when, where, and how it can be done.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and correctness.

Well, I first met the Dalai Lama in 1992. He was the one who recognized the important currency of science in the modern Western world and wanted to encourage serious scientific research in this area. And he heard about me through the grapevine. He knew I was a closet meditator. He also knew that I was a serious neuroscientist.

And he asked me a very simple question when we first met: Why cant you use the same tools of modern neuroscience that youre using to study depression and anxiety and stress and use those tools to study kindness and to study compassion? And so, I made a commitment to the Dalai Lama, on that day in 1992, that I was going to do everything I could to put qualities like kindness and compassion within the crosshairs of modern science.

You also asked about key findings or key insights, and I think that one of the key insights is the finding that engaging in this very simple form of, if you will, a kind of mental exercise is accompanied by changes in the brain that we believe facilitate the enduring impact of these changes.

Yes, he did. His support and direct involvement were critical in recruiting these very long-term practitioners, and thats where our research began in this area. Because we reasoned, in a very simple-minded way, that we would first test these very long-term practitioners. And if we didnt see anything different in their brains, it was very unlikely that we would see differences in people who are just learning to meditate.

So, we brought people into our lab. We flew them from Asia. They came to Madison, Wisconsin. They spent, typically, somewhere between three and five or six days with us. And we tested them over this period of time in the laboratory. And there are a number of seminal publications that resulted from that that helped to establish that there was a there therethat there was something different about their brains.

And then we began to pursue that using other strategies, including looking at more novice practitioners because the work with long-term practitioners is super interesting and kind of flashy, but ultimately, its not fully scientifically satisfying because there are always questions about these long-term practitioners. After all, most people would not elect to live their life this way. And so these people are highly self-selected and presumably quite different to start with. And a skeptic could say, Well, maybe their brains are just different that way to begin with. Maybe it has nothing to do with meditation.

And so in order to do more rigorous scientific work, we needed to do a randomized controlled trial where you take people whove never meditated before. You randomly assign one group to meditation and another group to a control condition. You train them over time, and you test them before and after. And thats the kind of method that we and others have used to much more definitively establish that it is indeed the meditation that is producing the kinds of changes that were talking about.

We have found differences in, for example, the presence of certain brain waves that we can measure from the scalp surface. There is a frequency of brain oscillation called gamma oscillations, which are very fast frequencies. They are, on average, 40 cycles per second or 40 hertz. Most people do have gamma oscillations, but when you measure them in a typical average person, you see them for very short bursts. Theyre typically less than one second in duration, and they accompany states of focused attention. And you see a burst that may last a quarter of a second.

In these long-term practitioners, we saw these gamma oscillations present for minutes, not seconds. They were very large amplitudes. We actually could see them with the naked eye, which is almost unheard of in this kind of research. And we also saw that they were highly synchronized among different regions of the brain so that theyre aware of more things at any given time than most ordinary people. That was actually the very first major finding that we published.

In this case, were talking about people whove done just a little bit of practice. And so, in certain cases, theyre taking a course that lasts two months. And theyre meditating a total of somewhere between 24 and 30 hours over this two-month period. And there, we see clear changes in the functioning of the brain. We see changes in networks that are important for attention. We also see changes in networks that are important for the regulation of emotion. And in general, one of the important outcomes of this kind of training is improvements broadly in self-regulation, in our capacity to regulate both attention and emotion. And we see changes in the brain networks that are important in those aspects of self-regulation.

What we might say is that meditation represents a family of exercises that involve the intentional use of our mental capacities to improve our well-being and to nurture human flourishing. You dont need to be in any special place. You dont need to be in any special posture, and you can meditate anywhere any time.

We had one particular very long-term practitioner who made many visits to our laboratory over the course of a 12-year period. And so we have 12 years of serial MRI scans. And of course, we know the date on which each of these scans occurred, and we have lots of normative data now. And we can age and gender match it to know what the normal curve is for brain age over this period of life.

And so we can compare this very long-term practitioner. This is a practitioner who, when we first tested him, the very first time he came into the lab, had 62,000 hours of lifetime practice. Thats a big number. What we found is that he was in the 99th percentile of brain age. That is, he had the slowest brain age of a normative database of 1,000 people over this period of 12 years.

So thats one possibility for you. Your brain may be aging, and I would predict it would be aging, more slowly than your chronological age.

Yeah, there are literally hundreds of different kinds of meditation practices, and we have classified meditation into at least three broad families of practice. One we call awareness practices, and thats where mindfulness kinds of practices would be. The second we call deconstructive practices. The most important prototype for this is a kind of meditation that, for example, is most commonly done by the Dalai Lama but actually has received very little scientific attention. And its what we call analytic meditation, where through reasoning, there is a deconstruction of the self, if you will.

One example of that is the sentence that people might commonly use when they might say, Im in pain. If you use that sentence, when you say Im in pain, what does that actually mean? Who is the I in this sentence and does it mean that all of you is in pain, every cell in your body? And so what does it mean to say something like that? Or with an emotion when we say, Im sad. What does that actually mean? And what is the I in that sentence? So, reflecting on that is really beneficial, and thats a deconstructive practice.

The third category is constructive practice, actually generating a specific kind of emotion. The prototype for that is compassion meditation, where youre actively and intentionally generating this quality of compassion, or it could be kindness but one of these virtuous emotions.

To give a high-level summary, awareness practices and focused attention and concentration practices mostly affect systems in the brain that are concerned with the regulation of attention. The deconstructive practices are going to affect the default mode of the brain. This is the mode of brain function that has been linked to self-referential thought. The constructive practices, particularly compassion and kindness, will activate positive emotional centers in the brain and also activate, to some extent, perspective-taking areas of the brain that also are involved in empathy.

Yeah, that is a complete myth and stereotype. Meditation does not involve requiring in any way getting rid of thoughts. Human minds and brains, at least in large part, are there to produce thoughts. The goal of meditation is not to get rid of thoughts at all. Even the greatest meditation masters, and weve been lucky to study some of them in our laboratory, have thoughts. So, meditation may involve changing our relationship to thoughts, but it doesnt involve getting rid of thoughts.

Yeah, I would strongly agree with Jud. I think that thats a very important insight. And we have found that particularly in beginning practitioners, doing really short periods of practice several times a day is much more effective in producing desirable long-term outcomes.

Let me give you one example from a very recently published study that we did with K-12 public school teachers in the US. This study was actually done during COVID when the stress levels of K-12 educators were skyrocketing. On average, these teachers were practicing for a little less than five minutes a day. And they did it for 30 days, but they did it consistently. We found dramatic improvements in their well-being and reductions in standardized measures of depression and anxiety. And these improvements persisted at a follow-up that we did four months following the intervention. I should say this was done in the context of a rigorous, randomized controlled design.

The second thing that we did in this particular study, is we said, you dont have to meditate sitting in a chair or sitting on a cushion. You can meditate while youre commuting. You can meditate while youre washing the dishes. You can meditate while youre doing physical exercise. You can meditate while youre brushing your teeth. And it turns out that, 40 percent of the time, people were electing to do these practices actively while they were engaged in other activities of daily living. And the important finding is that the benefits were just as effective, whether they were sitting on a cushion or doing these actively.

People, in public talks that I give, people often ask, well, Whats the best form of meditation that I could do? And Ill say, Ill tell you, the best form of meditation that you could do is the form of meditation that you actually do.

My reading of the data is that its basically comparable in terms of its impact on, for example, symptoms of anxiety and depression. Whats different is that it has fewer side effects. That is, meditation has fewer side effects. And were much more likely to continue with meditation than we are with pharmaceuticals because of the side-effect profiles.

People dont want to be on these drugs for the rest of their lives. And we dont even know what the safety profile is for very long-term maintenance on these kinds of pharmaceuticals. There is some data to suggest that, in part, because of what I just said, the longer-term effects, particularly in preventing relapse, are more in favor of meditation.

And then finally, I think the last point to make here, is that I think that there is some reason to think strength-based approaches, rather than deficit-based approaches may ultimately be better. Because theres a lot of reason to believe that many of the skills which are important for flourishing, are actually innate, at least the seeds of them are innate. And so, strengthening them, and cultivating them makes more sense than simply treatments to get rid of the symptoms.

Theres some research on a mechanistic level looking at the brain, which has found some similarities but also some differences in how psychedelics and meditation might work. In my view, the application of psychedelics to the treatment of specific disorders is different than the application of psychedelics to people who dont have a frank disorder and who otherwise, might be interested in meditation and/or psychedelics for the purposes of further enhancing their well-being or flourishing or spiritual development, whatever that might be.

We know that the nature of a psychedelic experience is at least in part a function of the guide or facilitator that one has. And just like in meditation, receiving instruction from a really experienced practitioner is very different than receiving instruction from someone who just took an MBSR course.

And so, the training of these psychedelic guides is a serious issue. And what were seeing today is a proliferation of these money-making one-year programs at various places around the country to train psychedelic guides for people who, otherwise, had very little experience. And that frightens me, to be honest.

A second concern is that meditation is not about the experience we have when were meditating. We can have all kinds of experiences when were meditating. We can have blissful experiences. We can also have really difficult experiences. And sometimes those really difficult experiences end up being as important, if not more important than the blissful experiences. And its not about the experience. And psychedelics produce really dramatic experiences. And often, people get very focused on the experience. And people who have had a psychedelic experience often want to recreate that experience. But it really is not about the experience.

Its not going to help you become a kinder person. And those are the measures, ultimately, which matter. Does your spouse think youre nicer, and youre more cooperative and more altruistic? Both meditation and psychedelics, in their original form, as plant-based medicine were, in the psychedelic case, embedded in Indigenous contexts and the meditation in religious and spiritual contexts, both of which have an ethical container. And I think that this ethical framework is really important and is an active ingredient in the beneficial effects that these might have.

(Reprinted with permission from the Harvard Gazette. Click here to read the original post.)

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Meditation Changes the Brain: Heres How - India New England

NEW YORK, May 3, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- The globalmindfulness meditation application marketsize is estimated to grow by USD 1.48billion from 2023 to 2027, according to Technavio. This growth is expected to occur at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 30.01% during the forecast period.

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Report Attribute

Details

Base Year

2022

Forecast period

2023-2027

Historic Data for

2017 - 2021

Segments Covered

End-user (Individual and Corporate ), Platform (Android, iOS, and Others ), and Geography (North America, Europe, APAC, South America, and Middle East and Africa)

Key Companies Covered

Aura, Calm.com Inc., CBZ Village des Pruniers, Headspace Inc., Humm.ly Inc., Inner Explorer, Insight Network Inc., Meditation Moments BV, Meditation Oasis, MindApps AB, Mindfulness Everywhere, Mindvalley Inc., Portal Labs Ltd., Simple Habit Inc., Smiling Mind Pty Ltd., Ten Percent Happier Inc., UCLA Health, Waking Up LLC, Welzen, and Yedi70 Software and Information Technologies Inc.

Regions Covered

North America, Europe, APAC, South America, and Middle East and Africa

Key Trends Fueling Growth

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Major Challenges:

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Analyst Review

In today's fast-paced world, mindfulness meditation applications are increasingly essential for managing stress, chronic pain, and high blood pressure. These apps, compatible with smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches running Android operating systems, cater to individuals seeking relief from anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses.

Utilizing modern technologies like sensor technology and artificial intelligence, these apps offer breathing techniques, body relaxation exercises, and yoga sessions to promote stable mental health. With gamification elements and progress tracking features, users can monitor their mental well-being and adherence to mindfulness practices.

Targeting a wide audience, including aging populations and those in corporate wellness programs, these apps provide personalized coaching and motivation. They contribute to preventative healthcare and workplace wellness initiatives, complementing traditional treatments like spa therapies and mindfulness courses.

As smartphone penetration and app usage continue to rise, the mindfulness meditation application market thrives, addressing the growing demand for digital wellness solutions in today's digital-centric society.

Market Overview

In the growing Mindfulness Meditation Application Market, users seek solutions for stress management and mental well-being. With the prevalence of lifestyle diseases on the rise, digital technology steps in to offer accessible solutions. Wearable technology devices like smartwatches and fitness trackers integrate seamlessly with tablets to provide muscle relaxation and stress relief.

These apps cater to user needs by offering guided meditation sessions led by mental health professionals, mindfulness experts, and meditation teachers. Subscription models ensure continuous access to content, promoting consistency in practice. As individuals become increasingly conscious of screen time, these applications offer a balance by leveraging technology to alleviate stress-related disorders. In this dynamic market, the focus remains on delivering effective tools for relaxation and mental health enhancement.

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Key Topics Covered:

1 Executive Summary 2 Market Landscape 3 Market Sizing 4 Historic Market Size 5 Five Forces Analysis 6 Market Segmentation

7 Customer Landscape 8Geographic Landscape 9 Drivers, Challenges, and Trends 10VenodrLandscape 11VendorAnalysis 12Appendix

About Technavio

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focuses on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions.

With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

ContactsTechnavio Research Jesse Maida Media & Marketing Executive US: +1 844 364 1100 UK: +44 203 893 3200 Email:[emailprotected] Website:www.technavio.com/

SOURCE Technavio

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Mindfulness Meditation Application Market size to record USD 1.48 billion growth from 2023-2027, Touch input and ... - PR Newswire

Chavalit Frederick Tsao enjoys a reputation for once throwing maritimes liveliest parties. However, the 67-year-old chairman of Singapore-headquartered Tsao Pao Chee Group has been largely absent from Asian shippings social scene of late.

The leader of a conglomerate that until April was known as IMC Pan Asia Alliance Group, the parent of Singapore-based IMC Shipping has had good reason for his absence.

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Shipping addiction and meditation: How a fourth generation owner was inspired to reinvent a vast business - TradeWinds

Watching Baby Reindeer, I was reminded of Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire and her line, Whoever you are I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. It is a sentiment that applies perfectly to this storys Martha Scott, a former lawyer turned stalker. While boisterous Martha may seem poles apart from Blanche the genteel Southern belle, they have a lot in common.Both women, on the cusp of middle age, are emotionally volatile and struggle with mental illness. Both develop unhealthy fixations with younger men. And both are vulnerable to the kindness of strangers. When Martha receives a tiny act of kindness from bartender Donny Dunn, who offers her a cuppa on the house, its enough to send her spiraling into obsession.

Donny, a stand-up comic struggling to make it big in London with his one-man comedy act, has instead found himself in a cast of millions in his own life story. So when Martha walks into the bar where he works and is immediately captivated by him, Donny cant help but humour her.

For a while, Marthas good for him. Laughter is infectious, and when Martha attends Donnys cringe comedy act, her enthusiasm is the boost he needs to get the audience going. So Donny tolerates her, even as she drags him through her various stages of stalking, from infatuation to desperation, then denial, and finally, terrifying rage.

I went into Baby Reindeer expecting a dark comedy. I wasnt, however, prepared for just how dark or just how powerful it got. You cant stop watching as Martha wrecks Donnys life, overwhelming him with endless messages (hilariously misspelt), catcalling, following him, and then outright endangering herself, Donny, and the people he loves.

I also never expected Baby Reindeer to be such an emotional education on stalking. Without being preachy, the show explores the many dimensions of stalking, from abuse to self-harm, and the psychological trauma that being stalked causes. The show treats these difficult experiences with rare insight and sensitivity.

Through Donny, we learn why people being stalked might be unwilling to confront or even report their stalkers. Many victims like Donny struggle to express how their stalkers behaviour threatens them. Instead, they feel ashamed of their powerlessness or even pity for their stalker. Donny minimises Marthas actions, which allows the abuse to escalate.

Even when he eventually seeks help, the legal systems unfairly skewed views are a barrier. Donny gets frustrated that the police feel the power differentials in female-to-male stalking mean the risk of physical harm to men is negligible. Having been groped by Martha, Donny knows how degrading sexual assault is regardless of gender. After the experience, he was furious at her for making him feel less human and at himself for freezing.

In the end, Donny finds sympathy and support from a surprising source: his tough-as-nails, alpha male dad, Gerry. In one of the shows most wrenching scenes, Donny confesses to his parents about being raped by an older man, and his terror that his family will now think less of him as a man. In a beautifully tender and surprisingly underwritten moment of connection, Gerry reaffirms his sons manhood by reminding the broken boy that he grew up in the Catholic church.

Those wanting to know the meaning of baby reindeer must wait until the end. In the final moments of Episode 7, Donny sits at a bar listening to a voice message from Martha where she expresses why Donny is her baby reindeer and how much he means to her. As Donny weeps for his lost nemesis, he realises he has left his wallet and cant pay for his drink. So the kind bartender gives it to him on the house.

Ive seen speculation online that Donny might now start stalking the bartender. But that misses the point entirely. Donny isnt about to replicate Marthas harmful behaviour. Instead, he has come full circle emotionally. Hes put in Marthas position and realises how his one small act of kindness when she was at her lowest meant the world to her.

At its heart, empathy is what keeps Baby Reindeer grounded amidst all the chaos. The show never gives viewers the luxury of taking the moral high ground or judging Martha or Donny, not even when they do the most self-destructive things. Instead, Baby Reindeer uses the full rainbow of human emotions to explore why hurt people hurt people.

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Baby Reindeer Is a Powerful Meditation on Why Hurt People Hurt People - GogglerMy

I am not a chill person, but I would like to be. Its why I keep trying various meditation tech, breathing in and out as abstract graphics or disembodied voices guide me to a higher state of being. Or thats what would happen if most meditation tech worked for me. So trust me when I say I expected nothing from Headspace XR.

When the pandemic struck, meditation and mindfulness apps like Headspace were everywhere. Totally makes sense. Yet meditating in VR? It sounds ridiculous. Why would I breathe in a headset when I could just... not. But you never know! Things could surprise you! Thats why I, the meditation skeptic, agreed to try a demo of Headspace XR. Walking into Metas New York office, I thought Id stick on the headset and nod politely while strangers mulled around watching me wear a Quest 3 and breathe deeply. Technically, that is what happened, but I was surprised that I actually enjoyed what I was seeing inside the headset.

Headspace XR is what youd get if you took the Headspace app and turned it into a virtual playground. You walk around as an abstract, gender neutral avatar and there are different locations you can go to and... play. Theres a bunch of fountains where you pick up colorful orbs and throw them at walls or breathe and inhale the colors into your avatar. Theres a place called the Energy Dome where you go and wave your arms around while tracing shapes. The best I can describe it is if Beat Saber and tai chi had a baby. Im sure I looked goofy from the outside, but inside the Energy Dome I was having a good time.

You can also pull up a little map to view all the areas within this mental health playground. A giant mood stream, where six balloons with faces representing various emotions await you. Touching one will tailor the experience to whether youre feeling happy, sad, bored, anxious, angry, or lonely. Theres a mural with slingshots lined up in front of it that you fling virtual balls of paint at that eventually uncover a message. (At my demo, it was Be present.)

Theres actually a lot of slingshots. At one point, we were encouraged to just fling balls through giant shapes in the sky breathing in when you pull back and exhaling when you let er rip. You can also invite friends to come hang out with you in various public spaces and club houses. The most traditional experience I tried was visiting the Boxy Treehouse. Its a virtual tree house at sunset where you can see a visualization of box breathing, a deep breathing technique to calm the nervous system.

The whole thing felt like a pill pocket for meditation. But instead of hiding medicine in a treat for your pets, youre learning meditation skills through playing games. Thats by design.

There are five pillars of mindfulness that we talked about specifically at Headspace. Theres meditate, move, eat, sleep, and play. Play, to me, is something that we could really, really access in the world of VR, that was tough to access in the world of 2D, says Sara Cohen, vice president of content creation at Headspace.

Another feature launching in Headspace XR is more mixed reality experiences. I didnt get to try this during the demo, but I was told that theyre designed to let you interact with your actual surroundings. For example, one lets you draw a window in your room and a guided visualization lets you see positive energy bubbles fly through that window and into your space.

The idea is to bring the practice into your everyday life. Because its not so much about techniques and exercises. Mindfulness is really a lifestyle, says Kessonga Giscombe, one of Headspaces mindfulness and meditation teachers. Its the same thing with the XR experience.

Thats a good sentiment, though Im still skeptical about meditating in VR overall. Last week, I tried the Mindfulness app in the Apple Vision Pro and that typical Look at these shapes and breathe gratefully experience never resonated with me. So as a meditation skeptic, theres something to Headspace XRs approach that feels fresh. I would try it again. Thats even though a part of me knows Im being fed something good in the guise of a game. But if its good for me, and I enjoy it, does it really matter how I get there?

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Headspace XR made me forget how much I hate meditation tech - The Verge

The route leading to Son Tra peninsula restricted visitors that afternoon for the special visitors attending the tea meditation session at the height of 700 m above sea level.

Two days before, two of Gates's assistants flew to Hanoi and went to the house of Vietnamese tea artiste Hoang Anh Suong to discuss every detail about the tea meditation session.

Suong, with over 20 years of organizing thousands of tea meditation sessions, was present at the top of Ban Co early in the afternoon and brought with him two ancient tea sets that he often uses to serve heads of state, along with lotus and ancient snow shan teas.

Two staff members from a travel company carried a set of ancient tables and chairs up hundreds of stone steps to the top of Ban Co. In Vietnamese culture, especially the old wealthy class, it is common to sit and drink tea on ancient tables and chairs.

The tables and chairs were placed next to a fairy chess board, thus named because the board lies next to a fairy statue, with a layer of mist below.

Hoang Anh Suong prepares a tea table for Bill Gates on top of Ban Co Mountain in Da Nang, next to a fairy chess board, on March 6, 2024. Photo courtesy of Hoang Anh Suong

At 5 p.m., Gates and his girlfriend arrived at the foot of the mountain and walked together to the top, while his representative and bodyguards stayed down.

A nun from Da Nang joined them on top of Ban Co that day.

Suong said that when he met Gates and his girlfriend, he was surprised by their simple style, with T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers.

(From L) A nun from Da Nang joins Bill Gates, his girlfriend Paula Hurd, and tea artiste Hoang Anh Suong for a tea meditation session on Ban Co mountain peak in Da Nang on March 6, 2024. Photo courtesy of Hoang Anh Suong's Facebook page

Suong guided the couple on how to meditate, with the nun's help, because "Western people are now very interested in meditation," he said.

He added that atmosphere on top of the mountain was so peaceful he could "clearly hear Gates' breathing."

After 10 minutes of meditation, Suong brewed two types of Tan Cuong tea marinated with lotus flowers.

"The first cups of tea I offered, Bill Gates and Paula Hurd drank them down very quickly. I asked them if the tea was too strong because most Westerners are used to drinking black tea, with a light taste, while lotus tea usually tastes acrid, I got the answer 'very delicious'," Suong said.

Tan Cuong tea is a famous brand in Vietnam's northern province of Thai Nguyen.

"Paula Hurd explained that at home she also drinks green tea," Suong said.

Gates and Hurd were also surprised as they listened to Suong speak of the sophisticated and elaborate art of marinating lotus tea among Hanoians. A kilogram of lotus tea needs to be marinated five to seven times, each time with around 200 lotus flowers from Hanoi's West Lake, he told them.

Hurd turned to Gates and joked, "You and I now become king and queen! (for getting to drink such precious tea)" Suong said.

Suong also spent time talking about how to brew and enjoy tea the ancient royal way, introduced tea making tools and how to choose a pot, cup, water and how to brew, pour and how to serve or enjoy the first sip of tea for 5-6 seconds, then purse your lips and swallow gently to feel the aroma of the tea.

Bill Gates (L) and his girlfriend Paula Hurd sit opposite to tea artise Hoang Anh Suong at a tea ceremony on Ban Co mountain peak in Da Nang, as a nun observes from a distance, March 6, 2024. Photo provided to VnExpress

Suong explained to his guests that Vietnamese people always choose quiet places to drink tea: Ancient masters often went to the mountains or to their study rooms. In a quiet space, people have the opportunity to understand themselves.

"The foundation and essence of the tea ceremony is a matter of understanding. When you understand each other, love is true love," Suong recalled what he told Gates.

He also explained that with tea meditation, tea was not just to enjoy but a way to cultivate the mind.

"When I talked about love, both showed their love right in front of us. This made me very happy," Suong shared.

They were so engrossed in talking about tea that they forgot to look at the clock and thus the tea ceremony lasted 20 minutes longer than the one-hour schedule, he said.

Suong took the initiative to end the conversation, as Gates and Hurd told him that they would return to Vietnam with their families.

The couple left Da Nang on their private jet Thursday night.

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Bill Gates, girlfriend spend 80 minutes enjoying tea, meditation on Da Nang mountain peak - VnExpress International

Insisting on getting 14 hours sleep a night and bathing at any hour because she finds that 'water is really grounding' - Dakota Johnson lives in a wonderful Hollywood world where she is now preparing to become the next Mrs Chris Martin.

The Fifty Shades of Grey actress, 34, was proposed to by the Coldplay singer, 47, 'a while ago' with the full blessing of his ex-wife Gwyneth Paltrow, 51, and their children Apple, 19, and Moses, 17.

Their news comes six years after their relationship started as a source told the Mirror it was 'inevitable' - because the famous couple had beenbesotted with each other from day one.

But behind their romance Dakota puts sleep as her 'number one priority', as she meditates twice a day to manage anxiety.

And the Madame Web star has revealed the gentle ways in which her now-fiance helps to ease her out of a 'low day'.

'I dont have a regular [wake-up] time. It depends on whats happening in my life. If Im not working, if I have a day off on a Monday, then I will sleep as long as I can. Sleep is my number one priority in life,' she told the WSJ.

'Im not functional if I get less than 10. I can easily go 14 hours.'

The Persuasion actress also revealed she will 'get in a bathtub at any time of day' saying: 'If in the middle of the day, Im like, "Oh God, what is this world?" Ill get in the bathtub. I find water really grounding.

'I meditate every day, twice a day. I do transcendental meditation. I've been really into breathwork recently and thats been helping me a lot with anxiety.'

Dakota, who has suffered with depressionsince she was 15, revealed her coping mechanism is to use humour to 'deflect'.

Her parents, Hollywood stars Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, entered her into the world of therapy at a young age amid their public divorce in 1996 - when Dakota was just seven years old.

Griffith has a host of major blockbusters to her name including Lolita, Working Girl and Roar, while Johnson has starred in films Miami Vice, Knives Out and Django Unchained.

The Miami Vice star later married Kelley Phleger in 1999 and the Working Girl actress tiedthe knot with Antonio Banderas in 1996. They divorced in 2015.

Dakota is also the granddaughter of actress Tippi Hedren, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and Marnie.

Hitchcock's obsession with Hedren is well-documented, with the actress revealing in recent years that after she refused his sexual advances he threatened to ruin her career.

Speaking candidly about her mental health struggles as she was honoured for her depression advocacy work at the 17th Annual HOPE Luncheon Seminar in December, Dakota recalled one telltale sign the Yellow singer knows to look out for.

'A few weeks ago I was having a low day,' she began. 'My partner said to me so kindly, "Are you really struggling?". I said, "No".

'He said, "Baby, you're wearing a Cats T-shirt". Like Cats, the musical. It turns out I was really struggling.'

She continued: 'But that moment lifted my heart, and it pulled me out of it.'

Dakota, who has been dating the British singer since 2017, continued: 'I think most of the time I speak about depression or anxiety in a very self-deprecating way. Perhaps it is easier to look it in the eyes if I wear the mask of comedy.

'Covering my pain or anxiety in comedy is a lifelong tool and I don't think it's a bad thing. It works. It helps me because sometimes if I don't laugh, I'll cry.'

Elsewhere in the speech, Dakota explained: 'The biggest thing I've learnt about depression is learning to become okay with there never really being an immediate answer, never really being an immediate end.'

The actress has also described herself as a 'sexual person' - after becoming a household name when she starred in 2015 movie Fifty Shades of Grey, with sequels Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed following in 2017 and 2018, respectively.

Speaking to Vanity Fair in 2022, she said: 'I'm a sexual person, and when I'm interested in something, I want to know so much about it.'

'That's why I did those big naked movies. I signed up to do a very different version of the film we ended up making.'

Chris Martin was formerly married to Iron Man star Gwyneth Paltrow, who is well known for her own wacky lifestyle - including famously launching a candle that smells like her vagina.

The This Smells Like My Vagina candle was first released back in 2020, and admitted the geranium, citrusy bergamot, and cedar scented candle was initially created as a joke.

But following her first candle's success, Gwyneth's brand then released a second titled, This Smells Like My Orgasm.

Gwyneth - who founded the website in 2008 - is no stranger to sparking controversy on her lifestyle website by previously advising readers to purchase a $15,000 24k gold vibrator and vaginal jade eggs.

She has also turned her attention to the world of BDSM, selling a nude underwear set alongside a black whip, which promised to fulfill consumers 'fantasies'.

Dakota also complained of the making of Fifty Shades of Grey as 'psychotic' and insists the trilogy lacked the sexual intensity she envisaged when agreeing to take on her starring role as Anastasia "Ana" Steele.

She explained how making the trilogy became complicated in part because the author of the books, E.L. James maintained creative control over the film adaptations.

And although she doesn't regret working on the racy franchise of films, the Texan born star said that the original film she signed on to wasn't exactly the one they ended up doing.

Chris and Dakota met through mutual friends and have 'never really left each other' since, the actress told Vanity Fair in June 2022.

She was seen wearing an emerald green ring on her wedding finger at her 34th birthday in Los Angeles last October.

They were first spotted together in 2017, the year after the musician's divorce from Oscar-winning actress Gwyneth.

However, it was not initially clear if the couple were dating, or just close.

In June 2019, the pair had a wobble, rumoured to be a result of the Coldplay frontman pushing for them to have children.

This was a leap as Dakota, in her professional prime, was reportedly not enthusiastic about. However, before summer was up, they were back together.

They will be extra glad for that having seemingly got matching infinity sign tattoos in 2018.

Dakota has recently said she loves Chris and Gwyneth's two children 'like my life depends on it'.

In an interview with Bustle, the actress, 34, opened up about being a stepmom to Apple and Moses, the teenage children Coldplay singer Chris shares with Gwyneth.

'I love those kids like my life depends on it. With all my heart,' Dakota said of Apple and Moses.

As a member of a large blended family herself, Dakota - who was recently spotted in Malibu - has learned to embrace connections that aren't blood-related.

When the reporter brought up a photo Gwyneth posted of her and Dakota, she said: 'I grew up in a family that was so big, and I just believe in the saying "Blood is thicker than water,"' she explained.

'The actual saying is "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb," which means that the connections with people you choose are more solid than the connections to the people you're actually born to.'

Now, Dakota is open to having children of her own.

'Im so open to that. Ive gotten to this place where I really want to experience everything that life has to offer. And especially being a woman, Im like, What a magical f*cking thing to do.

'What a crazy, magical, wild experience. If thats meant to happen for me, Im totally down for it. Ive been really tripping out recently like, were not here for very long.

'Theres so much to eat up and learn and grow from and experience and feel. That includes all the pain and the suffering and feeling so helpless about the world. Most days I feel like the most useless piece of sh*t.

'Im sitting in this dumb*ss chair, talking about this dumb*ss movie, and there are people in excruciating catastrophes, and what can I do? I do have that incredible friction in myself.

'And then Im like, "Were not here for very long, so if Im meant to be a mother, bring it on". '

The actress has been dating Coldplay frontman Chris since 2017 but watching him perform on stage never gets old.

'I love watching him. I could watch him every day. I dont know how to explain it. I feel like, I dont know... Im watching my most favorite being do his most favorite thing,' she explained.

The couple have lived together in a multi-million Malibu beach-house for some years now.

The singer is into his surfing, and the actress likes to swim, making this a perfect location.

Dakota also enjoys whizzing around the area in a 1965 Mustang bought for her as a birthday present by her partner.

They support each other professionally, with Dakota appearing at Chris' gigs, and Chris at Dakota's premieres.

In June 2023, the vocalist even serenaded his girlfriend at his band's visit to Naples.

They have even worked together once, with Dakota the director of Coldplay's 2020 music video for the song Cry Cry Cry.

Originally posted here:

Sleeping 14 hours a night, 'grounding' water and meditating twice daily...and we're not talking about Gwyneth! - Daily Mail

Mar 07, 2024, 10:56pmUpdated 1d ago

By: News 12 Staff

Three men are wanted for allegedly stealing money from the donation boxes at a Buddhist meditation center in Westbury.

Police say the suspects forced their way into the facility on Hicksville Road Sunday afternoon and stole the cash.

Anyone with information is asked to call police.

See the rest here:

Police: 3 men stole money from Buddhist meditation center in Westbury - News 12 Long Island

The first time I heard about the jhanas, they sounded too good to be true. These special mental states are described in the sacred texts of an ancient school of Buddhism. Today, advanced meditators usually access them by concentrating on something: a flame, their breath, the sense of loving kindness. The meditators unclench their minds bit by bit, until they reach a state of near-total absorption. If they direct that focus in just the right way, a sequence of intense experiences ensues, beginning with bliss and ending with full-body peace. The jhana bliss state is not like the little uptick in well-being that comes with mindfulness meditation. It is not like a runners high. This stuff is really powerful, says Matthew Sacchet, the director of the Meditation Research Program at Harvard Medical School. An orgasm is said to be tame by comparison. Tears of joy will sometimes stream down a meditators face.

The early Theravada Buddhists put no restrictions on the jhanas, but some later traditions taught that they were extraordinarily difficult to attain. Over the past 20 years, a small group of teachers has introduced the jhanas to a new generation of advanced meditators in the West, and a tech-adjacent subculture in the Bay Area has recently taken them up with gusto. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a tech start-up is now trying to make the jhanas accessible to almost anyone, at almost any time. It is called Jhourney, and according to its founders, Stephen Zerfas and Alex Gruver, the combination of artificial intelligence and EEG recordings of the brain will give novice meditators bliss on demand.

I recently joined a video call with Zerfas and Gruver. They were pulled over to the side of the road, on the way to one of the jhana meditation retreats theyve been leading as they develop their proprietary technology. (Attendees pay up to $3,000, they said.) Zerfas did most of the talking, and communicated almost entirely in founder-speak. He told me that Jhourneys goal is to teach 100 million people how to enter the jhanas. I asked how hed arrived at that number. He said that he was pretty sure that the Headspace meditation app had tens of millions of subscribers, but that otherwise he had pulled it out of thin air.

Zerfas first experienced the jhanas while he was navigating two different breakupsone with a girlfriend and the other with a co-founder at an earlier start-up. After reaching emotional rock bottom, he went on a meditation retreat, where he unexpectedly stumbled into the first jhana state. With time and coaching, he learned to enter the jhanas at just about any moment. He said that he still does a jhana meditation every morning and intimated that I wouldnt want to deal with the version of him who didnt. Learning the jhanas was one of the most important things that ever happened to him. It gave him a feeling of emotional abundance and imbued him with a particular kind of tech-world evangelical fever: Why isnt this happening at mega-scale? he remembers wondering.

Read: The app that monetized doing nothing

Zerfas learned to enter the jhanas the old-fashioned way, with sustained practice at lengthy meditation retreats, but he and Gruver want to fast-forward that process. They insist that by presenting students with real-time biofeedback from sensors attached to their scalp, they will soon be able to foster bliss within a single day. Afterward, they want their students to be able to reenter the jhanas anytime, in as few as 15 to 30 minutes. Terje Sparby, a philosophy professor at Rudolf Steiner University College, in Oslo, Norway, who studies the phenomenology of jhanas, told me that it usually takes him multiple days of meditation at a retreat before he enters one. The idea that someone could get there every morning in the time it takes to watch two episodes of Bluey struck him as unusual.

For the past year, Zerfas and Gruver have been collecting data by attaching EEG electrodes to experienced jhana teachers while they meditate. They want to use it to train an algorithm that determines whether someone is experiencing a jhana state in real time. They imagine their future teachers presiding over a class of novice meditators who are all wearing EEG headsets. (A tennis instructor can see whats wrong with your stroke, but todays meditation teachers cant look inside your mind.) If Jhourneys algorithm could track your progress toward entering a jhana state and display it outside your headset, the teachers could give you tailored real-time instructions. Youre on the right track, keep going, they might say, or, if things werent going well, Lets take a minute to relax before returning to focus.

Eventually, Zerfas said, the algorithm itself could do the teaching, by playing the same sort of instructions through speakers in a consumer helmet that Jhourney eventually hopes to manufacture. I pointed out that there are already EEG-based meditation headsets on the market, but they tell you only if youre in a general, meditative stateand none seems to work well enough to have transformed meditation practice. Those products are a good idea, Zerfas told me, but they arent targeting life-changing experiences. If his product is successful, he said, it would be the most important intervention in human well-being in a generation. He sent me a document that explained more. Imagine if Biden and Putin shed tears of joy and gratitude for 30 minutes every morning, it read. There would be all kinds of cascading effects. The implication seemed to be that Jhourney would help bring about world peace.

Read: An ode to not meditating

No one should disband their armies just yet. Jonas Mago, a neuroscientist who has consulted for Jhourney, told me that the companys algorithm has not been able to achieve enough precision at classifying neurological states. When I asked Zerfas and Gruver how reliably their software can identify whether a person is having the intense experience of being in a jhana, they would say only above chance. So far, theyve primarily collected data from expert meditators. Kathryn Devaney, a neuroscientist and co-founder of the Alembic, a nonprofit body-mind center in Berkeley, California, has also advised Jhourney. She told me that whatever brain data Zerfas and Gruver are able to record from advanced meditators may not generalize to other people. Even if the EEG sensors could reliably detect jhana states, that might not be enough. For the product to be useful, it would need to recognize the intermediate states that precede the jhanas, and then deliver the sort of feedback and instruction that could coax a person across the finish line.

EEG data are also notoriously difficult to collect and isolate. Extracting bona fide neural activity from the noise created by muscle movements and other sources is tedious work, even for experts. When I asked Zerfas if Jhourney has a full-time EEG scientist on staff, he said no, but added that hed read a bunch of textbooks, and taught himself with the help of a tutor. The current state of EEG research coming out of academia underwhelmed him, he said. And in any case, he saw this as more of a machine-learning problem than a neuroscience problem.

Academic research into the jhanas has indeed been pretty thin, but it is ramping up. Michael Lifshitz, a psychiatry professor at McGill University, in Montreal, recently led an EEG study of an experienced jhana meditator. His group chose a respected Western jhana teacher named Shaila Catherine because she belongs to a strict traditionjhanas, for her, count only if they are extremely prolonged states of absorption. Lifshitz hasnt yet published his results, and he stressed that theyre still preliminary. But he told me that when Catharine entered the deepest states, her brain still seemed to be having sensory experiences, yet the neural signals that might be associated with complex cognition about the sensations were reduced to the point of being nonexistent.

Lifshitz hopes that more scientists will take up bliss as an object of scientific study. He and Josh Brahinsky, a researcher at UC Berkeley, have been studying evangelical Christians who report having an intense blissful experience while speaking in tongues. Their ecstasies look quite distinct from those of your average Buddhist monk: Tongue-speaking Christians are physically active to the point of being spastic, and they churn out streams of nonsense syllables. They also have a very different worldview from the meditators, with very different metaphysics. But they might be hacking the same feature of the human brain to produce a very similar inner state, Lifshitz said. Maybe instead of accessing it by being really quiet, theyre becoming so loud that they drown everything out. It could be a different way of flattening the landscape.

Last fall, Sacchet, the director of the Meditation Research Program at Harvard Medical School, published detailed brain-imaging data from a meditator entering the jhana states, with the help of an MRI machine. A fuller understanding of these brain states could have incredible potential for humanity, he says, so long as the science is done with rigor. I worry about a move fast, break things approach when it comes to the mind and these deep states of consciousness.

There may not be reason to worry: Zerfas and Gruver arent moving that fast. Before we hung up, I asked them when they could imagine the first headset-aided retreats happening. As soon as 18 to 24 months from now, Zerfas told me, while granting that it was an optimistic assessment. He then detailed for me the consumer-headset development plan that would follow. (The final stage: Then we SpaceX it!) Gruver was more circumspect. I would love it if it was working in two years, he said, but it might also take five or 10. A lot depends on how seriously we take this as a society. Society, in this case, meant investors. I told him that I would expect his pitch to be quite welcome among Silicon Valleys venture capitalists. It brings together a lot of their interests. There are a lot of people in Silicon Valley who like to say that they are countercultural risk takers, he said, but very few actually are.

I get what Gruver was saying, but Jhourney doesnt seem all that countercultural to me. When Id discussed the jhana states with Sparby, the philosopher, he reminded me that they were not cultivated as ends in themselves, but rather as way stations on a longer path to wisdom and enlightenment. Jhourney is trying to extract the bliss from that path, and to optimize and productize it in a gadget for the mass market. What could be more mainstream than that?

The rest is here:

The Meditation Start-Up That's Selling Bliss on Demand - The Atlantic