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| Meditation environment |
To perform this meditation it helps to be in a suitable environment and maintain a correct posture.
Suitable Environment
Find somewhere crowded, noisy, hot, stressful and generally frustrating. A packed commuter train or bus is ideal.
Correct Posture
Check whether you're sitting comfortably. If so, you're doing it wrong. Get up off your ass, hang on the strap and let someone who needs it have your seat.
The correct frame of mind
Concentrate on your own frustration, stress, boredom, discomfort and low-level hostility to the passengers around you who are swaying and bumping into you and crowding you in. Visualize these negative feelings as a cloud of acrid black smoke swirling around your heart.
Next, imagine all your fellow passengers are experiencing the same hassles.
On an in-breath, breathe in all their irritations as black smoke which mixes with and annihilates your own swirling black smoke in a burst of white light.
The light purifies and calms your body and mind. Imagine the irritation of yourself and the irritation of others as antimatter meeting matter in a burst of mutually assured destruction, producing vast amounts of pure positive energy.
As you breathe out, imagine this pure white energy radiating out into the hearts of all those around you, remaining in the form of a globe of white light, an abiding centre of calmness and clarity in their hearts.
Karmic supernova
Now repeat the procedure, but this time the energy release is going to be HUGE, like a karmic supernova.
Imagine all the problems and sufferings of your fellow passengers: sickness, pain, sick relatives, financial worries, work problems, loneliness, insecurity, fear, relationship breakdowns, legal hassles, mental illness, addictions and so on. Then reflect that you yourself have the negative karma to experience all this, and much worse, for life after life. This negative karma swirls around your heart like a thick cloud of hot, acrid, black smoke.
On the in-breath, breathe in all these present and future sufferings of your fellow passengers in the form of black smoke, which mixes with, and annihilates, the negative karma at your heart in an ENORMOUS release of energy in the form pure white light. This reaction utterly destroys the sufferings of others and your own bad karma like matter meeting antimatter.
On the out breath, imagine that this colossal burst of purifying energy radiates in all directions through everyone around you, cleansing all their negative karma, and their potential for future sufferings, and sweeping it all away, utterly destroying it never to be seen again.
Finally, dedicate any merit you may have created from this meditation to the enlightenment of all sentient beings.
More meditations
Philosophy is the search for truth, which is founded on the
premise that there is at least one true statement that can be made about life,
the universe and everything.
But how can we prove that there exists at least one true
statement?
Well, consider the negation of ‘There is at least one true
statement.’
That negation is ‘All statements are false.’
But if all statements are false, then ‘All statements are
false’, being a statement, must also be false.
So at least one statement must be true.
So we have proved that ‘There is at least one true
statement’ by reference to another statement.
Which means that the foundational statement of philosophy is not inherently existent, but is dependent for its veracity upon its relationship to
another statement.
But the statement which it depends upon has no inherent existence
either, because it’s false.
Very odd.
By Abi Jackson in The Northern Echo
"... I'm in a small room off Westminster Hall in London's Houses of Parliament, along with a few other journalists, mental health charity bods and various MPs - all also sitting, eyes closed, hands on laps and breathing deeply, as Rebecca Crane of Bangor University's Centre for Mindfulness guides us through.
Never in a million years would I have imagined I'd be indulging in a spot of deep breathing in Westminster, with a panel of MPs - and yet here we are. And do you know what? It feels good.
We're here for the launch of the Mindful Nation UK interim report. The Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Group, co-chaired by Conservative MP Tracey Crouch, Labour MP Chris Ruane and Lib Dem MP Lorely Burt and in collaboration with The Mindfulness Initiative - which brings together a number of leaders in the field and key mindfulness training and research centres; Oxford, Exeter, Bangor and Sussex, as well as the Mental Health Foundation - have spent the last eight months looking at the benefits of mindfulness, evidence backing up these benefits, and how it might be incorporated across a range of UK services and institutions, mainly education, healthcare, work and criminal justice.
The hope, in a nutshell, is for the Government to recognise the importance of wellbeing in society, the role mindfulness could play, how this could follow through into policy, and how those holding the budget-strings could give it some funding..."
"... One of the things we need to think about is how this works long-term, not just short-term, which is what governments tend to think about, and that is pays to focus on prevention rather than cure," he says. "Nearly all these interventions require spending by one department, and will see gains elsewhere, and that's the bit we need to crack."
A pound spent on mental health, he notes, is "at the margin, hugely more productive than a pound spent on physical health", and yet that isn't reflected in the current system..."
"...For example, mindfulness in schools may or may not have a significant immediate impact on exam results - one of the key things currently used to measure success in education - but it could hugely improve harmony in classrooms, behavioural problems, stress among teachers, sickness rates, self-esteem - the list could go on and on. These things will then have a positive snowball effect through years to come, including, ultimately, less strain on the NHS and welfare budgets..." Read it all
