Meditation May Increase Gray Matter

Meditation May Increase Gray Matter:

Specifically, meditators showed significantly larger volumes of the hippocampus and areas within the orbito-frontal cortex, the thalamus and the inferior temporal gyrus — all regions known for regulating emotions.

“We know that people who consistently meditate have a singular ability to cultivate positive emotions, retain emotional stability and engage in mindful behavior,” said Eileen Luders, lead author and a postdoctoral research fellow at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging. “The observed differences in brain anatomy might give us a clue why meditators have these exceptional abilities.”

Huh

I hadn’t been on here in a while, and apparently my blogroll had disappeared! I have no idea what happened to it. But it’s back.

the social contract

Recently I watched an episode of House called “The Social Contract” in which a man has frontal lobe disinhibition. He is forced to say whatever is on his mind whenever he opens his mouth to speak. This means any negative or embarrassing thought he has about anyone with whom he is talking, he says this aloud, with no control or ability to refrain from speaking the thought. It was like a truth serum: he was forced to answer any question posed to him with the first thing that popped into his mind, no matter how hurtful or snarky. It would seem, then, with this condition, the only way to control what you say would be to learn to control what you think. In other words, what an amazing incentive to learn to control one’s mind.

Not that I want to need such motivation. Relationships would be destroyed; tact non-existent; the ability to perform basic pleasantries in one’s job impossible. It would be impossible to provide friendly service as a server if I had to say whatever was on my mind to a table’s often ridiculous demands or criticisms. I’d be fired in a heartbeat. I can’t think of a job that would allow such a disability to control one’s speech.

Clearly, being forced to speak whatever might be on your mind would drive most of us insane. We’d be ostracized and shunned from everyone we know and love. Despite the fact that they have the same thoughts, they have the wherewithall to keep them to themselves to avoid unnecessarily hurting others. Without this ability, this ability to censor our own speech, we’d be saying hurtful things all the time, especially since most of us lack much control over our own mind and thoughts.

It’s sad really, how much censorship we have to do between our thoughts and our speech.

How much energy would we save if that weren’t necessary, if we could actually have not only right speech, but right mind?

Everybody is special, whether or not they believe it.

Happy Spring!

Summer Map

Spring is in the air…

drowsy tedious introspecting

It’s after 2AM and I’m sitting with bad posture and a pained back in front of the computer, staring at empty space, while the Sophie knocks things off the dining room table one by one.  After lying in bed, awake, listening to the Wombat breathe sleepfully, unable to let go of my frustrations or calm the words and images and memories and fears in my head, I quietly retreated from failed attempts at slumber to stare at a blue screen in the dark.

Lying there, it occurred to me how much has changed, for better and worse, over the past few years. Three years ago, I was, for all intents and purposes, completely on my own, kicked out of my home for more than 2 years of my life by someone I had considered a friend for several years, due to legal problems on her part, working an internship that was ending, taking a bar exam I hadn’t had time to study properly for, with only enough money left to pay the first month’s rent of a new place and nominal moving costs. I had no loving, supportive significant other to help me through the trying times, and my family simply said: you’re smart; you’ll figure it out. Directly after moving, my grandfather, whom I barely knew, died, and I had to fly home for a week for funeral things. And yet: I was meditating regularly, going to meditation classes, and had several strong, supportive friendships to see me through everything. I didn’t get sick; I didn’t get hurt, and I always managed to find enough work to get by.

Now, I have a place to live, I have a job, although, still not an appropriate job for someone with my skill set, I have a loving, supportive, if sometimes impatient and cranky, boyfriend, and my family is close by, but I have no strong, supportive friendships, nor do I have a nearby dharma center filled with good-hearted, like-minded people, breathing an air of joyful safety and protection. I’ve gotten migraines with greater frequency, and have gotten terrible, lingering colds twice in the past 6 months, and my body aches more than I ever remember before, getting by on the work I have now is somehow even more challenging.  Granted, many things besides the lack of a sound meditation practice and local sangha have changed, including geography and age and job type, but can’t help but think that the lack of a solid dharma practice is playing a large part in these current ills.

I want to jumpstart the practice, and meant to, but I always let something get in the way. Most recently, it was the boyfriend’s lay-off at the beginning of the year. Then, the air in the house was thick with tension and anxiety, and alone time vanished. Finally he got a job, sort of, and I immediately got a terrible cold, that is only finally now just about gone, and I am no longer an embarrassing mouth-breather. Now, there is a 2 week break between phase 1 of the boyfriend’s new job and phase 2. Alone time has again gone puff. And now loving and supportive but judgmental boyfriend is here blogging away the day, passively resenting me for my poor housekeeping skills and lack of a remotely appropriate job in pay and skill. That I send several applications out a week to no avail in this flailing ailing economy makes no difference to employers or to him, it seems. I have no retreat, or release, or venting space, save for the crazy jumbled mess in my head. My longer-term friends feel abysmally far away, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and physically. That false feeling of separateness is oh so strong.

A few days ago, the wombat out of frustration decided to lecture me on the state of my lack of happiness and motivation in his eyes, as well as my failure to clean while sick and working while he was out of town working his little butt off every day and going out every night. My jerk response vacillated between tearful indignation and quiet anger. Patience at no time kicked in, a painfully glaring indicator of my lack of practice. He wants me to happy, yes, while keeping the house clean and convincing someone to hire me, and casting spells on people here to be my close friends and confidants, and also finding a hobby or activity for me and just me. (That’s admittedly unfairly worded; he does care about me and wants me to have a nice life here and with him. And clearly, I’m having trouble being the first of us to just let it go… every passive-aggressive comment brings the repressed, exasperated anger roaring back to the surface.) I can’t tell him that none of those things will do a damned thing about whether or not I’m happy; they’ll simply make things more comfortable for living a modern American life. Not that that’s a bad or undesirable thing. But on this topic, we don’t quite speak the same language.

The funny thing is, I’m not miserable. I’m frustrated with my lack of a meditation practice, and with certain missing elements in my life, and the former must certainly change immediately, but I can’t help but feel that his accusation of a lack of happiness and motivation on my part is more a reflection of his own lack of happiness and motivation. I’ve tried to talk to him about dharma and have given him books to read, but he’s just not interested, and I know better than to force it. It would certainly be nice if he were at least interested in talking about it, but in a year and a half he’s shown about as much inclination to read about or discuss Buddhism as my cat. (I wish at least someone else in this worn out, run down city wanted to read about it or talk about it though.) It really makes it hard to talk about how to be happy when our beliefs about where to find happiness don’t entirely overlap. Hopefully they will overlap more as time goes on, but I can’t change his mind, only mine. And that’s, of course, a multi-multi-multi-life-long process. It’d be nice to make some gargantuan strides in this particular life, since I’m one of the most fortunate beings in this currently perceived world, even if I don’t often enough remember it.

Well, this self-reflective/self-absorbed trip is now over, with no definite solutions, other than meditating regularly again.

Inner peace

Sometimes I need a reminder not to focus all of my attention on the externals… Some of attention must be focused on externals, obviously (without basic necessities there will be no body to encase the mind to train…), but I’d like to reduce, gradually, that portion to something around 10%… assuming that if my internal world is functioning properly, the outer world will be a natural extension of the inner calm, and thus, life will be much easier to deal with.

This excerpt from Transform Your Life offers a better explanation:

All living beings have the same basic wish to be happy and avoid suffering, but very few people understand the real causes of happiness and suffering. We generally believe that external conditions such as food, friends, cars, and money are the real causes of happiness, and as a result we devote nearly all our time and energy to acquiring these. Superficially it seems that these things can make us happy, but if we look more deeply we shall see that they also bring us a lot of suffering and problems.

Happiness and suffering are opposites, so if something is a real cause of happiness it cannot give rise to suffering. If food, money, and so forth really are causes of happiness, they can never be causes of suffering; yet we know from our own experience that they often do cause suffering. For example, one of our main interests is food, but the food we eat is also the principal cause of most of our ill health and sickness. In the process of producing the things we feel will make us happy we have polluted our environment to such an extent that the very air we breathe and the water we drink now threaten our health and well-being. We love the freedom and independence a car can give us, but the cost in accidents and environmental destruction is enormous. We feel that money is essential for us to enjoy life, but the pursuit of money also causes immense problems and anxiety. Even our family and friends, with whom we enjoy so many happy moments, can also bring us a lot of worry and heartache.

In recent years our understanding and control of the external world have increased considerably, and as a result we have witnessed remarkable material progress; but there has not been a corresponding increase in human happiness. There is no less suffering in the world today, and there are no fewer problems. Indeed, it could be said that there are now more problems and greater unhappiness than ever before. This shows that the solution to our problems, and to those of society as a whole, does not lie in knowledge or control of the external world.

Why is this? Happiness and suffering are states of mind, and so their main causes cannot be found outside the mind. The real source of happiness is inner peace. If our mind is peaceful, we shall be happy all the time, regardless of external conditions, but if it is disturbed or troubled in any way, we shall never be happy, no matter how good our external conditions may be. External conditions can only make us happy if our mind is peaceful. We can understand this through our own experience. For instance, even if we are in the most beautiful surroundings and have everything we need, the moment we get angry any happiness we may have disappears. This is because anger has destroyed our inner peace.

…

Ha!

The wombat found another job, pretty much, sort of a trial run starting next week, but hey! And I have a contact at the university I want to work at so hopefully I can finally get some interviews! Hooray! Movement…

uncomfortably numb

On Monday, the wombat, aka the boyfriend, was laid off from his job: a tremendous way to start off the new year. Luckily, it was not a job he particularly liked or enjoyed, although he did like his colleagues. His boss was teary-eyed when he went to clear out his office. Another fortunate thing: everyone in this town loves him. I don’t think he’ll have much trouble finding another job, even in this ridiculously dire economy. Although, it may not be the job of his dreams.

Needless to say, the past week has been infused with stress-fueled, frenzied job-searching activity, on both our parts. The wombat is now learning the joys of applying for jobs and writing carefully crafted cover letters, a joy I have been experiencing for several months. My problem: I have an advanced degree in a field I have no interest in pursuing, a field that actually makes me want to vomit, unless I could find non-profit work, which is actually hard to find here, and was extremely competitive to obtain in New York. So, I am trying to get HR people to believe that I am actually interested in the jobs I am applying for, for which I appear on paper to be both supremely over- and somewhat under-qualified. All I want is a job similar to the admin job I had before the fateful time I decided to go to law school. And, of course, I will have to keep my job as a waitress, at least for the time being, depending on the salary. But I have a sneaking suspicion that my applications go directly to the shredder as soon as the notice the J.D. buried at the bottom of my resume.

Our days and nights are mostly spent both sitting in front of separate laptops, trolling the interwebs for job opportunities, except when I am at work. The house is filled with a tense silence, broken only by the sound of typing, clicking, or mouse scrolling. Most other activities are on hold…