Vipassana Meditation and Body Sensation: Eilona Ariel
Eilona Ariel is a documentary filmmaker whose work was deeply inspired by her life in Asia and her practice of the ancient meditation technique called vipassana or "insight meditation." She moved to New York City in 1978 and spent nine years studying and working as a musician and a photographer. In 1980, she received a diploma from the Germain School of Photography. She left the USA in 1987 to spend several years living in Asia. In 1995 she returned to Israel and established the Karuna Films Production Company together with Ayelet Menahemi.
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations) For more information on Vipassana, see dhamma.org See more on Doing Time, Doing Vipassana & Karuna Films at karunafilms.com For more talks from this event, go to tedxjaffa.com
Dhr. Seven and Amber Larson (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly; Tori DeAngelis (American Psychological Association, APA.org, Feb. 2014, Vol. 45, No. 2); Dr. Tara Brach, Ph.D. (True Refuge/YouTube)
Psychology's
famous Ziggy Freud, who originated psychotherapy, had a couch. This is
it. Note the exquisite Buddha head figures next to his chair
(99percentinvisible.org)
Buddhist meditation and mindfulness teacher Psychologist
Tara Brach draws fans from high
schools, prisons, even the legislative offices of Capitol Hill.
A Blend of Buddhism and Psychology
When Dr. Tara Brach speaks, a lot of people listen. Even when she doesn't speak, they listen -- or simply join her in silence.
Brach
is a popular presenter at spiritual centers across the country,
leading about 10 workshops and two or three meditation retreats each
year.
Followers
in more than 150 countries download her talks and guided meditations
for free and devour her best-selling CDs and books, including her 2013
book True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart,
which discusses how people can find "their true home" -- what Brach
calls "a timeless, loving presence" -- under even the most challenging
conditions.
"What
I have found over time is that the more I can recognize what is
happening in the present moment and simply open and allow the
experience without judgment, the more I come back home."
Her
approach blends Buddhist and psychological teachings in ways that are
easy for people to apply in their daily lives, say colleagues.
"Tara has an incredible ability to bring the teachings alive with stories that are personal, that show she is vulnerable, but at the same time, not make them about her, but about others' development," says Cheri Maples of the Center for Mindfulness and Justice, a non-sectarian training center for criminal justice professionals and others.
Over the last decade, Brach's teachings and writings have helped to inspire a line of research that has made mindfulness techniques more mainstream, says one such researcher, University of Toronto psychologist Zindel V. Segal, Ph.D.
(Tara Brach) "Awakening from Trance: Embracing Unlived Life" recorded August 26, 2015.
When physical or emotional pain is too
much, our
conditioning is to pull away and avoid direct contact with raw feelings.
The result is a trance: we are split off from the wholeness of our
aliveness, intelligence, and capacity to love. This talk explores how
dissociation shows up in our lives and a powerful way that mindfulnessenables us to integrate cut-off parts of our being.
Join
Tara's email community to receive exclusive updates, events,
meditations, and a free download of Tara’s 10 min meditation:
“Mindful Breathing: Finding Calm and Ease"
Support enables continued offering of these talks freely, so if you
value them, consider donating
He was a key founder of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, an approach that uses mindfulness techniques to prevent depression relapse, first outlined with colleagues J. Mark G. Williams, DPhil, and John D. Teasdale, Ph.D., in a 2000 article in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.
"Coming
at a time when the field was still grappling with how mindfulness and
compassion practices could be integrated into clinical treatment,
Tara's work was profoundly influential," Segal says.
"The trance of unworthiness"
Brach came to her path by studying psychology, meditation, and yoga,
as well as by examining her own life and conflicts, which include a
1991 divorce, a 2003 diagnosis of a genetic disorder that affects the
connective tissue and a family that -- like her -- is "neurotic as hell," she laughs.
Now 60, Brach experienced an "aha!" moment at age 22 as a psychology and political science student at Clark University.
While
on a camping trip, a friend told her she was "learning how to be her
own best friend." Hearing this, Brach burst into tears, she remembers.
"I
realized I was just the opposite. Everywhere I looked I had another
judgment about myself: I was a bad daughter, I was a bad friend, I was
too heavy, I couldn't control my eating, I wasn't doing what I could be
doing academically, I didn't help the world enough," she says.
That observation led to an ongoing attempt to understand and free herself and others from what Brach has come to call "the trance of unworthiness."
It's a particularly strong habit in the West, she thinks, because our
competitive, individualistic culture pressures us to feel we're never
good enough.
To pursue healing and explore her spirituality, Brach decided to move into an ashram after college. For 10 years, she lived in this spiritual community, teaching at the ashram's yoga center, and working in a vegetarian restaurant to stay afloat.
She
immersed herself in practicing yoga, breath-based meditation, and
devotional chanting, which quieted some of her mental obsessing and
helped her gain more openheartedness and peace.
While
still living in the ashram, she began graduate school at the Fielding
Institute in Santa Barbara, California, where she earned her doctorate
in clinical psychology in 1991. More
Buddhism and Psychology?
What did Freud see in the Buddha's teachings?
Buddhism and Psychology(en.wikipedia.org)
Buddhism includes an analysis of human psychology, emotion, cognition,
behavior, and motivation along with therapeutic practices. A unique
feature of Buddhist...
Buddhist Psychology: Institute for Zen Therapy Buddhism is a path of liberation for the world. In the Buddhist
analysis, peace in the world and peace in the hearts of people are
simply... (instituteforzentherapy.com)
Mindfulness in Buddhism & Psychology He taught Training Compassion: From the Buddha to Modern Psychology, with Mu Soeng, at BCBS...Insight Journal asked Germer to talk... (BCBSdharma.org)
Buddhist Psychology, New College, Univ. of Toronto
Buddhist psychology is "radical," as it aims to challenge your
worldview (as all authentic spirituality and psychology does). It is
radical in that it addresses the [roots or radix]...
Buddhism and Modern Psychology, Princeton U.Buddhism and Modern Psychology from Princeton Univ. The Dalai
Lama has said that Buddhism and science are deeply compatible and
has...(coursera.org)
Buddha philosophy and Western psychology (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
Buddhism and Western Psychology overlap in theory and practice.
Over the last century, experts have written on many commonalities
between Buddhism and...
Contemplative Psychotherapy and Buddhist Psychology MA (naropa.edu)
Naropa University's concentration in Contemplative Psychotherapy and
Buddhist Psychology -- part of our Clinical Mental Health Counseling
Master's...
How are we supposed to meditate if the guards keep making that noise to F with us?
What life is really like for women in the growing prison-industrial complex (Daily Mail)
Breathe in, breathe out. Not having been, they come to be; once having been, they cease. When this is, that arises. When that is not, that does not arise. Damn biased, bogus judge...
The United States of America is locking up more people than any other nation on earth. Home to just 5 percent of the world's total population, the USA houses more than 20 percent of the world's prisoners.
In the last three decades -- fueled in large part by a bogus national drug policy (aimed at mass incarceration to drive up drug prices for the benefit of bankers and militarized police at the expense of taxpayers) as well as legislation that backfires like Three Strikes laws -- the U.S. has imprisoned even more citizens.
There are now more people in prisons, local jails, federal penitentiaries, and private "correctional" facilities than Stalin put in Russian gulags.
New court rulings have declared overcrowded prisons to be unconstitutional, and the sheer cost of incarceration is forcing prisons to let prisoners back out on the streets.
VICE News was granted rare access to go inside one of the most maximum-security prisons in the country, a place that's on the frontline of what could be a sea change in prison policy.
(DLF.tv/dlfprojects.org) A meditation-based rehabilitation program offered by the David Lynch Foundation has been utilized in dozens of prisons throughout the US and worldwide over the past 30 years. Research on meditating inmates at San Quentin and Folsom prisons in California and Walpole Prison in Massachusetts has found transcendental meditation (TM) practice markedly reduces rule infractions and dramatically reduces recidivism rates by as much as 50 percent. This 5-minute documentary shows how the effects of TM are transforming the lives of inmates, guards, and staff of a medium-security prison in Oregon.
Salinas Valley State Prison is home to America's most powerful prison gangs including the white supremacist Aryan Brotherhood and Mexican Mafia. It's a place that's projected to have more than 700 sexual and/or assaults this year.
In an institution that houses the alleged "worst of the worst," we see how one maverick warden is trying to turn the system around by rehabilitating murderers before they get returned to the streets.
Serving time in prison is not supposed to be pleasant. Nor, however, is it supposed to include being raped by fellow prisoners or staff, beaten by guards for the slightest provocation, driven mad by long-term solitary confinement, or killed off by medical neglect. These are the fates of thousands of prisoners every year -- men, women, and children housed in lockups that give Gitmo [Guantanamo Bay] and Abu Ghraib [US torture prison] a run for their money. More
"Punishment" does not reform anyone, nor does warehousing. According to the report of the Reentry Policy Council "Charting the Safe and Successful Return of Prisoners to the Community," two million Americans are serving time in our prison-industrial complex; 50% of the inmates are in for violent crimes; about 67% of the inmates released from prison are re-arrested within three years; this recidivism rate has not improved over the past 30 years; prisoners return to society more hardened and more willing to commit crimes than before. What is the David Lynch Foundation (DLF) doing about it? See the 5-minute video above.
Insight on the Inside
And I thought doing ten days at a Goenka retreat was impossible, this BS never ends!
As we do to "enemies," we do to our citizens.
(AC) "The Dhamma Brothers" is a 2007 documentary about a prison meditation program at Donaldson Correctional Facility near Bessemer, Alabama. It follows four inmates, all convicted of murder, and includes interviews with guards, prison officials, local residents, and other inmates with reenactments of their crimes.
Directed by Jenny Phillips, a cultural anthropologist and psychotherapist, Andrew Kukura, a documentary filmmaker, and Anne Marie Stein, a film-school administrator. In 2008 Phillips released Letters from the Dhamma Brothers: Meditation Behind Bars, a book based on follow-up letters with the inmates. "The Dhamma Brothers" has been compared with another documentary, "Doing Time, Doing Vipassana" (1997), which documented a large scale meditation program at Tihar Prisons in India with over a thousand inmates using the same meditation retreat format (Goenka-style).
The Meditation Program
When I'm standing behind bars instead of in front of them, then I'll meditate. (Disgraced L.A. Sheriff Lee Baca indicted on serious felonies faces 20 years of payback in prison).
Director Jenny Phillips was largely responsible for the insight meditation movement program's inception at the prison. Phillips had previously studied prison culture in Massachusetts.
In 1999, she heard that prisoners at Donaldson were practicing meditation and she then organized the first ten-day intensive Goenka retreat there in January 2002. Phillips believes that was the first time a ten-day retreat had been held in a United States maximum-security prison such as Donaldson. Previous US courses had been in county jails.
Democracy Now! investigates the shocking case of Mark DeFriest, known as the "Houdini of Florida prisons" because he has tried to escape 13 times -- seven of them successfully. In 1979, DeFriest’s father died and left him a set of tools. He picked them up before they were probated. The teenager was arrested for stealing and sentenced to four years in prison. [The U.S. does not torture, for we are a land of law and order.] Thirty-four years later he is still there, having spent 27 of those years in solitary. [The U.S. does torture, but we call ourselves a land of law and order.] DeFriest spent much of it in the notorious “X Wing” of Florida State Prison (FSP), where he went for many years without seeing the Sun. DN! is joined by Gabriel London, director of the new film about the case, "The Life and Mind of Mark DeFriest." More
Unindicted white collar meditator
If drugs fail to gain one one's freedom, might there be another way to escape the insanity, to escape to reality? What if it were possible to overcome the distractions -- external and internal -- and successfully meditate? All meditation is an intention in the right direction, but it is not all equally effective or ultimately successful. It matters what we do, what we intend, what we practice. "A pure heart," it is said in the opening verses of the Dhammapada ("Dharma Imprint/Path"), "brings happiness in its trail like our shadow that never departs" even when it seems not to be there. "An defiled heart," on the other hand, "brings suffering like the cart dragging behind the draught ox." Just to focus on the breathing taking place at this moment, not "thinking about" it but simply aware of it so fully that discursive thinking wanes and one is living directly in this moment, even if this moment seems from a distance to be unpleasant, is a great start. What do most of us instead? We look for substances and activities to blot out blissful reality, allow our mind/hearts to spin in the insanity we assume to be real, and yearn for more powerful hallucinogens, narcotics, sleeping pills, and forms of liquid and inhalable ignorance. Wouldn't it be so much better to Escape to Reality?
"The real measure of a society is how it treats its weakest members."
The weakest means its imprisoned citizens, the disenfranchised, impoverished, jobless, its animals. These are in need of more compassion, not less.
There are unconfirmed reports that Pelican Bay torture (Special Handling Unit) victims have begun taking food. Their hunger strike to call attention to deplorable conditions tantamount to CIA-sponsored secret prisons on foreign soil. Pelican Bay is in California and represents a kind of prison built for psychological and physical torture.
SuperMax housing is not more secure housing, as it is intended to be. It is less safe by virtue of the fact that victims of this kind of treatment go insane by being deprived of human contact. Worse is the fact that what gets one sent to such facilities has little to do with the danger they present. Any documented affiliation with a gang -- even standing in a picture with a prisoner who is later determined to be a member -- means permanent lock up in maximum security. The real reason for this? Pressure by California's largest and most powerful union, the Prison Guard's Union ensuring is growth and success. As difficult as this is to believe, three-strikes legislation was also lobbied for and financed by this union. And going deeper, the real reason behind this SuperMax movement is a worldwide fascist movement. The Nazis did not lose WW II as we are taught. They went underground (often invited to America to work and prosper here teaching SS techniques to clandestine services like the CIA, NASA, FBI, NSA, Mi5, Mi6, Moussad, KGB, and so on around the world. Impossible? Our CIA would never do that or teach others to do that?
PrisonerHungerStrikeSolidarity, July 20, 2011 Reaching at least 6,600 prisoners across 13 prisons, this massive and inspiring act of solidarity and people power across prison-manufactured and exacerbated racial and geographic lines has dumbfounded the CDCR (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, nothing about routine torture). While the daily numbers of hunger strikers fluctuates, the CDCR is underestimating how many people inside prison are participating in and supporting this strike.
Richard C. Hoagland put together the pieces -- NAZIs, NASA, and global fascism because the NAZI movement itself lived on stronger than ever after WW II.
[Indian and American] Prison authorities have adopted a holistic approach Pramod Morjaria (BBC reporter in Delhi)
The massive Tihar jail complex just outside the Indian capital Delhi was until a few years ago a place to be feared.
"I found a new kind of mental freedom in jail"
-- Tihar inmate
Comprising six separate prisons sprawling over 400 acres, Tihar -- the biggest prison in Asia -- was notorious for drugs, corruption, and violence.
Overcrowding is still a chronic problem, with 12,000 inmates filling the institution to almost three times its capacity.
But Tihar is now regarded as a model prison, welcoming delegations from far and wide who come to study how prison authorities turned the place around. [The first female officer in South Asia apparently introduced the idea.]
The key to their success, they say, is an holistic approach to reform and rehabilitation.
Golden cage Buddhist meditation and yoga are now widely practiced by inmates, and more than 1,000 prisoners are enrolled in education programs or degree courses.
"For the past 18 months, I've been into meditation, both yoga and Vipassana meditation, and it's helped me a lot," said Ravi Chandran, who is awaiting trial for murder.
Agarwal: rehabilitation must be mental
He said Vipassana ["insight"], which involves ten-day silent meditations, had helped him "eradicate the vicious complexes you have inside." [Free Goenka meditation programs are available worldwide and involve a ten-day intensive Buddhist practice].
"And it helps a lot to eliminate the agony which you have created," he said.
Critics of Tihar call it a "golden cage" full of amenities for prisoners to enjoy for free, instead of a place where they go to be punished for their crimes.
But Ajay Agarwal, the Director General of Tihar, defends his prison's alternative approach.
"In the western world, what happens is that a person is incarcerated physically, but mentally there is no effect on him," he said.
"As a result, when he comes inside, or when he goes outside, there is practically no difference whatsoever."
Mentalfreedom One inmate who has noticed a difference is Leo Sandigasnier, a Norwegian national sentenced to 10 years in 1997 for trying to smuggle two kilos of cannabis from Nepal.
Delegations visit from far and wide.
"Before I came here, my impression of jail was like some black hole in my mind," said Mr. Sandigasnier, who was just 19 when he was sentenced.
"Coming here, I see that there is a lot of positive initiative, a lot of people who want to help us evolve, and somehow, I found a new kind of mental freedom in jail," he said.
New circular cells have been built for prisoners who want to do the 10-day Vipassana meditation course, which authorities say gives them the time and space to come to terms with their actions.
"After three days, [the prisoner's] mind starts bursting, he starts laughing and shouting, but by the fourth day onwards, peace starts descending on the man," Mr. Agarwal said.
"After 10 days, he starts realizing the futility of having committed a crime."
Further education Non-governmental organizations come in from outside to oversee some of the initiatives, but in many cases then hand over the running of the projects to the prisoners themselves.
Tihar helps prisoners help themselves.
About 800 inmates are enrolled on various education programs.
And more than 300 are taking degrees with the help of the Indira Gandhi National Open University and the National Open School.
The typing and secretarial class is popular, and the female section of Tihar jail, which houses 532 women, even has its own beauty parlor.
Ruby, a female prisoner who has trained as a beautician in Tihar, summed up the view of many of the inmates.
"When I entered the prison, I was scared and apprehensive about how jail would be," she said.
"But seeing that there are many opportunities here, it calms one's mind." Source
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Eilona Ariel is a documentary filmmaker whose work was deeply inspired by her life in Asia and her practice of the ancient meditation technique called vipassana or "insight meditation." She moved to New York City in 1978 and spent nine years studying and working as a musician and a photographer. In 1980, she received a diploma from the Germain School of Photography. She left the USA in 1987 to spend several years living in Asia. In 1995 she returned to Israel and established the Karuna Films Production Company together with Ayelet Menahemi.
