Jon Kabat-Zinn, a pioneer of scientific research on meditation and founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, defines meditation as “living your life as if it really mattered”.

Check our video section and watch what he says about what meditation really is and the benefits of meditation.

Here is Sogyal Rinpoche’s entire WhatMeditationReallyIs talk from the AWAKE event on the 4^th of May 2011 in Amsterdam.

Sharon Salzberg from the 'Wisdom of Awareness' Retreat with Sogyal Rinpoche and Tsoknyi Rinpoche, June 2011 (Garrison Institute, New York), she talks about the importance of a loving attitude in our modern society.

I recently came across a very interesting TEDx talk by a colleague and collaborator of mine: Willoughby Britton, who is an assistant professor and clinical psychologist at Brown University. Here is the link.

It’s intriguing to think that while business seeks to make profits by providing goods and services in a competitive environment, some eastern spiritual traditions would consider the advice to “Give all profit and gain to others, Take all loss and defeat upon yourself,” to be extremely profound and supremely important. These two approaches to life have both been part of societies for millennia, but there’s still plenty to discuss before a common understanding can be clearly defined in our current era.

The last few days I have been at Lerab Ling for a retreat. Unlike the person who wrote about the What Meditation Really Is retreat at Lerab Ling, this is not my first time here. In fact, coming here has almost become a yearly ritual. As a result, arriving here felt like coming home.

Action for Happiness http://www.actionforhappiness.org is a new mass movement to create a happier society, based in the UK that already attracts 15,000 supporters in 115 countries.

Earlier this year, Action for Happiness partnered with BBC Breakfast in the UK to encourage members of the public to try out these simple actions to improve their happiness, based on the latest scientific research.

Show me a bathroom without a hook on the door, and I’ll show you a bathroom designed by a man.

Here’s an exercise for you Ngöndro students - visualize holding a purse, a laptop case and a scarf in your arms while hovering 2 inches above a toilet seat for a couple minutes. Done? Now visualize reaching for the toilet paper.

At the morning teaching session I fantasized about fedexing Lerab Ling a bunch of stick-on hooks that I would get at Walmart for a dollar. Meanwhile, Rinpoche was telling us that the source of all fear was a mind untamed. As I tried to figure out whether my bathroom beef stemmed from my untamed mind, or did I just need to buy hooks, a man raised his hand. He wanted to learn how to handle the anger of his spouse. Rinpoche dug deeper into the matter, at which point the man told a shocking and very disturbing story.

According to an article by Thomas Roth, PhD in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine titled, Insomnia: Definition, Prevalence, Etiology, and Consequences, up to 30% of the adult population in the United States suffer from some form of insomnia or sleep disturbance. That's 90-million people just in our country who don't sleep well!

A common question that seems to come up in conversation a lot these days is whether meditation can cure insomnia. As an avid practitioner of meditation – and insomnia! – I can attest to the fact that meditation and mindfulness practices can help to alleviate insomnia. I'm not sure about cure, since underlying factors are usually to blame for sleeplessness.

A large part of science operates as if cognition and emotion are completely different things and have nothing to do with each other. A recent paper by Sahdra and colleagues is different. She studied not only how the meditators in her sample improved on a cognitive task, but also how that was related to socioemotional functioning. And it turns out to be quite related!