A University of Pennsylvania-led study in which training was provided to a high-stress U.S. military group preparing for deployment to Iraq has demonstrated a positive link between mindfulness training, or MT, and improvements in mood and working memory. Mindfulness is the ability to be aware and attentive of the present moment without emotional reactivity or volatility. The study found that the more time participants spent engaging in daily mindfulness exercises the better their mood and working memory, the cognitive term for complex thought, problem solving and cognitive control of emotions.

What we know as our weekday is a tide of miscellaneous information which we receive with our five senses and put together to an integral picture in the brain. The sense organs are the gates of our body – they connect the outside world with the inner world and determine, dependent on our state of consciousness, how we experience this world. But is there more to human sense activity than touching, seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting? There is, according to many cultures and religions where we find the notion of an inner sense. This sense is thought of as a mode of perception which directly and intuitively gives insight to the essence or true nature of the object perceived.

The ability to entrain brain wave patterns opens up an exciting world of mind-boggling possibilities. Researchers in neuroscience could not contain their excitement. "It’s difficult to try to responsibly convey some sense of excitement about what’s going on," said UCLA neurophysiologist John Kiebeskind. "You find yourself sounding like people you don’t respect. You try to be more conservative and not say such wild and intriguing things, but damn! The field is wild and intriguing. It’s hard to avoid talking that way...We are at a frontier, and it’s a terribly exciting time to be in this line of work"

I have had so many people call or write to ask me exactly how Holosync works, that I have decided to explain just why what we do at Centerpointe Research Institute is different.

Meditation has proven benefits that range from increased well-being to pain relief. For instance: * People who meditated for eight weeks produced more antibodies to a flu vaccine, which indicates it changed immune function in a positive way. * Meditation may help you maintain your ability to remember and focus on details as you age, according to research by Sara Lazar of Harvard Medical School. * Meditation lowers anxiety, depression, anger, and fatigue.

The goal of a creative mindfulness practice—the kind of practice that you really want—is not only the nonjudgmental observation of your thoughts but complete right thinking that leads to authenticity, creativity, and mental health.

We all know that the road of life is bumpy with unexpected drop-offs, accidents, and only the occasional smooth-sailing highway. I believe that meditation -- a practice for increasing awareness -- is truly a seat belt of mental health, a protection for us on the hazardous road of life.

Overall, adding meditation to one's life appears to improve an overall state of well-being (happiness, if you will), reduce anxiety, and foster healthy relationships. A geneticist I know describes Buddhist meditation techniques as a "technology with some 2,000 years of research and development."

Meditation is known to alter resting brain patterns, suggesting long lasting brain changes, but a new study by researchers from Yale, Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows meditation also is associated with increased cortical thickness.

Music and art have the strongest capacity to lead us to a meditating path, to produce that state in which we forget about all of our anxieties, worries, problems at work...