Fragrant Heart Blog

Elisabeth's reflections on the benefits of meditation

Expanding Your Awareness - Part 3

Posted: 28 Jun 2008

This week’s exercise in Expanding Your Awareness lends itself to experiencing physical activities that engage your right brain.

Exercise 3: Get Physical

Engage in activities that require repetitive, rhythmic action like swimming, drumming, skiing, whirling like a dervish (the reason dervishes whirl is it pushes them into Right brain awareness).

Quoted from a Martha Beck article written in the “Oprah” magazine May 2008.

I hope you’ve found some time to try these exercises. Each one will enhance your well-being, and also help you to deepen your meditation practice.

Expanding Your Awareness - Part 2

Posted: 21 Jun 2008

Last week in Expanding Your Awareness you could try the Open Focus exercise. Did you feel a change in your awareness that left you feeling right here, right now and a greater feeling of connectedness to yourself and your world?

This week try something altogether different. You will need a pencil, some blank paper and something to copy.

Exercise 2: Draw Upside Down

The process is simple: muddle your verbal mind by copying a picture that you’ve turned upside down. The inversion of the shapes will confuse your left hemisphere. You’ll begin perceiving nameless colours and shapes, verbal thinking will slow down and beauty will emerge from things you’ve never even noticed.

Quoted from a Martha Beck article written in the “Oprah” magazine May 2008.

This can be a lot of fun to do and if you believe you are not artistic you’ll be amazed at how accurate you can draw something when your left brain is not organizing, controlling and judging the outcome. See how relaxed and at ease you can feel just drawing lines that you are not trying to make into something that you already perceive how it should be.

Expanding Your Awareness - Part 1

Posted: 15 Jun 2008

Getting into meditation will help you to relax, become peaceful and calm and energize you both physically and mentally. Meditation helps to access the right hemisphere of the brain and as we do so we experience a change in brain wave patterns. We are able to access what is known as the Alpha state. Here we experience mental alertness, while at the same time being calm and clear in our physical and mental functioning.

Practical and simple ways to expand your awareness

Over the next three weeks read these blogs to learn practical and simple ways to change your awareness and to experience a move to Alpha state. Any one of these exercises can be done as part of your meditation practice, or simply to enjoy other aspects of right brain functioning that lead to greater calmness, expansiveness, creativity and oneness.

Exercise 1: Open Your Focus

The first exercise is called “Open Your Focus.”

Les Fehnis, PhD, a brain scientist and author of “The Open Focus Brain”, found that when our eyes are in ‘sharp focus’ our stress responses increase; when they’re in ‘soft’ or open focus, we relax. An animal relaxing in the sun will maintain soft focus until something threatening or appetizing appears; only then will its eyes become sharp. Softening your eyes releases the sequential processing of the left brain and turns on the holistic perceptions of the right brain.

Try softening your focus now. After reading this paragraph look up at whatever’s in front of you. Then without moving your eyes allow your attention to broaden taking in everything you see. Slowly expand your attention to include everything you can hear, smell, feel and taste. As your focus opens, you’ll stop thinking in words, become more present, and see beauty everywhere. Fehnis research showed that if we do it consistently, this practice affects the brain like meditation. Try it, it works.

Quoted from a Martha Beck article written in the “Oprah” magazine May 2008.

Meditation can slow down some diseases

Posted: 7 Jun 2008

Time Magazine August 4th 2003

Not only do studies show that meditation is boosting peoples’ immune system, but brain scans suggest that it may be rewiring their brains to reduce stress. It’s recommended by more and more physicians as a way to prevent, slow down or at least control the pain of chronic diseases like heart conditions, AIDS, cancer and infertility.

Meditation can boost your immune system

Posted: 3 Jun 2008

Washington Times August 14th 2003

A new study shows that people who underwent meditation training produced more antibodies to a ‘flu vaccine than people who did not meditate. Those who took part in the meditation study showed signs of increased activity in areas of the brain related to positive emotion, as compared to people who did not meditate.