Why Meditation?

It may make you happier.

The practice helps you to cultivate more positive states of mind; if you’re happy you will do better in every area of your life. Emotions are contagious, and when you’re happy you spread that feeling to everyone around you.

There’s evidence that it strengthens the brain.

A study done at UCLA suggest that meditation actually strengthens the brain in a good way. Studies like this are pointing to the fact that meditation is literally a workout for the brain. How about right before you do your sit-ups, you incorporate some meditation to strengthen the brain?

It may help you focus at work.

Our hectic, technology-filled lifestyle is talking all of our attention; we’re constantly checking emails, Facebook updates, and our Twitter accounts. A new study suggested that meditation may make you more focused at work.

It could make you a more compassionate person.

Meditation helps you to calm down by centering your focus on your breathing and the sensations in your body. It also helps you recognize positive emotions within your own body, and to use those emotions to act more compassionate toward others. A new study from Northeastern University and Harvard University researchers showed that people who meditated acted more compassionate afterward than those who did not meditate.

 It may help you lose weight.

Mindfulness is a way to pay attention to the all the sensations you’re experiencing. When you do meditation while you’re eating, you become more conscious of what you’re putting in your mouth.

It may relieve stress.

A study in the journal Health Psychology showed that mindfulness decreased levels of the stress hormone cortisol. This is something everyone in American could use, considering stress has literally become an epidemic here.

 It could help you do better in school.

A new study done in the journal Mindfulness showed that meditation improved the test scores of students in a psychology class. Some of the students meditated before the lecture, and another group did not. After the lecture, the ones who meditated did better. Want your kids to do better in class — why not show them how to meditate?

It’s been shown to help people stay focused in high-stress environments.

When we get stressed, it attacks are focus, we can’t concentrate. If we can’t concentrate, we can’t get things done. This happens to everyone who experiences stress — why not give meditation a try?

It positively changes the brain, even when you’re not meditating.

A new study has indicated that by participating in an eight-week meditation program, you can potentially change how the brain works even when you’re not meditating. The brain is just like a muscle you work out at the gym: If you do meditation every day, it’s going to positively influence your life.

It may help protect against colds.

A study done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison showed that people who practiced mindfulness meditation or engage in physical exercise suffered less from colds than those who did not.

It may improve sleep quality.

A One meditation study is showing that it may improve our quality of sleep. Why not try some before you go to bed?

There is over 3,000 scientific studies on the positive effects of meditation.

PureYi Curriculum

Robert calls this system “PureYi” meditation systems. (In Chinese, “Yi” means mind intent.) Pure Yi has no religious attachments and can be practiced by anyone.

His curriculum consists of mindfulness, sitting meditation, standing meditation, reclining meditation, walking meditation, Taiji, and QiGong.

This system is similar to a training curriculum that an Olympic athlete would use. However, instead of conditioning the physical body, these monks conditioned their mind through rigorous meditation.  

Mindfulness

The first level focuses on breathing to calm the mind. Robert offers various strategies to incorporate mindfulness into your life in a very easy and accessible way.

 

Mind and Meridian Level

This level focuses on bringing attention to the stomach which opens up the meridian channels in the body; this leads to increase states of happiness.

Taoist monks recognized that babies breathe from the stomach,  from this observation they formulated a meditation system that was originally called, “Pre-natal meditation.”

 

Outside Energy Level

Part of the Taoist culture was to keep most of the energetic components of this system a secret, because of this it has almost become extinct.

At this level, you can use this energy for healing arts (acupuncture, acupressure, tui na massage, etc.), martial arts, or happiness.

The energetic component of this system can be incorporated into all types of yoga, martial art’s, etc.

Energy Demonstrations

I do these demonstrations below, only for the fact that I was completely fascinated with this idea of energy when studying this meditation system. It’s something that fascinates me everyday. Energy has been a apart of Asian cultures for thousands of years. 

These demonstrations are the scientific method of working with outside energy that were originally a requirement to graduate from a Taoist temple or monastery. (Taoist temples were also political centers; they did not have a military or police force;  they used martial arts for self preservation.)

There’s a very small number of people left in the world that can truly do these energy demonstrations. It has basically become extinct, most of the Masters died in the 90′s that could demonstrate this. This is all real; these demonstrations are the result of somewhere around 10,000 hours of highly sophisticated meditation work.

All of these demonstrations are talked about in the Tao Te Ching.

 

 

 

Prior, to the Cultural Revolution in China, Taoist Monks and Internal Martial artist would do these demonstrations in the parks and villages. In some cases Taoist monks, and internal martial artist who demonstrated this spent up to seventeen years in a labor camp. During the cultural revolution, Chairman Mao put anyone in jail that demonstrated this.

 

 

Energy Explanation form a Western Science View Point

There’s been a lot of recent discussion in western medicine about formulating a scientific model to explain acupuncture; some people have said there is no such thing as energy (Qi).  I can understand that some people feel threatened, when ideas and concepts don’t fit their current paradigm so they criticize and condemn it.

However, my own hypothesis is that they don’t have a scientific model or a technology that can properly look at it. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are great technologies but they’re not powerful enough to see energy.

I think with the recent work on quantum mechanics and the work being done in Switzerland with the “Higgs boson particle.” This work may offer a better scientific model to give rise to technologies that would be able to examine the functions of the mind and body.

I’m one hundred percent confident in stating the fact that someone will win a Noble Prize when they measure energy (Qi). Similar to the discovery of the nervous system, someone with the right measuring device will discover that there is an energetic system inside the human body.