The benefits of love in one’s life may be too numerous to mention.  Here is an interesting study that astonished the scientific community in the 1970’s. This is an excerpt from Deepak Chopra's Quantum Healing:
 
"An Ohio University study of heart disease in the 1970's was conducted by feeding quite toxic, high cholesterol diets to rabbits in order to block their arteries.  Consistent results began to appear in all of the rabbit groups except for one, which strangely displayed 60 percent fewer symptoms.  Nothing in the rabbits' physiology could account for their high tolerance to the diet until it was discovered by accident that the student who was in charge of feeding these particular rabbits liked to fondle and pet them.  He would hold each rabbit lovingly for a few minutes before feeding it; astonishingly, this alone seemed to enable the animals to overcome the toxic diet.  Repeat experiments, in which one group of rabbits was treated neutrally while the others were loved, came up with similar results."
 
Who would have believed that feelings of love can reach out and affect diseases to create healing?   …Even when the intent of the experiment was to bring about illness!
 
Research by HeartMath shows there are some pretty great benefits that accompany the experience of love and appreciation:
• Longer life span
• Lower stress levels
• Decreased incidence of a number of heart-related maladies.
• Lower rates of diabetes.
• Improved mental capacity, including clarity of thought.
• Improved test-taking ability for students and overall academic success
 
Their work, among many others, has proven that when a person is feeling really positive emotions like gratitude, love, or appreciation, the heart beats out a different message, which determines what kind of signals are sent to the brain. This has a powerful influence on our behaviors, choices, and results. According to HeartMath research, “By learning to shift our emotions, we are changing the information coded into the magnetic fields that are radiated by the heart, and that can impact those around us.”
Song titles like All You Need is Love (Beatles), I was Born to Love (Queen) and People Need Love (Abba) all speak of a truth we somehow know is true, but don’t really know how to bring it about in our own lives.
 
According to the practice of Ishayas’ Ascension, there are four basic emotions or Attitudes that lead to Ascension: Apprecia­tion, Gratitude, Love, and Direct Cognition. There are thousands, even millions of specific applica­tions of these four basic Ascension Attitudes. For example, any feeling of love for anyone or anything tends, to some greater or lesser degree, to cause the vibratory rate of the individual to rise, to expand the conscious capacity of the mind, to improve the health of the body, to decrease the bound­aries of life. If you think of any time you have been sincerely in love, you will probably remember how easy it was to overlook the small, surface flaws of your beloved and to focus on his/her perfection and beauty. This is an example of expand­ing awareness, but such occur­rences are typically not consistent or powerful enough to transform life perma­nently.

Ishayas’ Ascension is simple and effective technique, used in a similar way to meditation, which not only utilizes but generates more Appreciation, Gratitude, and Love in the user’s life.  We use the word Ascension because it is not simply meditation, but so much more.  If you are interested in learning more about this practice, visit "Learning to Ascend" for more information and courses available to learn and advance one’s practice. 

​Many military historians believe battles, even wars, have been won or lost in the warrior's mind, long before any physical conflict is initiated. Learning how to circumvent the debilitating psychological influence of stress is key to military success as well as military personnel’s well-being.
To train future soldiers, the U.S. Military is using new technologies and ancient traditions, like yoga and meditation, to retrain their brains, help them be better soldiers, and prevent trauma.
 
Historically, one purpose of meditation has been to reduce stress, however, the Army's long-term goal is to use it to mitigate the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.  The University of North Texas and Bruce J. West, Army Research Office, published a study in June 2018 that studied 2 forms of meditation to determine which has more effect on stress levels. They found that the long-term practice of meditation has the effect of making permanent the meditation-induced physiologic changes. Moreover meditators show a stronger executive control, that is, the ability to carry out goal-oriented behavior, using complex mental processes and cognitive abilities.

Here’s a review of some of the recent meditation studies and uses in all the branches of the US Military:

Army
"Soldiers are experts at standing at attention," according to Jha; however, maintaining this type of mindful attention under the intense physical and emotional demands of deployment is a far more difficult task. 
A University of Miami-led research study, led by principal investigator and neuroscientist Dr. Amishi Jha, and funded by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, has shown that meditation positively support active-duty Soldiers in protecting and training their own minds and helping better prepare Soldiers for high-stress combat situations while also improving overall cognitive resilience and performance. 
"I would like to emphasize that these practices are powerful, but that they only work if they are exercised daily," said Jha.

Marines
In 2014, a research team recruited 8 Marine Infantry platoons at Camp Pendleton.  4 platoons underwent standard military training, while the other 4 had a 20 hour meditation course added, along with a requirement for 30 minutes daily meditation.  After their training was completed, they went through a mock ambush attack.  The meditating group of Marines breathing and heart rates returned to normal faster than the others. Other results indicated that the meditators moved from the fight-or-flight status faster than the other marines.

Navy
Elite navy SEAL training that includedmeditation showed more activation of the insula, related to awareness, pain and emotion; and increased gray matter volume and better synapses in pre-frontal cortex. Soldiers showed better biofeedback tests of muscular and neurological reactions to stress after 10 days of meditation/yoga and the practices helped relieve stress as well as increase awareness. They were able learn a foreign language better, learn complex technical weapons systems better and were better marksmen. 

Are you looking for ways to deal with stress or ways to be more effective in your life?  As you can see from above, learning a meditation practice and using it regularly can make a change in your life.  Find a meditation that you will do daily. 
We like to recommend The Art of Ascension as it is so simple and so effective.  You can meditate without any special postures, it requires no special equipment, and can be done anywhere.

Everyone knows that yawns are “catching”.  Did you know it is possible to ‘catch’ emotions from others – even when we’re not consciously paying attention?  Even if you're not aware of it, it's likely that your emotions will influence someone around you today.

From as early as the 18thcentury, research ascertained that people mirrored smiles or frowns they saw on someone else's face. But, modern research tools have taken it to another level. From 1984-2003, Dr. Christakis plotted the social connections of 5000 people to study the spread of emotions.  When he plotted the happiness or unhappiness of residents of one town over time, he found an interesting pattern.  "We were able to show that as one person became happy or sad, it rippled through the network," Christakis says.For instance, Christakis' research indicated that if you start to become happier with your life, a friend living close by has a 25 percent higher chance of becoming happy themselves; a spouse experiences an 8 percent increased chance and for next-door neighbors, it's 34 percent chance of being happier. And yes, the happiness or sadness even spread to people to those not directly connected.

Let’s not forget, we live in a digital age.  So those connected through online social networks show similar patterns of emotional contagion. The first to prove emotional transfer via text was a 2008 study named, “I’m sad, you’re sad”. It also determined that certain traits of the text communicate the emotion indirectly: sad participants used fewer words, agreed less with their partner, used less punctuation, and responded less quickly than happy participants.

A 2013 Facebook study, 689,000 people were subjected to emotional content in their feed.  The feed was manipulated over a week with happy, sad, or neutral feed.  The study showed that the recipients’ responses and further posts were likely to be similar in emotion to their feeds. The study showed that the emotional contagion could impact the recipients for several days.   The implication, though not proven with this particular study, is that it effects the recipients’ offline behavior as well as their health. 

Emotional contagion even impacts the work environment. Dr. Barsade study showed that a negative group member disrupted workers and reduced their efficacy, while having a positive team member increased cooperation with fewer group conflicts, and lead to heightened task performance.

Now you may be wondering what all this has to do with meditation.  Here’s a few studies that along with your active choice to become more conscious could make you a positive catalyst in your world:

1. This study and others show that those who meditate have higher EQs; they also show improvements in characteristics of emotional intelligence — namely, general mood, stress management, adaptability, intrapersonal awareness, and reality testing.  Importantly, the measure of these improvements appeared to be dependent on how much the participants meditated. That is, those who meditated on a regular basis reported higher EQ and lower perceived stress than peers who meditated less often.
2. Another interesting study from 1993 proved that meditators can impact an environment. A meditation course was planned in Washington DC to be held for 30 days.  The class size began the first week with 800 participants and grew until the final week, 4000 meditators were on location.  Before the class, they went to the Chief of Police and told him the by-product of this course would reduce crime in the city by over 20%.  The Chief of Police said that would only happen if there were 20 inches of snow.   

According to the FBI, before the course began, violent crime was on a steady increase.  However, within a week of the course beginning, crime began to fall.  By the last week of the course, violent crime fell by 23.3%. After the course ended, crime began to rise again.  There are 53 studies showing that groups of trained meditators can prevent crime, violence and war. The size of the group only needs to be the square root of 1% of the population in order to impact an area.
 
It is physically impossible for any one person to do a hundred tasks at once.  However, you have the respon­sibility to change just one person in the entire Universe! The good news and the terrible news is exactly the same -- it is up to you.  You don’t even have to know exactly how your part fits into the whole. It isn’t necessary! By making an active choice to become conscious and participating in a committed practice of meditation, all you have to do is live your own part and your world will trans­form around you.

Whether you extend your lifespan or not, meditation can extend the length of time that you are healthy and active.

Meditation is associated with many psychological and physical benefits.

1. Memory. "Meditation is associated with enhanced short- and long-term memory," says neuropsychologist Jean Lengenfelder, assistant director of traumatic brain injury research at the Kessler Foundation.
2. Cognitive decline.  A 2014 review of a dozen studies involving older adults, published in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, suggested that meditation was linked to positive effects on attention, memory, executive function, processing speed and general cognition.
3. Digestion and circulation.When in stress mode, our body no longer focuses on everyday functioning, like digestion - everything becomes secondary to our body's "fight or flight" survival response.  Of key importance to the digestive system, especially the stomach and intestines, blood oxygen levels and circulation are multiplied during meditation.  
4. Stress. Meditation has been shown to decrease stress and have a calming effect on older adults," Lengenfelder notes. "That can help them organize their thinking and give them a clearer perspective. They have improved focus, and their mind is sharp."
5. Inflammation:  Meditation has been shown to improve inflammation as well
6. Blood Pressure:  Meditation has been shown to lower blood pressure
7. Chronic Pain:  Mediation has been shown to improve pain better than morphine.
8. Anxiety:  Experts say that those with anxiety have difficulty in coping with stress and are shown to have physiological effects including raising heart rate and blood pressure and increasing one's risk for heart attack and stroke. Meditation reduces anxiety and rumination that leads to anxious thoughts and feelings.
9. Loneliness: It has been shown that lonely older adults have increased expression of pro-inflammatory genes and both were reduced by meditation.
10. Aging related decline: Lazar in 2008 showed that cortical thinning (which plays a part in the executive functions of organization, self-monitoring and impulse control) due to aging was strengthened; increased gray matter in insula, hippocampus (which is responsible for memory and detecting threats) was found by Holzel in 2008
11. Immune System:  Davidson in 2003, and Tang in 2007 found proof of improved immune system. An extensive insurance study also showed that meditators’ doctor visits, hospital visits, and medical costs where much lower than non-meditators when matched for race, gender, and other similar traits in the control group.

Dr. Stephanie Cheng sees older patients regularly.  She has noticed that some of her patients who meditate are able to reduce medications (such as antihypertensives and antidepressants).  She also notes that she has seen their blood pressure, stress and depression decrease and on the upside, experience greater well-being, increased peace and quality of life. "One thing I see commonly is people noticing the blessings and abundance in their lives. It increases gratitude for what they have," she says.

"It can be transformative," Dr. Moria Smoski, a psychiatrist agrees. "I've seen meditation help people feel more grounded as they're going through difficult situations. It improves their sense of resiliency."

No one is too old to begin The Art of Ascension.  It’s simple and charming to the mind.  No postures are required, so no need to worry about forming into a pretzel to learn this practice.  

Google, Yahoo, Nike, Pearson, Prentice Hall Publishing, AOL Time Warner, Deutsche Bank, Proctor and Gamble as well as HBO offer official meditation spaces in their corporate offices.  At General Mills, there's a dedicated Meditation Room in every building of their vast campuses, and they offer all staff members weekly meditation sessions and yoga classes.  In San Francisco, Salesforce offers employees a Meditation Room on every floor with the CEO saying it was “really important to cultivating innovation.”  
Steve Jobs most likely put the meditation-room-at-work trend on the map. At Apple, Jobs introduced 30-minute daily meditation breaks at the company, then had Meditation Rooms built throughout their offices worldwide in the company’s infancy.  Jobs, who began meditating at 19, said about meditation - “Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It’s a discipline; you have to practice it.”
 
While Meditation Rooms are available for employees who practice meditation, employees who don't pray or meditate can use the quiet room to get away from the stress of the office environment, recharge and refocus. Therefore, companies may call this type of space a Meditation Room or use the term "quiet room."
By providing a space for these practices, companies send a message that the well-being of its workers is important, enhancing its image as a good company to work for. This pays off for the company in the retention and recruitment of talent.
Innovative approaches for Meditation Rooms include:

• New Orleans city hall created Meditation Rooms designed for the youth of that city, in particular youth at risk.
• Increasingly, airports are offering Meditation Rooms, including San Francisco, Raleigh-Durham, Chicago O’Hare, San Diego, and Zurich.
• More and more High Schools and Colleges are offering Meditation Rooms for students.
• Inhere Studio designers created an attractive oval meditation pod that can drop into almost any environment to help workers relax and unwind.  It is made of wood slats with a fringe curtain opening so that you feel some privacy without feeling enclosed. The pod is 8 feet by 6.5 feet and includes a meditation chair.

 
Cleveland Clinic study showed that meditation at work reduces stress and boosts morale even showing a 28% increase in vitality (the measure of how energized a person is during the day).  Michael Roizen, M.D., the Chief Wellness Officer at Cleveland Clinic, said “Unmanaged stress is the largest cause of chronic disease in the world,” Roizen said. “Stress is associated with heart disease, stroke, cancer and dementia. These data show that while you cannot always eliminate the events that cause you to feel stress, you can always manage your response.”
A study conducted at the University of Washington found “that those who had meditation training were able to stay on task longer and were less distracted. Levy and his co-authors discovered that meditation also improved test subjects' memory while easing their stress.”
 
Nico Pronk, Ph.D., F.A.C.S.M., F.A.W.H.P., president of HealthPartners Institute and chief science officer for HealthPartners. "Precision, accuracy, speed, and quality of work all suffer when people are stressed."
 
Meditation Rooms benefit companies just as much as it benefits employees.  It can lower a company's health-care costs by reducing chronic stress, a major risk factor for illness, said Maryanna Klatt, lead author of a 2009 study at Ohio State University.
 "More productive employees create a more pleasant company culture and an increased bottom line," explains Steve Orma, Psy.D, a clinical psychologist and specialist in insomnia and anxiety. "This kind of culture attracts the most talented applicants, because they want to work in that kind of environment," he says. "Just look at all the perks companies like Google offer their employees and how that attracts the smartest people in the world."

A study from the University of Virginia discovered that a majority of healthy people would rather administer electric shocks to themselves rather than be left alone with their own thoughts!  The percentage was much higher in men than women. This response went against all data and expectations from the researchers.
When you don’t have a task to focus on, brain areas activaterelated to processing emotions, recalling memory, monitoring the environment, thinking about the intentions of others, thinking about the future, and so on--all things that we often do when we find ourselves just "thinking" without any explicit goal in mind.  Marcus Raichle  University of Washing neurologist discovered that “the brain is actually just as busy when we relax as when we focus on difficult tasks.”  He discovered it involves a particular network in the brain and named it the default mode network.  
 
According to research by Matt Killingsworth, human beings spend almost half their wakeful hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing! His Harvard study confirmed that there's a clear connection between mind wandering and unhappiness.By studying thousands of people he found mind-wandering precedes unhappiness but unhappiness does not precede mind-wandering. In other words, mind-wandering is likely to be a cause, and not merely a consequence, of unhappiness.
 
Those experiencing depression have shown increased activity in the default mode network and a direct correlation to the severity of their negative thinking impacting the severity of depression as well as in increased risk of suicide.  
Default-mode content involves an image of self, one that’s easy to become attached to. “We constantly think that it’s not just another thought, that [the image of self] is something real, not just a mental image.” Says Scott Barry Kaufman a psychologist at Barnard College, Columbia University who writes for Psychology Today and Harvard Review.
When the DMN (default mode network) “predominates, especially out of unawareness, it can very much limit our understanding of ourselves and of what might be possible,” Jon Kabat-Zinn argues.
“Prospection can lead to suffering if it hinders executive attention, the ability to have awe, attention to the present moment,” Kaufman says, emphasizing that, as with so many others ways that our minds get into trouble, the problem is rigidity; research indicates that a disturbed DMN is a mechanism in depression. “Our greatest source of suffering isn’t the default mode,” Kaufman says, “but when we get stuck in the default mode.”
Many studies indicate that meditation reduces activity in the DMN. Judson Brewer, psychiatrist and director of research at the UMass Medical School Center for Mindfulness founded by Kabat-Zinn, has found that extended meditation practice reforms the DMN, so that the default mode itself shifts: The resting state of the brain becomes more like the meditative state, producing “a more present-centered default mode.” 
​
Life in the present moment means we are no longer chained to past experiences or future worries; life can be lived continually in the present moment.
If you are looking for an effortless practice that can change your default mode, or just want to live more of your life in the present moment, the Ishaya Foundation offers beginner to advanced courses in a practice called The Art of Ascension. Ascension simply means to rise beyond our limited thinking.  It requires no belief to work.  You can sign up for a free webinar to learn more about how the Art of Ascension and how to learn this practice.

​Self-compassion and self-love are largely used interchangeably in specialized literature. Researchshows that having more self-compassion builds resilience when times get rough helping people to recover more quickly from traumas or romantic separation. Self-compassion is great for coping with failure or embarrassment.
The subject of narcissism has received much attention in part due to psychological literature and recent studies showing that the path to self-esteem from the last several decades actually has led to narcissism and has not created resilience.  Self-esteem relies more on positive self-evaluations and often is based on comparing oneself with others in order to increase one’s perceived self-worth. Self-esteem requires that I feel better than others or even better than most.  Self-esteem is contingent on success.  
By comparison, self-compassion works in quite the opposite way. It is not strictly based on self-evaluations and comparing oneself with others, but is rather based on the realization that we are all connected and part of mankind, as well as on the awareness that failure and setbacks are part of normal life.
A common myth says that in order to be motivated you must be self-critical. However, a more encouraging stance actually helps us to learn from failure.
"Self-kindness entails being warm and understanding toward ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, rather than flagellating ourselves with self-criticism," write Profs. Neff and Germer who have studied and written extensively on compassion.  As Neff said in an interview with The Atlantic in 2016: "When we fail, it's not 'poor me,' it's 'well, everyone fails.' Everyone struggles. This is what it means to be human."  
There's some work on physical health, showing that self-compassion is linked to better immune function. Studies show that it stabilizes glucose levels and improves depression in diabetes patients, another study says it's associated with longer telomeres, which has shown to add to longevity.  (also from the Atlantic article) Self-compassion helps you be motivated, it helps you take responsibility. It's not self-indulgent, it's not selfish, and it leads to better relationships. I find it's quite remarkable how much research there is supporting these ideas.
According to the researchers, practicing self-compassion techniques for 40 minutes every day for 8 weeks raised the participants' levels of self-compassion by 43 percent.
Let’s talk a little bit about what elements are active in True Compassion.
3 German Scientists published their work in 2015 studying 16,000 volunteers globe-wide showing that those with higher levels of self-compassion had higher levels of well-being. Their definition of self-compassion had 3 components 

1. An understanding behavior toward oneself in the face of suffering.
2. The balanced awareness of negative thoughts and feelings rather than their over identification.
3. The perception and classification of one’s experiences as part of mankind rather than an interpretation that is separate from others.”

 
Another study just published in May 2018 from the University of Wisconsin states that compassion is connecting with the suffering (of others and oneself) and a genuine wish for freedom of suffering.  The connection requires the courage to see the suffering rather than avoidance or denial. "Compassion meditation may shift habits of becoming overly distressed when we encounter another's pain," says Helen Weng, assistant professor of psychiatry at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Richard Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds and senior author of the study said, "The pattern of these findings -- an increase in looking at suffering while simultaneously down-regulating neural circuits associated with negative emotion -- is a winning combination.”
This is put in perspective by another statement from Davidson.  He says that training your brain to pay attention to compassion would be a giant step toward a better, more enjoyable life.  When you aren’t doing anything in particular, but are just at rest, your brains’ so-called default mode kicks in. This baseline mental state often leads to negative rumination that tends to be, as Davidson puts it, “all about my, me, and mine”.  
In the practice of the Art of Ascension, the Compassion technique is taught in the beginner’s workshop. A great aspect of this tool is that it can be used all day long when you are going about your active life. So, Compassion can be cultivated whenever and wherever you are.

Probably in less time than you surf the web, you could increases your cognitive judgment, your emotional resilience, and reduce your stress through meditation.

Jha, director of the University of Miami’s Contemplative Neuroscience said “We found that getting as little as 12 minutes of meditation practice a day helped the Marines to keep their attention and working memory — that is, the added ability to pay attention over time — stable.”  Our attention is fragile. Jha likens our attention to “a flashlight you can direct to whatever you choose.” “If they practiced less than 12 minutes or not at all, they degraded in their functioning.”
 
One 15-minute meditation may help people make better choices, according to new research from researchers at INSEAD and The Wharton School. The findings are published in the February issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

"Most people have trouble admitting they were wrong when their initial decisions lead to undesirable outcomes," says researcher Andrew Hafenbrack, lead author on the new research and doctoral candidate at INSEAD. "They don't want to feel wasteful or that their initial investment was a loss. Ironically, this kind of thinking often causes people to waste or lose more resources in an attempt to regain their initial investment or try to 'break even.'"   Co-author Zoe Kinias said, "First, meditation reduced how much people focused on the past and future, and this psychological shift led to less negative emotion. The reduced negative emotion then facilitated their ability to let go of sunk costs."
 
Then, in the emotional well-being area, one recent study found that a brief mediation practiced for 25 minutes for three consecutive days diminished meditators’ stress level. Published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology, this provides an initial indication that brief meditation training reduces stress reactivity, but also increases cortisol reactivity to social evaluative stress. This seems to indicate that brief meditation training fosters greater active coping efforts, resulting in reduced psychological stress appraisals and greater cortisol reactivity during social evaluative stressors. 
​
Some people think they may not have enough time available in their life to meditate. Of course the studies show many more benefits for daily regular meditation over months but the above studies show that even a beginner, with as little as 12 -15 minutes can gain benefits with meditation.
The Ishaya Foundation offers a weekend course that can teach you the basics of The Art of Ascension.  

Have you heard that the mind is actually more effective at dealing with pain than medication? Studies show that meditation can be more powerful than morphine.  Morphine has been shown to, on average, reduce chronic pain by about 25%. A beginning meditator has received on average 40% reduction in pain and an experienced meditator experiences up to 93% reduction in pain.

Cancer patients at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute can take free meditation classes due to a philanthropic grant. “I see meditation almost as a requirement in any therapeutic regimen for cancer treatment,” said Patricia Arcari, co-director of Dana-Farber’s Leonard P. Zakim Center for Integrative Therapies. “The meditation helps with pain management, nausea, and other side effects of the treatments, but it also helps them express more self-compassion and appreciation of life.”

To see why meditation is more powerful than drugs, it helps to understand more about pain vs suffering and what’s really transpiring:

• Pain or what may be referred to as Primary pain results from illness, injury or damage to the body or nervous system. This is raw data from the body informing you of the injury.
• Secondary pain or what we might call suffering is the mind’s reaction to Primary pain but is often far more intense and long lasting. Crucially, it is controlled by an ‘amplifier’ in the brain that governs the overall intensity of suffering.

Yogis have known about this tendency of the mind to suffer for thousands of years and how to treat it. Science is just now getting around to studying the actual events in the brain.

Studies show the human mind does not simply feel pain; it also processes the information that it contains. Its first responsibility is to find the underlying causes so that you can avoid further pain or damage to the body. But In effect, the mind zooms in on your pain for a closer look as it tries to find a solution to your suffering. Since our mind likes to create habits, it begins doing so repeatedly. This “zooming-in” amplifies your experience of pain.

Also, as we avert our experience of suffering (or try to push it away), we tense our muscles and create even more tension with increased pain and suffering.

So, what have the yogis said for thousands of years and what makes meditation more powerful than morphine?  It’s simply the act of bringing your awareness to what you’re actually experiencing in the present moment without judgment that reduces suffering. That ability or skill is developed by a daily practice of an ancient time-honored practice like The Art of Ascension.  Using this tool daily has many wonderful by-products, one being an ability to experience “what is” without judgement. 
One of the fallacies about our experience of pain is, at first glance it seems so solid.  But the deeper we go into awareness, we realize nothing is solid. From our daily practice, we learn through experience that everything in life comes and goes. 

So, for an experienced meditator, when or if they experience pain, suffering becomes optional.

Neuroscience “will play a huge role in the future of business education,” says Michael Platt, a Wharton professor.  

Business education of the future will not be limited to accounting, strategy and finance.  The future includes heart-rate monitors, meditation and new courses that help students improve productivity, influence decision-making and handle stress. 

MIT’s Sloan School of Management has offered “Neuroscience for Leadership Course” since 2014. “Demand is growing because business leaders who are ahead of the curve know that emotion can impact their performance,” says Yoshie Tomozumi Nakamura, Columbia’s director of organizational learning and research.

Thomas Bonfiglio, a regional director with American Medical Response in New York found good results after taking the MIT course by introducing meditation into the workplace. “We have a lot of aggressive, alpha-type personalities,” he says. “It was often difficult to get the group to work together.” But after introducing meditation, they worked more quickly and effectively, Mr. Bonfiglio says.

When NYU introduced Mindfulness in Business program, hundreds of MBA students participated and at least 15 faculty and staff members attended various programs.   Following the program, students told them they were made more self-aware, more focused, and better able to recognize and understand their own thoughts and emotions. Many felt that it made them better leaders, and expressed the need for continuing the programming. 

A graduate school in Japan, called Shizenkan, is re-orienting their approach to teach innovation-oriented management. Courses will be taught in both Japanese and English, and will include meditation and other spiritual practices.  Anil Sachdev, the founder Delhi's School of Inspired Leadership in India, or SOIL, said "to [foster] inspired leaders with character, competence, enthusiasm and social responsibility, we need to transform higher education." They are following the direction of the Japanese school to incorporate more experience-based learning to include meditation and ethics to address the trend they view in America that lacks corporate responsibility and has issues with fraud.  

Jeremy Hunter, from Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University outside Los Angeles, believes meditation should be at the center of business schools' teaching. He argues that improving the workplace and productivity is about improving the quality of attention. "To me, it's fundamental to how work gets done these days," he said. "Basically, that's what work is, attention."

Committing to a daily practice of meditation is a simple method that will improve attention, allow one to be more self-aware, handle stress with less turmoil, as well as improve productivity.  

Daily practice is key.  The most important thing is to find a practice that you will do every day.  Many of the teachers of Ascension tried many techniques before trying the Art of Ascension.  One reason we like it, is because it is easy to use and can be used anywhere.  After all the other things I tried, I knew that this is one I could and would use daily.

​Jyoti