​Are you one of those people that are too busy to meditate?  

Studies suggest that people with jam-packed schedules and intimidating to-do lists stand to benefit most from meditation, which can help reduce stress, improve focus, and even increase one's ability to relate to others.

Like a car that never gets maintenance, the mind can also need some downtime to continue running on all cylinders.  You never know when you’ll need to solve a tough problem, focus intently on a task, or search for creative inspiration for a project.

Still, the idea of sitting in a quiet room seemingly “doing nothing” for a few minutes each day can sound absurd unless you understand what might really be happening on the physical and psychological level.

So here’s a peek at what is happening “under the covers” when you meditate:
1. Meditation helps us gain perspective.
Being able to observe your thoughts as a spectator helps you to realize that thoughts and experiences are temporary, which is known as decentering.
In one study of people with severe depression, gains in decentering ability were linked with a reduced rate of relapse and better outcomes in terms of life satisfaction and overall feelings of well-being.

2. Meditation can also reduce stress by helping us deal with negative feelings we might otherwise ignore.
It is common in our western culture to push aside those feelings that we judge, completely ignoring them.
A large review of studies involving close to 3,000 people found that mindfulness meditation was linked with a reduction in feelings of depression, anxiety, and even physical pain.
 
3. Meditation may also help improve our memory, 
Researchers at University of California at Santa Barbara studied undergraduate students. 2 groups of students took a GRE exam twice. One group of 48 students met 4 times per week to meditate for 2 weeks prior to the second GRE exam. Another group of students focused on nutrition during that time.  After retaking the course, the average score of the meditating class improved from 460 to 520.  There was no change in the group that focused on nutrition.

4. And it may strengthen our ability to relate to others.
A group of researchers at Stanford University showed that meditation can increase positive social interaction

5. People with a steady meditation practice also see decreases in blood pressure.
A study of 200 people over 5 years, half following a healthy life-style, the other half meditating regularly, found the meditators not only reduced their blood pressure, but reduced their chance of heart attack by half over the healthy life-style folks!

6. Meditators experience less fatigue.
For a small study in 2016, researchers had over a dozen participants aged 24 to 76 spend a week at a spiritual retreat. The researchers scanned the brains of their participants before and after to observe the behavior of two chemicals linked with mood — dopamine and serotonin. Following the retreat, the participants' saw marked improvements in their perceived physical health, while negative feelings like stress and fatigue decreased. 

7. Meditators may get sick less frequently than those who don't meditate regularly.
For a recent study, researchers split people into two groups and had one complete an eight-week meditation course. After 8 weeks, the researchers injected both groups with the flu vaccine and checked their immune response by measuring flu-fighting antibodies their bodies produced. The meditators showed significantly more antibodies than those who did not meditate, suggesting meditation produces demonstrable effects on brain and immune function.
An insurance study of 2000 people showed that meditators had fewer hospital visits, fewer heart attacks, and spent substantially less on medical bills than meditators. 

8. There’s also some evidence that suggests that regular meditation can help prevent or repair genetic damage.
One study in distressed cancer survivors who completed a meditation program showed that the meditator's telomeres — special protein complexes that help protect our DNA — had grown longer. Whereas, the non-meditators grew shorter. It is currently believed that the length of telomeres relate to aging.  

These all seem like worth wile benefits for anyone, anywhere, anytime! We'd love to hear from any of our readers who used to think they were too busy to meditate...until they began!

From an article called “Thoughts program your cells”, Jordan Lejuwaan, reminds us of some basic biology: “There are thousands upon thousands of receptors on each cell in our body. Each receptor is specific to one peptide, or protein. When we have feelings of anger, sadness, guilt, excitement, happiness or nervousness, each separate emotion releases its own flurry of neuropeptides. Those peptides surge through the body and connect with those receptors which change the structure of each cell as a whole. Where this gets interesting is when the cells actually divide. If a cell has been exposed to a certain peptide more than others, the new cell that is produced through its division will have more of the receptor that matches with that specific peptide. Likewise, the cell will also have less receptors for peptides that its mother/sister cell was not exposed to as often.”

In other words, if you are experiencing emotions based in fear, you are literally pre-programming yourself to experience more fear based emotions and less love based emotions!  

Every thought you think is changing your cells, but what else can thoughts do?

• One study asked questions of subjects. They told one group they would be given the answers subconsciously.  This group out-performed other groups, even though no answers were provided to them.  
• Another study of hotel attendants informed a group of attendants that their work gave them the recommended level of exercise for a healthy lifestyle.  In 4 weeks, just having this knowledge, this group lost weight, reduced their blood pressure, lost inches and even reduced their fat ratio. Another group of attendants, who were not given this information but cleaned the same number of rooms, did not lose weight or see the results of the “informed” group.
• Doctors increased subjects’ growth hormone levels by injecting medication.  Later, telling them they were being given the same medication, their growth hormone levels also rose.  But they were only given saline in the second injection.

Such expectancies and learned associations have been shown to change the chemistry and circuitry of the brain. These changes may result in such physiological and cognitive outcomes as already mentioned.  
Doesn’t this make you wonder about the untapped resources in your own mind and body? 
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The Art of Ascension is a tool that puts you in direct contact with the Source, the Grand Architect of the body. The tool is based on the Attitudes of Praise, Gratitude, Love, and Compassion, we can pre-program these positive Attitudes into the body.  Using these tools also open us to more possibilities.

People are now sleeping less than they did in the past, and sleep quality has decreased as well.
“We found that shorter and lower quality sleep tended to lead to more stressors on the following day,” said Soomi Lee, lead author and Penn State postdoctoral scholar from two separate studies published in 2017.

Aside from the above study, here are 10 reasons why good quality sleep is important. (Below is a condensed version of a Healthline article.)

1. Poor Sleep Can Make You Fat
Poor sleep is strongly linked to weight gain. If you are trying to lose weight, getting quality sleep is absolutely crucial.

2. Good Sleepers Tend to Eat Fewer Calories
Studies show that sleep deprived individuals have a bigger appetite and tend to eat more calories.

3. Good Sleep Can Improve Concentration and Productivity
Sleep is important for various aspects of brain function which includes cognition, concentration, productivity and performance.
A study on medical interns provides a good example. Interns on a "traditional schedule" made 36% more serious medical errors than interns on a schedule that allowed more sleep.

4. Good Sleep Can Maximize Athletic Performance
Sleep has been shown to enhance athletic performance. A study of over 2,800 women found that poor sleep was linked to slower walking, lower grip strength, and greater difficulty performing independent activities.

5. Poor Sleepers Have a Greater Risk of Heart Disease and Stroke
A review of 15 studies found that short sleepers are at far greater risk of heart disease or stroke than those who sleep 7 to 8 hours per night.

6. Sleep Affects Glucose Metabolism and Type 2 Diabetes Risk
In a study of healthy young men, restricting sleep to 4 hours per night for 6 nights in a row caused symptoms of pre-diabetes. This was then resolved after 1 week of increased sleep duration.
Poor sleep habits are also strongly linked to adverse effects on blood sugar in the general population. Those sleeping less than 6 hours per night have repeatedly been shown to be at increased risk for type 2 diabetes.

7. Poor Sleep Is Linked to Depression
It has been estimated that 90% of patients with depression complain about sleep quality. Poor sleep is even associated with increased risk of death by suicide.

8. Sleep Improves Your Immune Function
One large 2-week study monitored the development of the common cold after giving people nasal drops with the virus that causes colds. They found that those who slept less than 7 hours were almost three times more likely to develop a cold than those who slept 8 hours. 

9. Poor Sleep Is Linked to Increased Inflammation
Poor sleep has been strongly linked to long-term inflammation of the digestive tract, in disorders known as inflammatory bowel diseases.

10. Sleep Affects Emotions and Social Interactions
One study found that people who had not slept had a reduced ability to recognize expressions of anger and happiness.
 
What does all this talk of sleep have to do with the Art of Ascension? When a person uses The Art of Ascension in a 20 minute close-eyed practice, similar to meditation, you receive twice as much rest as you do in 8 hours of sleep.  This is measured by your heart rate, respiration rate, and other factors such as fatigue toxins being released. And if you fall asleep using the techniques, you will enter a much deeper rest immediately.  

Would you like to share your story of how The Art of Ascension has given you rest? 

Attention is a limited resource.  Billions of bits of data are available in every moment, but we have the ability to attend to a small fraction.  Your brain is designed to present data to you that it believes is important to you.  So if you believe you are unlovable, it will heighten your awareness to information that lends proof of your unlovability and ignores data that shows the love that is in your life.

As the expression ‘paying attention’ suggests, you have a limited supply of cognitive currency.  Rick Hanson, who wrote Buddha Brain, said “Attention is like a combination spotlight and vacuum cleaner: it illuminates what it rests upon and then sucks it into your brain – and your self.” He also made the statement “the mind is Teflon for positive experience and Velcro for negative experience.”

Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, found that paying attention to positive emotions literally expands your world, while focusing on negative emotions shrinks it — a fact that has important implications for your daily experience.

The ability to manage your attention is a skill called Self-Regulation and governs your ability to make decisions, plan, and function; it ultimately determines your well-being. What if we actually paid attention...to our attention? Rather than getting sucked into a self-defeating thought, we have the ability to redirect the mind quickly to a more productive thought.

As the great psychologist, William James, wrote over a century ago: “The education of attention would be the education par excellence.”  Studies have shown that meditation improves attention regulation. Other studies indicate that improved self-regulation reduces stress and improves the immune system. 
 
In the Art of Ascension as taught by the Ishayas, we teach simple tools or “seed thoughts” to expand the mind.  They can be used anytime, anywhere, by anybody.  By easily introducing these simple “seed thoughts” based on Praise, Gratitude, Love, and Compassion into your life, your mind and perception becomes attuned to these upward spirals and charms the mind into wanting more.  Just by utilizing the practice, your neurons are attracted to more praise, gratitude, love and compassion. 

As part of the practice you learn to observe your attention without judgement.  Our awareness is actually infinite.  The more we use this practice, the old boundaries and self-limitations begin to fall away.  These simple tools can be used to reduce stress, but they can also be used to find unlimited freedom and unconditional love.

“There are three things,” says Dan Harris, the ABC News correspondent who reported his encounter with meditation in his memoir 10% Happier. “The first is that guys think it’s bullshit — that you have to wear your wife’s yoga pants or chant. The second is that people assume it’s impossible: ‘My mind is too busy.’ ” Last, Harris explains, is that men assume meditation is all about being mellow, that it will rob them of their edge.

One of the great things about the Art of Ascension is that is does not require any posture or any pre-requisite at all.  It can be introduced into any activity that you are doing.  We do recommend that you do it 2 or 3 times per day with your eyes closed, but that can be done lying down or a favorite for many, in a recliner.
  
The myth about your mind being too busy is true on one hand.  But the Art of Ascension uses the natural tendency of the mind to its advantage, kind of like ju-jitsu.  So, what you may think is a disadvantage, is actually put to use in the Art of Ascension.  It uses thoughts to move you to deeper levels within the mind.  The Art of Ascension teaches you how to construct a perfect thought, so the mind will move as designed.  With the perfect thought, both the left and right hemispheres, the frontal lobe and the rear are all in harmony.  Your mind loves it, and therefore your body loves it.

Then there’s the myth that if you meditate you will be too mellow.  If one considers that some of the most successful CEO’s, entertainers, and sports people meditate, that debunks that one immediately. After all, Oprah Winfrey, one of Hollywood’s wealthiest women with a net worth of $3 billion, has been talking about the power of meditation since 1990. Ray Dalio, who began with humble beginnings and now has a net worth of $14B began meditating in college. He said that meditation is “the single most important reason for whatever success I've had."

Think you should get better at multi-tasking?  Actually, current research seems to show the myth about multi-tasking…being good at multi-tasking is an illusion created while in the busy mode of multi-tasking!  
 
Here’s some of the current research that you might find interesting:

• In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.” 
• Researchers at the University of California at Irvine monitored interruptions among office workers; they found that workers were interrupted on average every 11 minutes and took 23 minutes to return to the task. 
• Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that “multitasking adversely affects how you learn. Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.” Discussing his research on National Public Radio, Poldrack warned, “We’re really built to focus. And when we force ourselves to multitask, we’re driving ourselves to perhaps be less efficient in the long run even though it sometimes feels like we’re being more efficient.”
• Stanford research put people who regularly multi-task and even consider themselves to perform well at multitasking through a series of tests.  Tests showed that multi-taskers were outperformed by those who are only light multi-taskers.  They found the heavy multi-taskers had difficulty with their memory plus were distracted by irrelevant information much more easily than those who did not multi-task often. 
• Here’s a video that gives an example of how the brain is trying to operate in “multi-task” mode and further information on the subject:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJuXV6AD93s

Dr. Edward Hallowell, a Massachusetts-based psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and has written a book with the self-explanatory title CrazyBusy. In his book he calls multitasking a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously.” He describes a new condition, “Attention Deficit Trait,” which he claims is rampant in the business world. ADT is “purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live,” …“Never in history has the human brain been asked to track so many data points.”
 
It is rather difficult to multitask and stay in the present moment.  One way to talk about being in the present moment is the art of paying attention -- being available to truly listen to others as well as the still small voice inside and to become aware of the Source of All Thought.  These cannot be accomplished when one is pulled in many directions at the same time. 
  
However, it is normal for minds in the waking state to wander aimlessly through 60-100,000 thoughts per day. These thoughts are random or in reaction to the environment. So, few minds are accustomed to being one-pointed.    
 
In Ascension! An analysis of the Art of Ascension as taught by the Ishayas, MSI said, “The mind can be trained to think one-pointedly, or it can continue to think as most human minds think, in conflict and diversity. Ascension’s simple suggestion is that this process of re-training is not only effortless but easy, completely natural and extremely quick. Part of the secret is to charm the mind during every phase of this transformation.”  
 
The simple, regular practice of charming the mind to rest using “The Art of Ascension” is all that is required to experience our heritage of Infinite Awareness, to gain true freedom, and to live life spontaneously.  It becomes easier and easier to experience the love around us and to love more deeply.  Life unfolds in perfection.  

A new and very large study published in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry supports the premise that increased inflammation may play a role in depression. 

Whatever its cause, depression and anxiety is on the rise. Anxiety disorders affect 40 million adults in the United States every year- that’s 19% of the population!  It's not uncommon for someone with an anxiety disorder to also suffer from depression or vice versa.  1 in 13 globally suffers from anxiety. 
 
Everybody feels stress and anxiety in different ways. But when stress becomes excessive, it can contribute to high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, physical inactivity, and overeating — all of which contribute to heart disease and stroke, according to the American Heart Association.
 
Coventry University conducted a review of decade of studies to conclude that Mind-body interventions reduce cytokines and pro-inflammatory gene expression.  According to the researchers, the benefits of MBIs can be interpreted as reversing the molecular signature caused by the effects of chronic stress, which is correlated with a higher risk of inflammation-related diseases, accelerated biological aging, and early mortality.

These mind-body interventions (MBIs) include various types of mindfulness, meditation, yoga, tai chi, and Qigong.  The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) defines mind-body interventions as practices that "employ a variety of techniques designed to facilitate the mind's capacity to affect bodily function and symptoms.”

Lead investigator of the recent MBI systematic review, Ivana Buric, from the Brain, Belief, and BehaviorLab at Coventry University, said “Millions of people around the world already enjoy the health benefits of mind-body interventions like yoga or meditation, but what they perhaps don't realize is that these benefits begin at a molecular level and can change the way our genetic code goes about its business. These activities are leaving what we call a molecular signature in our cells, which reverses the effect that stress or anxiety would have on the body by changing how our genes are expressed. Put simply, MBIs cause the brain to steer our DNA processes along a path which improves our wellbeing."
Some evolutionary experts say that pro-inflammatory gene expressions triggered by fight-or-flight also provided a short-term boost in immune responses and protection for our hunter-gatherer ancestors but this response is perpetuated in modern day by anxiety related stress.

Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center published a study titled “Neural Correlates of Mindfulness Meditation-Related Anxiety Relief” and concluded that anxiety was significantly reduced in every session that subjects meditated. Brain imaging found that meditation-related anxiety relief was associated with activation of the anterior cingulate cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and anterior insula, areas of the brain are involved with control of worrying. 

Dr. Ramani Durvasula, professor of psychology at California State University, Los Angeles said, “Given that anxiety is in fact a ‘head game,’ it would follow that it could also be managed by techniques that focus on distraction, refocusing body sensations, and thinking differently.”

The good news is that utilizing a regular, daily practice you can reverse the effect of stress and anxiety, inflammation and many forms of depression.  We do emphasize daily and regular, because this may be the most important criteria of your practice.  Choose one that you will use regularly.  

Many of us that now use the Art of Ascension tried many practices before we came to it.  We found that Art of Ascension is simple and can be used anywhere, anytime and personally, the one that we knew we could do regularly.  

Asthma UK, a research company, has found that 69% of people with asthma say that stress is a trigger for their asthma.
 
They reported the main reasons for stress causing asthma is:

• Stress hormones cause the ‘fight or flight’ syndrome which causes a faster heart rate, with more shallow and faster breathing. This type of breathing can put someone at risk for an asthma attack
• When one is stressed, they have more of a tendency to become angry and anger is a trigger for stress.

 
Dr. Raja Amarnath says “Emotional stress is the main contributor to the worsening of asthma symptoms” and later in the article said “Meditation is an effective tool to thwart asthma attacks.”  He regularly uses it to help his patients.  Research also supports the use of meditation for asthma.

The Art of Ascension invokes the relaxation response which turns off the ‘fight or flight’ syndrome. It slows breathing, relaxes the body, reduces blood pressure, and, in effect, reduces stress very effectively.

We love comments from our readers in connection to our favorite studies... Do you have any first hand experience with meditation in any form improving asthma symptoms?