Amazing Mindware

Have you ever tried your hand at meditation, only to give up in frustration? How about wanting to boost your immune system, calm your emotions, and generally help your body fight stress? What if you could gain all those benefits just by playing a computer game?

Well now you can. Take The Journey to Wild Divine and watch your stress levels decrease as your skill in playing the game increases. The game includes a biofeedback device so that it can accurately measure when you are breathing calmly and other measures of successful self-regulation. As you improve at mastering your mind-body connection you also proceed up through levels in the game -- opening magic doors, discovering lost treasures, and meeting all kinds of fascinating guides and mentors along the way.

I can't think of a more fun way to learn how to meditate. I think every household should have one. Great for the teens, as meditation has been shown to help them get their grades up, and great for adults who are dealing with all kinds of stresses and are in danger of physical ailments if that stress isn't being effectively reduced. You can take a look and demo it at the following link:

Demo the Journey to Wild Divine

The Perfection of Your Present Situation

The following is an adaptation of a post I recently made on a message board in response to a woman's complaint about the challenges motherhood is presenting to her spiritual practice. I repost it here because I think it applies equally to whatever excuse we are clinging to for why we are not doing the very actions that are most likely to help us awaken. The ego doesn't want to awaken; it just wants to pretend it wants to while cloaking itself in excuses for why the conditions of one's life make freedom from its tyranny impossible.

Ego says, "Sure I want you to wake up. I like the idea of enlightenment. As soon as I can make every speck of external reality perfect you won't need me anymore and you can become enlightened then. Let's work very hard at this enlightenment business. I'm sure I can come up with a very effective strategy for you."

I suggest you take the point of view that your current situation is exactly what you most need to support your practice. If you have to be active every waking moment with home and family care tasks, meditate mindfully as you engage in the activity needed to support your family. View the path within your situation to be the blessing, not the compromise or sacrifice.

Think of how many more hours of meditation you can get in like this than someone who merely sits for meditation practice 40-60 minutes a day (the norm). You will literally be getting hours of meditation practice each day, if you are willing to embrace the situation as an opportunity to meditate rather than clinging to the idea that it is an obstacle to your meditation. Think of how much inner discipline it would take to get you to actually sit for meditation and lose yourself completely in the experience for 14 hours a day. Yet as a mother with young children you have plenty of drive to engage in selfless activity for so many hours. All you have to do is use the situation as a meditation practice instead of fighting it.

In vajrayana, enlightenment is about developing the view of the Buddha, recognizing that nirvana was always there within all the situations of samsara (all of them), not about changing anything outside onself so that it becomes nirvana. So in daily practice one doesn't strive to rearrange the chairs on samsara's Titantic. Instead we just want off that damn boat altogether, and we achieve this by realizing that the boat never truly existed, so it can't truly sink.

Liberation comes just that quickly, when there is insight, conviction, and stability in the view. No external situation can stop you from realizing that external situations are inherently empty. Only your conceptual beliefs (your opinions) about those situations can stop you if you are unwilling to see that the beliefs themselves are equally insubstantial.