Meditation

This morning I made time. 15 minutes is not bad. With mindfulness meditation, your goal is to stay in the present. That’s easier than it sounds, because we daydream constantly. When you do wander during meditation, bring your attention gently back to the here and now. Classically, you would focus on the breath, but being here now is the bigger goal. Think of it this way: if someone came in and said “Boo!” you would not be startled at all if you are meditating correctly because you are already fully in the present. Eyes open, cross legged, back straight, feeling great with every breath.

If You’re Too Busy to Meditate, Read This

Peter Bregman – This morning, like every morning, I sat cross-legged on a cushion on the floor, rested my hands on my knees, closed my eyes, and did nothing but breathe for 20 minutes.

People say the hardest part about meditating is finding the time to meditate. This makes sense: who these days has time to do nothing? It’s hard to justify.

Meditation brings many benefits: It refreshes us, helps us settle into what’s happening now, makes us wiser and gentler, helps us cope in a world that overloads us with information and communication, and more. But if you’re still looking for a business case to justify spending time meditating, try this one: Meditation makes you more productive.

How? By increasing your capacity to resist distracting urges.

Research shows that an ability to resist urges will improve your relationships, increase your dependability, and raise your performance. If you can resist your urges, you can make better, more thoughtful decisions. You can be more intentional about what you say and how you say it. You can think about the outcome of your actions before following through on them.

Our ability to resist an impulse determines our success in learning a new behavior or changing an old habit. It’s probably the single most important skill for our growth and development.

As it turns out, that’s one of the things meditation teaches us. It’s also one of the hardest to learn. …

Read the rest: If You’re Too Busy to Meditate, Read This – Peter Bregman – Harvard Business Review.

I’ll admit it. I was too busy to meditate this morning. Perhaps I’ll catch up tonight. On my iPhone I track my meditation sessions and keep notes using an app called Equanimity. I used the free version for a while and liked it enough to buy the paid version.

Study explains the mystery of ball lightning

… Led by CSIRO scientist John Lowke, the new theory focuses on how ball lightning occurs in houses and aeroplanes – and how it can pass through glass. His theory also proposes that ball lightning is caused when leftover ions electric energy, which are very dense, are swept to the ground following a lightning strike.

“A crucial proof of any theory of ball lightning would be if the theory could be used to make ball lightning. This is the first paper which gives a mathematical solution explaining the birth or initiation of ball lighting,” says Lowke.

Lowke proposes that ball lightning occurs in houses and aeroplanes when a stream of ions accumulates on the outside of a glass window and the resulting electric field on the other side excites air molecules to form a ball discharge. The discharge requires a driving electric field of about a million volts.

“Other theories have suggested ball lightning is created by slowly burning particles of silicon formed in a lightning strike, but this is flawed. One of the ball lightning observations cited in this paper occurred when there was no thunderstorm and was driven by ions from the aircraft radar operated at maximum power during a dense fog.”

Lowke used eye-witness accounts of ball lightning by two former US Air Force pilots to verify the theory. Former US Air Force lieutenant Don Smith recalls:

“After flying for about 15 minutes, there developed on the randome radar cover two horns of Saint Elmo’s fire. It looked as if the airplane now had bull’s horns…they were glowing with the blue of electricity.”

Lowke’s paper gives the first mathematical solution explaining the birth or initiation of ball lightning using standard equations for the motion of electrons and ions. He argues it is unique because it not only explains the birth of the ball but also how it can form on glass and appear to pass through glass resulting in globes of light in people’s homes or in aeroplane cockpits…

via Phys.org | Study explains the mystery of ball lightning.