One of my friends was sitting with me today, after my surgery.  We both belong to our spiritual book club and so our conversation tends to always drift in that direction.  I mentioned Anita Moorjani’s Ted talk to her. I had sent her a link to Brene Brown’s TED Talk on vulnerability but she’d never seen it.  We watched it, and Anita Moorjani’s TED talk.  Both are wonderful.

After she left, I clicked on another TED talk that was suggested by YouTube.  It was about a retreat for Vipaassana meditation.  It’s a specific meditation, the training involves sitting on the floor for 10 hours a day for 10 days, paying close attention to every sensation you feel in your body but not reacting to them.  The woman who did the talk, made a film about it, and took the 10 day instructional retreat to one of the worst prisons in the world.  The program decreased the violence in this horrible place, and the recidivism.   Then they did it at a maximum security prison in the US and have the same results. In an interview with one prisoner, he said in anger management and stress management only taught me how to conceal my anger and stress.  This meditation taught me how do I allow it to come up and to deal with it. This is a guy who was a violent criminal in prison for life. Violence in this present decreased by something like 20%.

Then I watched another very short TED talk Buy a researcher who had scientific evidence that meditation rewire the brain and change the structure of the brain and increase and decrease gray matter in different areas. It was fascinating.

I love when science proves spirituality. I’ve heard it said if we taught every child age of eight to meditate The world would be a different place and one generation. After watching these two videos I’m pretty sure it’s true. Not that I needed a lot of convincing, since I meditate every day almost.

I did this blog by talk to text on my phone. Now I go try to prove read it online and see how it is. 🙂

** Now edited, and thankfully, I can type now!