How Scientific Approach to Meditation Revolutionizes this Gift from Our Ancient Past

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Meditation, the mystical practice that has gained so much recognition lately from the Internet, has been around for literally thousands of years in various forms and styles. It gained its flame because of the supposedly superpower you can unlock within yourself like becoming wiser, calmer and perform better in almost everything. However, for normal people who tried to learn this, more than half of them are likely not able to benefit from practicing meditation. In fact, it is creating more frustration and confusion than helping out these people to live a better life. After all, it was called a mystical skill for a good reason. Well, thanks to latest scientific research and technology, this ancient technique of training our mind is now much more learnable than ever.

I touched on this subject of meditation over the years but I tried to minimize the coverage because of several factors. First, it was much less acceptable to even talking about meditation just ten years ago. It was even namely as “evil” when you whisper the name to someone whose religious background somehow tainted by bad information. Second, self learning meditation is always difficult because there is no easy way to track one’s progress in such training. Unlike learning a subject with scientific facts that you can be quizzed later on to see how much you remember or understand, a normal person do not have a simple way to self assess the improvements they have made from practicing meditation.

Modern meditation techniques introduced by many famous gurus actually helped a lot more people because they simplified the whole concept down to something much more tangible. For example, the famous one-moment meditation has been helping so many people in dealing with their everyday stress and hectic lives. There are many scientific researches made public that help people to understand that being more mindful (through meditation) can benefit them so much that their brains are rewired in a good way.

So we now know meditation helps people in a very meaningful way. Its health benefits are tremendous. But these researchers have not been able to solve the biggest obstacle of making meditation something accessible to everyone, until now.

I reviewed a product called Inner Balance at my other site, Essence of Trading, focuses on its benefit on trading performance. This product is basically a portable heart rate monitor that connect to your cell phone through Bluetooth. What makes it special is that it can track your heart rate variability (HRV) in real-time giving the user instant feedback of their current state of calmness. Yep, you read this right. For the first time, there is a way for anyone who does not have access to a good trainer to learn the foundation of meditation, which is slowed down breathing, to finally learn the skill properly, quickly with much less frustration.

Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is a pretty good indicator of one’s calmness which was very difficult to measure before the discovery and deeper understanding of how our heart lung functions are affected by our mood swings. Maybe, in the future there will be even better measurement tools discovered along the way. But why wait if we already have something on hand that can help us now.

Anyone interested in getting Inner Balance can go to their site and check out the products offered there.

(Affiliate disclosure: I have signed up to become an affiliate after I gave out a whole bunch of this device as gifts and see the amazing results on my friends and family)

I will try not to repeat what I wrote in the review here. Anyone interested in that can read it later.

What I like to say here is that many traditional practices from our ancestors could be labelled as mystical but not all of them are bad. Once we start to understand more how they work, the mysticism dissolves, resulting in a more accurate view of what they really are. Meditation, now with enough scientific researches done on the subject, is shining through with real life practical use in medical treatments like reducing anxiety, lowering high blood pressure and improving performance from sports to trading. It is a real gift from our ancient past.

Settling Down After a Chaotic Week

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Flying from Toronto Canada to Hong Kong is easy. In fact, way easier than traveling to United States. First and foremost, going through US customs takes at least double the amount of time. Anyhow, my hectic schedule started the very next day after I arrived.

Jet Lag and Polyphasic Sleep

I have been asked enough times about jet lag that it is something worth mentioning here.

Ever since I trained myself to sleep in biphasic sleep, jet lag is never an issue. I always get sleepy once I have nothing to do and can fall asleep easily. When I focus my mind, I can continuously work 10 to 15 hours straight. That’s the interesting benefit of training oneself to actually sleep multiple times a day.

One thing to remember though it takes time to modify one’s sleeping pattern. If you are used to sleep at least 8 hours a day and that you cannot easily squeeze out at least 45 minutes during the day for a nap, cutting short your main sleeping time will seriously affect your brain functions.

Meditation as a Sleep Replacement

Sometimes, if actual nap is not possible, there are interesting ways to refresh our mind to peak performance through other means.

If you have practiced meditation long enough and can get yourself to the state of a cleared mind quickly, you can try to induce the sleep like function in your body where it starts to flush out the chemicals generated during the day when your brain has been working hard. Key to this technique is switching to a breathing rhythm closely resemble the one that our body normally does during our sleep.

In other words, one can consciously induce the brain cleaning function without actually going into deep sleep. Your brain will be completely refreshed after a 20 minute practice of sleep breathing under meditation. Interesting isn’t it?

Hong Kong

It is considered being cold in Hong Kong right now but for someone coming from Canada, just T-shirt and jeans are perfect for me. Obviously that attracted many curious stares wondering if this guy is insane. The picture in this post is taken from the famous place in Hong Kong where they make the roasted gooses. I chose to take a picture of the mega bridge connecting the airport to the rest of the region because it is in fact a very cool piece of architecture.

My schedule will continue to be very hectic. Instead of the expected quiet down of my meetings, many more meetings are now scheduled around my original ones. An interesting development indeed since I thought not that many people would be interested in my line of work.

Have a nice weekend all!