reduce stress

If checking your email has become as vital to your wake-up and bedtime routines as brushing your teeth, it’s time to unplug. “Starting and ending the day in stillness is essential to stress reduction, so it’s absolutely critical not to jump into email during either of those times,” says Joan Borysenko, Ph.D., author of ”Your Soul’s Compass.”

In the morning and at night, turn off your computer (and TV) and pick up a book — or simply delight in the rare pleasure of doing nothing. A little nature therapy can also ease the stress of too much computer time. A stroll through a park or on a trail counteracts overstimulation and can also boost your mood and energy.

adapted from wholeliving.com, Dec. 2011

soothing chime alarm clocks

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meditation timers for cultivating calm

How to Cultivate Calm

It may seem counterintuitive, but one of the best things you can do in times of high stress is not much at all. Of course, what you’re thinking about during this quiet period of reflection and breathing makes a big difference. By practicing meditation and mindful breathing, you can reduce stress levels, increase productivity, and boost your mood.

Meditation doesn’t necessarily mean sitting cross-legged on a pillow or lying on the ground. In fact, you can do the following exercises indoors or outdoors, at work or in your car, with a free hour or a free minute. You don’t have to perfect them all, but experimenting with various techniques will help you find the method that works best for you.

wholeliving.com, Dec. 2011

Carved Wooden Thai Buddha with Singing Bowl

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learning to pray

Learning to Pray: A Beginner’s Guide

In her book “Beginner’s Grace: Bringing Prayer to Life,” Unitarian Universalist minister Kate Braestrup wrestles prayer out of the clouds. Here she answers our questions about how to start.

What Is Prayer to You?
Prayer is deliberate, intensive thought, offered silently or spoken aloud. It’s a tool that allows us to be more conscious, like meditation. I pray for two reasons. If I have an urgent desire for something, I’ll pray like crazy.

Prayer is likely to be our default mode for managing the fear and pain that sometimes come with human experience and for engaging the sacred dimensions of that experience. Because it’s set apart from the normal stream of life, and because it can be ritualized, prayer can give us comfort in crisis. It can also nudge us in the direction of awareness and a deeper empathy — which is to say, wholeness.

Why Do It?
There are so few opportunities in a modern life in which we are asked (or allowed!) to pause and pay attention to anything other than our own preoccupations. I can name a few — singing the national anthem before a ball game; saying the Pledge of Allegiance; singing the R-O-T-A-R-Y song at Rotary Club meetings.

But even then, our smartphones ping, we’re snapping pictures of Derek Jeter, who looks so cute with his cap held over his heart. Prayer is wildly countercultural, even subversive: Pause, bow your head, close your eyes, say a prayer? You rebel, you!

prayer

What If You Don’t Believe in G-O-D?
That’s okay. You don’t have to use someone else’s idea or language when you pray. My whole theology can be summed up in a three-word sentence: God is love.

But you don’t have to begin with theology. You don’t have to know why you are praying or to whom. You can just try it — literally pray every day for a week and see if this helps you to be more aware and more loving.

Incidentally, silent prayer is fine. As St. Francis of Assisi advised, “Pray without ceasing. If necessary, use words.” Or try Buddhist prayers, which don’t insist on addressing themselves to anyone but draw your mind toward attentive listening and compassionate response.

How Can We Begin?
Pray before meals. Say a simple prayer of thanks or just take a moment in silence. You don’t need to kneel on gravel. You don’t even need a lot of self-discipline. Since you eat every day, the meal is a built-in reminder.

Prayer demands no drama. Before you eat your next meal, pause. Close your eyes, bow your head. Let yourself be. You have everything required for prayer and need believe only in what is self-evident: You are a human being, alive now.

And then: Eat.

Whole Living, December 2010

tools for prayer, timers and clocks

Now & Zen’s Chime Timer Store

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

sleep inducing tea

Natural Sleep Remedies:

Sleep-Inducing Tea
For a relaxing bedtime beverage, Yance suggests combining several herbs as follows: Passionflower and skullcap soothe agitated nervous systems and can help with mental chatter; oat seed strengthens the nervous system and helps people who are too tired to sleep; and chamomile provides a gently relaxing base.

1 chamomile tea bag
30 to 60 drops passionflower tincture
15 to 30 drops skullcap tincture
15 to 30 drops milky oat seed (Avena sativa) tincture

Pour boiling water over tea bag and let steep for five minutes. Remove tea bag, and add drops of tincture to tea. Stir in a touch of honey if desired. Sip and enjoy.

Waking up in the morning should be as pleasant as falling asleep at night

Waking up in the morning should be as pleasant as falling asleep at night. The Zen Alarm Clock’s gradual, gentle awakening is transformative.

Waking up in the morning should be as pleasant as falling asleep at night. The Zen Alarm Clock’s gradual, gentle awakening is transformative.

Now & Zen

1638 Pearl St.

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

gentle awakening alarm clock with chime

gentle, chime alarm clocks

Fundamentally, dreams — like effective cognitive psychotherapy — “are about abstraction, the ability to pan back, get bigger than, stretch into the remembrance of a larger sense of self,” Naiman says.

And in this hard-charging, info-slurping, sleep-deprived era, in which about 70 million Americans suffer from chronic sleep disorders (and depression is also suspiciously widespread, affecting one in eight women), he and many other sleep experts are more convinced than ever of the link between mental health and a full nightly menu of sleep.

We asked the experts for their best tips to help you get restful sleep — ideally, seven to eight hours of it — that will yield all the dreams you’ve got coming to you.

Drink Moderately, And Mind Your Meds
“A glass of wine with dinner is fine,” Naiman says, but excessive alcohol will cause you to wake up after two or three hours when the sedative effects wear off; this interacts with the first significant REM cycle and disrupts sleep further from there.

Also, many medications — including a number of antidepressants, over-the-counter painkillers, and even, ironically enough, sleeping pills — suppress the hormone melatonin and/or the nutrient choline, both of which mediate REM. It’s always wise, Naiman says, to ask your pharmacist before taking any medicine if it has a REM suppressant and, if it does, whether there’s an alternative.

Utamaro Kitagawa, Bijin Combing Her Hair, 1750-1806

Establish A Presleep Routine
Take a 20-minute soak in a hot bath two hours before bedtime, Cartwright says. The body’s effort to cool itself after the bath mimics the cooling that occurs naturally as our bodies prepare for sleep.

If your logical waking brain is reluctant to let go of the same old anxieties, Cartwright suggests writing down the day’s cares (well before bedtime) in a worry diary, then literally closing the book, telling yourself, I’ve done my worrying for the day.

Create A Restful Environment
Use blackout shades or a sleeping mask to make the room as dark as possible; darkness prompts your brain’s pineal gland to make melatonin. Also, keep your bedroom at a comfortable 60 to 65 degrees; even subtle shifts in body temperature can disrupt sleep cycles.

create a calm environment

Put Technology To Work
Relaxation CDs have moved beyond ocean waves; new versions actually have frequencies embedded in the sound tracks to encourage slow-wave sleep. (Check out sound therapist Jeffrey Thompson’s sleep-enhancement collection atneuroacoustic.com.)

Soothe Yourself If You Wake Up
If you have trouble falling back to sleep, Cartwright advises adjusting your strategy depending on the time of night. If you’re waking up after only an hour or so, try some boring mental exercise: See if you can name all 50 states alphabetically, or count backward from 100, inhaling deeply and slowly, then exhaling with each number.

Use a Gentle, Chiming Alarm Clock to wake-up so that you will be calm in the morning.

Woodson Merrell, M.D., chairman of the Department of Integrative Medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, advises trying to remember the dream you were having when you woke up — even if you can recall only a detail or two — and focusing on it to see if you can drift off again.

If it’s close to your usual wake-up time — say it’s 5 a.m. and you usually wake at 7 — your core body temperature will just be starting to rise to get you active for tomorrow, which may make it hard to go back to sleep, Cartwright says. “The best thing is to take a positive attitude and don’t say to yourself, I’m going to be draggy all day,” she advises. “Instead say, Great, I have two more hours to rest!”

Let Go
“People with insomnia are hyperaroused — pushing, pushing,” Naiman says. “We’re all working so frantically to get a chance to rest. But the paradox is that rest is free.” And, he adds, the great beauty of dreaming — in which “parts of ourselves that recede during waking life” roam freely and creatively — is that “you don’t have to force it to happen. It’s just there for you when you stop.”

choose a chime alarm clock with soothing tones

How to Zazen - Stillness of Being

As the name Zen implies, Zen sitting meditation is the core of Zen practice and is called zazen in Japanese. The posture of zazen is seated, with folded legs and hands, and an erect but settled spine.

The legs are folded in one of the standard sitting styles.   In many practices, one breathes from the hara (the center of gravity in the belly) and the eyelids are half-lowered, the eyes being neither fully open nor shut so that the practitioner is not distracted by outside objects but at the same time is kept awake.

How to Zazen, a Sitting Mindfulness Practice adapted from wikipedia.org

Meditation Clock Timer- Zen Timers and Alarm Clocks by Now & Zen

Use our unique “Zen Clock” which functions as a Yoga & Meditation Timer. It features a long-resonating acoustic chime that brings your meditation or yoga session to a gradual close, preserving the environment of stillness while also acting as an effective time signal. Our Yoga Timer & Clock can be programmed to chime at the end of the meditation or yoga session or periodically throughout the session as a kind of sonic yantra. The beauty and functionality of the Zen Clock/Timer makes it a meditation tool that can actually help you “make time” for meditation in your life. Bring yourself back to balance.

Now & Zen – The Yoga & Meditation Timer Store

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Wake Up Refreshed - Choose a Z E N Alarm Clock - Utamaro Ukiyoe Wood Pipe by Yukisakuma

“Waste not life,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, patron saint of American entrepreneurs. “In the grave will be sleeping enough.”

Centuries later, the attitude toward sleep in America – and in American business, in particular – has scarcely changed. Corporate culture reveres the e-mail sent at 3 a.m., the executive who rushes directly into a meeting from a red-eye flight. Bumper stickers offer an updated version of Franklin’s dictum: “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

“There is a cultural bias against sleep that sees it as akin to shutting down, or even to death,” explains Dr. Jeffrey Ellenbogen, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School and director of the Sleep Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Most people, Ellenbogen says, think of the sleeping brain as similar to a computer that has “gone to sleep” – it does nothing productive. Wrong. Sleep enhances performance, learning and memory. Most unappreciated of all, sleep improves creative ability to generate “aha” moments and to uncover novel connections among seemingly unrelated ideas.

Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, once defined creativity as “just connecting things.” Sleep assists the brain in flagging unrelated ideas and memories, forging connections among them that increase the odds that a creative idea or insight will surface.

While traditional stories about sleep and creativity emphasize vivid dreams hastily transcribed upon waking, recent research highlights the importance of letting ideas marinate and percolate.

“Sleep makes a unique contribution,” explains Mark Jung-Beeman, a psychologist at Northwestern University who studies the neural bases of insight and creative cognition.

Some sort of incubation period, in which a person leaves an idea for a while, is crucial to creativity. During the incubation period, sleep may help the brain process a problem.

“When you think you’re not thinking about something, you probably are,” says Jung-Beeman, who has a doctorate in experimental psychology.

Wake up refreshed, love your alarm clock, transform your mornings with The Zen Alarm Clock's progressive awakening with gentle chimes.

Another theory is that typical approaches to problem-solving may decay or weaken during sleep, enabling the brain to switch to more innovative alternatives. A classic switching story, recounted in “A Popular History of American Invention” in 1924, involves Elias Howe’s invention of the automated sewing machine: After much frustration with his original model, which used a needle with an eye in the middle, Howe dreamed that he was being attacked by painted warriors brandishing spears with holes in the sharp end. He patented a new design based on the dream spears; by the time the patent expired in 1867, he had earned more than $2 million in royalties.

Spear-wielding savages make for compelling stories, but creative insights directly induced by dreams are rare. In general, people are unaware of sleep’s effects on their performance.

Ellenbogen’s research at Harvard indicates that if an incubation period includes sleep, people are 33 percent more likely to infer connections among distantly related ideas, and yet, as he puts it, these performance enhancements exist “completely beneath the radar screen.”

Sleep sounder - wake up refreshed - choose a natural chime alarm clock

In other words, people are more creative after sleep, but they don’t know it.

This lack of awareness makes it hard to identify specific “aha” insights that have been prompted by sleep.

“It’s more that sleep brings a change of approach,” explains Mark Holmes, an art director at Pixar Animation Studios who worked on the film “WallE.” “You can get tunnel vision when you’re hammering away at a problem. You keep going down this same path, again and again, just tweaking, making incremental changes at best. ” He continues: “Sleep erases that. It resets you. You wake up and realize – wait a minute! – there is another way to do this.”

Business attitudes toward sleep may be starting to shift. Claire Stapleton, a spokeswoman for Google, says grassroots interest in sleep led to an on-campus talk by Sara Mednick, a napping expert. Google also installed EnergyPods, leather recliners with egglike hoods that block noise and light, for employees to take naps at work.

Other companies that have installed EnergyPods include Cisco Systems and Procter & Gamble.

Vinayak Sudame, an engineer at the Research Triangle Park campus of Cisco, says he uses an EnergyPod to “shut my eyes and shut myself off for 10 or 15 minutes” when he is working on a problem or needs some quiet time. More than a walk or a coffee break, he says, this type of “total mental rest” helps him return to work with a reorganized perspective.

Alertness Solutions, a sleep consulting company in Cupertino, provided consultations and recommendations to several U.S. Olympic teams before the Beijing Games and also works with corporate clients. Bob Agostino, vice president of operations at L.J. Aviation, in Latrobe, Pa., worked with Alertness Solutions at a previous employer and says that employees learned specific strategies to improve performance. These included when and how long to nap, how to determine the amount of sleep one needs, and how to recognize signs of fatigue and symptoms of sleep disorders.

Acting on this knowledge, Agostino says, “gives you an edge.”

In general, West Coast companies are more concerned about sleep issues than their East Coast counterparts, says Arshad Chowdhury, co-founder and chief executive of MetroNaps, which developed the EnergyPods.

“Particularly in New York, where financial services play such a big role, people are consistently sleep-deprived and consistently in denial,” he says.

Chowdhury – who says the idea for EnergyPods came to him in a nap – recalls a seminar in which one banker responded to a survey question with a note saying she knew she had no fatigue-related problems at work because the only time she fell asleep was when she sat still. Chowdhury laughs a bit ruefully: “Maybe we could have avoided the crisis we are in now if these people had just gotten proper sleep.”

Our Bamboo Digital Zen Clock’s long-resonating Tibetan bell-like chime makes waking up a beautiful experience – its progressive chimes begin your day with grace. When the clock’s alarm is triggered, the acoustic chime bar is struck just once … 3-1/2 minutes later it strikes again … chime strikes become more frequent over 10 minutes … eventually striking every 5 seconds until shut off. As they become more frequent, the gentle chimes will always wake you up – your body really doesn’t need to be awakened harshly, with a Zen Clock you’re awakened more gradually and thus more naturally.  Unlike artificial recorded sounds coming out of a tiny speaker in a plastic box, natural acoustic sounds transform your bedroom or office environment.

adapted from sfgate.com by Leslie Berlin

Wake Up The Most Natural Way -- Choose a Gentle Chime Alarm Clock

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