Go Deep, Get Dog: Contemplative Spiritual Practice

A number of years ago when I was working as a therapeutic wilderness guide, a friend of mine, Corey Alexander, told my group and me this story. He said he had been at a Lakota sacred ceremony and afterwards they traditionally have a meal. In the Lakota tradition, dogs are considered sacred food. So, as Corey…

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Meditation and the Physical Transformation of the Brain: Part 1

One of the key structures in the brain that has been found to be physically changed through long-term meditation is the thalamus. Long-term meditation also affects the prefrontal cortex, the parietal lobe, and the middle prefrontal areas, but here I will focus on the changes to the thalamus and their implications. The thalamus is a…

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How the Practice of Meditation Raises Your Stress Threshold

One of the things we know about binaural beats and the other technologies Eric Thompson has so brilliantly woven together in the Profound Meditation Program and iAwake’s other tracks is that with daily practice and prolonged use, in a very short time, we start becoming much more resilient and able to deal with stress. The stress threshold begins to raise and…

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Vaporize Your Performance Anxiety

One of the most common emotional problems we experience revolves around performance anxiety—whether it involves a job interview, a difficult math test, creating a new relationship, or especially public speaking.  Building on the seven important insights into obtaining emotional freedom that I shared with you in my last blog, this time, instead of theorizing about…

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7 Insights into Obtaining Profound Emotional Freedom

Insight #1: Every emotional experience, including anxiety, has two components: The story which seems to give rise to the emotional experience. The energy behind that experience, the stream of sensation accompanying it. We often get so caught up in the story that is attached to our emotions, that we unwittingly magnify the energy behind such experiences, and in reality…

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Q and A w/ Eric: Part 2 – Am I Cheating When I Use Technology to Assist My Spiritual Growth

This is the second video of a new series in which Eric Thompson, Chief Technical Officer and Creator of the iAwake Technology, answers questions he receives from iAwake practitioners. Here Eric is exploring inner meditation technologies versus outer meditation technologies, such as the Profound Meditation Program. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxKOgDmzsCg What do you think about Eric’s response? Do…

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Taking a Universal Perspective and What We Can Do to Evolve

Why is the whole big picture—everything, the universe—part of our conversation? It’s because we’re evolving the human brain, which means we’re evolving consciousness. I don’t know of anything more important going on right now, because everything else flows from that. There’s not a problem in the world that I can think of offhand that is…

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Emptiness and Fullness by Bill Epperly

There are two essential capacities for awakening: emptiness and fullness. What I mean by emptiness is access to radical emptiness—abiding in the place where self can seemingly dissolve to nothing, where we are in the presence of nothing, and yet have the felt sense of tremendous presence that is pure potential. I want to contrast that with…

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On Creating New Stories to Reflect Our Deepest Selves

A lot of us have old messages about who we are and what we can accomplish. “Oh, I’m not smart enough.” “I’m not good enough.” “I certainly can’t do that.” Or whatever. Well, if we buy into these things, they become true. One of the mysterious things about the brainwave entrainment enhanced meditation practice (we’re…

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How Mindfulness Helps Us Heal

What is mindfulness? From what I can see, mindfulness is when you begin to develop the witness or the observer self. In other words, instead of being locked inside your story, your trauma, or your ego, you begin to experience it from the outside as in, “Oh, isn’t this interesting?” If you can observe yourself from outside the mental and emotional…

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Integration and Mindfulness: A Dynamic Duo

Something I find quite extraordinary about the Profound Meditation Program is the integrative power of the practice. In other words, you really get through your trauma and shadow issues. They come out during the process, and often they’re expressed not just in cognitive ideas but in bodily-felt sensations. This doesn’t necessarily happen with traditional meditation. Because the Profound Meditation Program is…

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How to Open Your Heart with Centering Prayer

There is not a whole lot of theology attached to Centering Prayer, but there is a lot of phenomenology―meaning inner experience. Centering Prayer is an invitation to center down and not only clear the mind and be present, but to be present to God, basically. When we surrender like this, then there is no such thing as an…

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Practicing Meditation to Reach Higher States, Higher Stages

One of the great benefits of brainwave entrainment meditation is that it is one of the only things that has been shown to actually facilitate and speed up the process of moving stably into higher developmental levels. I love it that we can now watch exactly what happens in the brain when someone is practicing…

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Sharpen Your Swords

Recently, my wife Pam and I were at a conference focused on where contemplative wisdom and technology intersect. It was a very interesting, extraordinary experience. One of the remarkable things that went on was hearing from a number of MIT-, Harvard-, and Brown University-trained neuroscientists talk about meditation and neuroscience. As I listened, it became…

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Creativity and Conscious Evolution

I picked up a book the other day by Rollo May called The Courage to Create, published in 1975. Rollo May was an existential psychologist, and I think he was quite influential in some of Ken Wilber’s early stuff. His half-brother, Gerald May, wrote a classic in the recovery field, calledAddiction & Grace. Anyway, The Courage to…

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Hope at the End of the Tunnel

I was recently in the Bay Area to teach a class on Addiction Studies. When my class and I did our first meditation together, we sank into a very deep meditative state, one which we could all really feel. When you meditate in a group, there is a definite field of energy, a palpable coming…

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Your Passion Your Practice

I have been passionately playing electric blues guitar for about two years now. Before that, I spent about forty years playing acoustic rhythm guitar and a little bit of lead. Then two years ago this August, I fell in love with a guitar at a friend’s house. He was selling a vintage guitar―which I bought…

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