Meditations to Change Your Brain
Meditations to Change Your Brain
The structure of your brain changes constantly, in a dynamic, unfolding process that you yourself can direct to create the life you want. This is the exciting premise of Meditations to Change Your Brain, a breakthrough three-CD program from psychologist Rick Hanson, Ph.D., and neurologist Rick Mendius, M.D.
Drawing on a vast body of research spanning more than 30 years, Meditations to Change Your Brain collects the best meditative and contemplative practices to help anyone increase their capacity for joy, love, and spiritual bliss. Listeners join Dr. Hanson and Dr. Mendius to learn specific practices for making positive changes in their body and mind,plus four guided practices to strengthen their meditative abilities, and four guided meditations to heal and nourish their relationships.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Psychological Concepts + How to Meditate
This 3 disc, 3 ½ hour, 2009 Sounds True program is encased in a cardboard type tri-fold. It is said to draw on 30 years plus of research by neuropsychologist Rick Hanson and neurologist Richard Mendius. The cover states that it will show you how to strengthen your neural circuits that generate happiness, love, and inner peace and includes 7 guided meditations to reshape your brain. (OK. I’m in.) Note that the term “guided meditation” just means that someone is verbally guiding you through the meditation by talking to you and making suggestions.
There is a lot of really good information here and this is an excellent program, especially for those who want to learn to meditate but also want to be convinced first that it is worth their time commitment. This material provides how and why to meditate from a medical standpoint and can also be useful to seasoned meditators. The doctors also talk about how getting rid of your emotional baggage can help you. I can attest to that. Meditation has helped me bring up and confront some stuff I had buried inside. Once you bring it to the surface, you can begin to deal with it. This is a program that you can work with over and over, and will likely need to repeat to effectuate a positive change.
With the exception of the meditation segments on each CD, you can listen to the other/instructional parts in your car, on your way to work. I have listed the times for each track so you can figure out how everything is laid out and what way to listen best suits you.
Disc 1: Using Your Brain to Change Your Mind (total time 71:12)
1. Introduction (0:51)
2. Using Your Mind to Change Your Brain (13:59)
Drawing on a combination Western psychology and neurology and Eastern Buddhism, we explore how to be happier and have less anger and stress, to better understand difficult experiences, and to replace them with better states of mind. Rick begins this segment, followed by Richard. Both speak simply, in easy-to-understand language, and have voices that are pleasant to listen to. Both guys alternate throughout the 3 discs. Instead of getting caught up in all the “stuff” that is going on around us, they talk about how shifting your inner state-of-mind, one bit at a time, can effectuate positive change.
3. How Your Mind and Brain Work Together (20:08)
Your conscious mind is dependent upon your nervous system and is primarily dependent on your brain. Something transcendental is necessary for consciousness. This program is based primarily on Western (scientific) medicine. The complex brain is a gift–the extraordinary process of how it works (neurons firing, etc., even when someone is unconscious.) How brainwave patterns change and they change your mind, so you can deliberately effect a positive change in the physical structure of your brain.
4. Why Aren’t People Happier? (10:32)
Explains how the brain generates suffering and how understanding these processes can allow you to suffer less.
5. The Effects of Meditation on Your Brain (15:31)
What scientific studies on meditating Tibetan monks have revealed, what happens in your brain when you meditate, and why. As someone who meditates frequently, I found this segment very interesting in helping me understand certain things about myself. If you listen to only segment 5 in this whole set, I think you will FIND time to meditate.
6. Guided Meditation: Appreciating Your Brain (10:06)
DO NOT DO THIS MEDITATION SEGMENT WHILE DRIVING. A bell indicates completion of the meditation. Do not jar yourself awake, but sit for a minute and then come out of it slowly.
(Disc 1, Segments 1 through 5 can be listened to in your car. You may have to listen to this information more than once, because there is a lot of scientific information here.)
Disc 2: Meditations to Change Your Brain (total time 78:47)
This disc is about 50 % meditation, so you cannot listen in the car unless you skip over each meditation and just listen to the instructional information, which you could do by track. The meditations are fairly brief, so if you are not good at meditating yet, the shorter ones will probably help you learn to focus better. The better you get at it, the longer you can meditate on your own. You can either stop the tape when you want to continue, or just do your own thing.
1. Introduction (0:40)
2. Taking Good Care of Yourself (4:58)–general information
3. Guided Meditation: Foundational Practices (15:04)
How to meditate practice.
4. How You Can Target Specific Changes in Your Brain (5:52)
Explaining psychologically what the meditation and the suggestions do in your brain.
5. The Four Steps to Taking in the Good (13:27)
You are mainly built up of stored memories of events and emotions. How you can help the brain to register positive experiences and why that is important.
6. Guided Meditation: Taking in the Good (7:32)
Practicing positive meditational experiences.
7. Introduction: Antidote to Stress (8:10)
What happens to the body in stress and why medically it happens. How to activate the parasympathetic nervous system to compensate and how it medically helps you.
8. Guided Meditation: Antidote to Stress (9:22)
How to relax body parts in a combo instructional and meditational experience.
9. Introduction: Healing Painful Experiences (4:52)
How you can influence the tone of your memories and shift your reaction to the painful memory.
10. Guided Meditation: Healing Painful Experiences (8:01)
Practicing the concept.
Disc 3: Meditations to Change Your Brain II (total time 73:32) This disc is 2 longer meditations and roughly 2 ten minute explanations–not a CD for the car.
1. Introduction: Steadying your Mind (12:41)
Voice in your head tends to chatter away on a lot of different subjects and build negative stories, which then causes you to expect negative happenings. Rick explains how attention works in the mind and brain. Steadiness of the mind is a real challenge for some, so you must practice and be patient with yourself.
2. Guided meditation: Steadying Your Mind (28:33)
A sampling of meditation methods to focus the mind on one thing.
3. Introduction: Mosaic Meditation (10:00)
Each moment of your life is like a mosaic of multi-sensual tiles that form a picture. This segment is about how the tiles are made and how we can rearrange them if we need to make a better picture.
4. Guided Meditation: Mosaic Meditation (22:15)
Practicing the concept.
4 Stars Good meditations but discs need better editing
Two of my greatest concerns in meditation CD’s are the quality of the narrator’s voice and the quality of the meditation script. In these areas, the CD’s are excellent. I found the narrators’ voices very soothing, not distracting, and pleasant. And, I found the meditations relaxing and well designed.
There are some long stretches with no narration, which can challenge your powers of concentration, but I guess that’s the point– after you practice for awhile your mind will calm down and you’ll enjoy the long pauses. And I have to admit that I fell asleep several times while listening to them, but that is arguably my fault for playing them at night while lying down. So if you are using them for meditation purposes and not to cure insomnia (which is not their intent), I recommend that you sit up when you listen.
The only annoying feature is that the material on the discs should have been better organized and presented. The non-meditative parts of the CD are rather long, involved, technical and not particularly conducive to an audio CD format. It would have been much better to include the text as a separate booklet. Also, the discs alternate between text and meditations, so you have to constantly skip through tracks to find the meditations. If the narratives were short, you could probably sit through them more than once to get to the meditations, but they aren’t, and once you’ve heard them you don’t need to play them again.
All in all, this set of discs contains thoughtful and well-designed meditations. My recommendation is that you burn the meditation tracks onto one disc or load them into your Ipod so you can avoid all the other tracks after you’ve listened to them once.
3 Stars Rewiring Your Brain
For this CD set, a psychologist and a neurologist come together to lead you through a number of meditations to “rewire” your brain, with the goal of helping you to create new neural pathways that will allow your brain to function more effectively. They provide a thorough explanation of the brain and introduce the idea of our ability to change it. Neither of them are captivating speakers, but there is certainly valuable information being shared. What I found interesting was the scientific information on anxiety and the work the brain does to protect you. We have to work against these brain-engrained tendencies to reach deeper states of psychological well being.
I found this material to be useful when focusing in on a specific meditation. It would be difficult to listen to the whole program from beginning to end, as it tends to get a bit dry after a while.
A good effort, while the audio presentation could have been a good deal better.
5 Stars In depth blend of Western Psychology and Brain Biology with eastern Quantum Physics
The two authors of this audio book wrote a very thorough explanation of how ego and psyche and the brain all work, and how to fix the problems. The Introduction is nice and long, and very thorough and detailed. They are fond of saying, “Change your mind to change your brain to change your mind.”
But the introduction to this set of 3 CDs is a lot like a textbook. I find that at the same time that I am hearing extremely important, totally new concepts, which are hard to “get” in the first place, I am having a hard time paying attention. It’s just dry. Plus, one of the authors is a much better speaker than the other… It might have been better to hire voice actors or professional readers, because the authors are clearly reading from their own scripts, and seem to be so uncomfortable with speaking into a microphone, that at times they don’t even sound like they are familiar with the material that they wrote themselves!
They just don’t sound confident in the material, or relaxed about conveying it.
I have heard few Audiobooks that rise to the level of “The Secret.” Even if you don’t agree with everything in that book, “The Secret” CDs are spectacular with production value, the music, the number or authors and experts who do sound great on CD, the overall impact… The Secret is the best audiobook I have ever heard for those reasons. I wish more Audiobooks sounded like that.
I will update this soon with a review on the Meditations themselves!
TECHNICAL ASPECTS of the CDs
During the Introduction, each track is much too LONG! The topics and subjects change several times during each and every track! There have been many times when I would have loved to hit the skip back button on the player, but I realized that’s impossible, unless I want to listen to about 18 minutes that I did hear, to get to the last 3 minutes I missed.
The sound quality is 100% - very clean and professional.
The cardboard album case is flimsy and doesn’t really close. It would be impossible to bring it in a car. Dust would get in and the CDs would fall out constantly. I had to put the CDs in my zipper case to hear the introduction in my car. (Of course, the meditations can’t be done while driving.)
5 Stars Gound Breaking Material
I’ve been dealing with chronic anxiety for the past 30 years. I have found this group of CD’s to be incredibly helpful. It explains some of the evolutionary processes that have contributed to our survival anxiety and takes a lot of the mystery out of this free floating anxiety. Also, I have been working with cognitive therapy for some years which is a wonderful way of dealing with anxiety and depression and controlling what you can to overcome these forms of suffering. “Meditations to Change Your Brain” explains the actual physical changes to your brain that cause changes in our mind, which is what we have been doing with cog therapy. The exercises and information are presented in a gentle and sensitive way and have taken me even further in the direction of health and happiness. You have assisted me in getting my mind, body and spirit in sync and the resulting peace is incredible. Thank you sirs for HOPE!!!
Filed under: Personal Development Book Reviews