Meditation Rebuilds the Brain

Test subjects taking part in an 8-week program of mindfulness meditation showed results that astonished even the most experienced neuroscientists at Harvard University.  The study was led by a Harvard-affiliated team of researchers based at Massachusetts General Hospital, and the team's MRI scans documented for the very first time in medical history how meditation produced massive changes inside the brain's gray matter. "Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day," says study senior author Sara Lazar of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program and a Harvard Medical School instructor in psychology. "This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing." Read more.

The 10 Best Pilgrimages for Modern Travelers

Pilgrims approaching Elizabeth Castle

Thousands trek to Nevada's Burning Man festival to burn a towering effigy and the hopeful ill journey to Lourdes seeking a cure as they have for centuries. Although pilgrimage may seem an antiquated religious ritual, it remains a vibrant activity in the modern world as pilgrims combine traditional motives--such as seeking a remedy for physical or spiritual problems--with contemporary searches for identity or interpersonal connection. That pilgrimage continues to exercise such a strong attraction is testimony to the power it continues to hold for those who undertake these sacred journeys. Read more.

"Tending the Soul with Healing Ritual"

Tending the Soul with Healing Ritual by Gay Wolff, Ph.D. is a guidebook for those wishing to develop their intuitive senses and learn to tap into the healing power of personal ritual. Part 1 talks about why we need ritual and what it involves. Part 2 provides a menu of personal rituals with detailed instructions. According to the author, "Ritual takes us beyond the psychological. It is a process of thinning the veils between the dimensions of the material world and those luminous realms lying within and beyond oneself. In Ritual, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, certainty becomes mystery, and potentialities become real possibilities!" I highly recommended this insightful book to anyone seeking to awaken and engage the blueprint of the soul. The Rituals will guide your soul work to help you engage at an energetic level, where you can access the power to change and heal. The passionate expression of our soul's purpose is precisely the medicine the earth needs at this time.

Sitgimgut, the Art of Cleansing the Soul of the Dead

While traditional shamanism continues to decline around the world, it is currently undergoing a revival in South Korea. Though Korean shamanism has suffered centuries of ridicule and persecution, it is now acknowledged to be an important repository of Korean culture and indigenous psychology. The Sitgimgut ceremony is a shamanic ritual for cleansing a dead person's soul that comes from Jindo, a tiny island off the coast of South Korea. The islands remoteness has helped maintain its musical traditions and rituals in an unusually pure form. Read more.

Weather Shamans of the Himalayas

There can be few more exotic jobs than herding clouds in the Tibetan Himalayas. Shamans in the Amdo region keep watch from the mountain peaks and warn villagers of approaching storms. Their predictions are based on a combination of weather experience and trusted formula such as "when the clouds over Ami Kodtse are like sheep's hair, it will hail in the village."

Nor do the shamans just passively observe conditions; a "weather shaman" or "cloud herder" claims to be able to ward off bad weather. According to their beliefs, the weather is caused by the interaction between humans, spirits and nature. Weather shamans believe that extreme weather conditions are a reflection of a spiritual imbalance -- that our thoughts of fear, guilt, anger, etc. are being reflected by the environment. The shamans intercede with the spirits, who in turn influence the weather. As well as prayers and chants, a slingshot, like those used to herd sheep and yaks in Tibet, may be used to herd the clouds, or they may be driven off by firing arrows.

In his book Mindscaping the Landscape of Tibet, film maker and anthropologist Dan Smyer Yu describes a dawn excursion with a weather shaman in 2010. The mountains were shrouded under a murky white blanket and there seemed to be little chance of filming, but the shaman assured Yu that he could break the fog. The shaman chanted praises to the mountain spirits for a full 15 minutes, at which point the fog lifted and the Himalayan peaks emerged like islands from a sea of cloud. Perhaps the result was coincidence, but the shamans do seem better at gaining the confidence of their audience than most meteorologists.