From Bio Scholar

Scientists may have stumbled on a panacea that has eluded humankind for eons — one

which could knock out the common cold, flu, HIV and almost any other infection that you can think of.

It is a lab-created drug that can take on human rhinoviruses, the bugs behind half the colds in adults and almost all colds in children, flu, polio, a gut bug and deadly dengue fever.

Known simply as DRACO, the potent drug is also expected to destroy measles and German measles, cold sores, rabies and even HIV and could be on the shelves in a decade, the journal Public Library of Science reports.

In lab tests, DRACO killed 15 viruses, including germs behind the common cold and two types of flu. It also saved the lives of mice given a dose of flu that should have killed them, according to the Daily Mail.

Mike Rider of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, who led the study, said: “The discovery of antibiotics revolutionised the treatment of bacterial infections and we hope that this will revolutionise the treatment of viral infections.”

Rider has exploited cells’ natural defences against infection. Viruses are known to hijack cells’ mechanism to make countless copies of themselves. During this process they create long double-stranded strings of the genetic material RNA.

Our cells usually defend themselves by making proteins that latch on to the RNA and stop the virus from breeding. But some viruses can outwit our immune system.

Rider has harnessed a second process called apoptosis, in which diseased cells commit suicide. His drug homes in on cells with double-stranded RNA, stops the infection in its tracks and then kills the cells to finish off the infection.

DRACO works so quickly that if taken early enough it should stop any symptoms from appearing. Tests show it also wards off viruses, meaning it could stop people from becoming ill in the first place.

Carol Horton • My Life Yoga

Back when I first started taking yoga classes, I was preoccupied with whether I could meet the concrete physical challenges they presented. Coming in feeling proud that I could touch my toes (having long considered this a feat of flexibility), I’d experience some angst mixed with the thrill of new ambition when instructed to do some previously unimagined variation such as Padahastasana (“hand-to-foot pose,” a standing forward fold with feet on top of palms.) And that’s what I thought it was all about. Could I “do it” – that is, achieve some particular physical posture – or not??

It’s funny for me to think back on those days. Because when I get on my mat now, I’m much more absorbed in working with my emotional and energetic bodies than in honing my physical practice per se. While I still try to learn new poses and believe that that’s a valuable process, nailing them is far from my primary aim. Instead, I’m much more immediately concerned with the psychological and spiritual dimensions of practice. The visible physical practice is the vehicle, but what really matters to me is invisible – at least to the untrained eye.

Just as I feel my own life force revitalized by asana practice, I have as a teacher “seen” students’ Prana visibly amplify. Which is a strange and wondrous and inspiring “sight” – a vision seen with some intuitive capacity of mind that I previously didn’t even know existed. But it’s also a difficult one to translate into the empiricist rigor and cultural limitations of words like I’m trying to do now – really, I’d have to be a poet to do it justice.

But that’s OK. Because even though I’m not a poet, I do value the process of translation – taking experiences processed through that non-verbal, extra-rational, intuitive right hemisphere of my brain and representing them through the medium of its linguistically structured, rational, analytic counterpart. Trying, in other words, to write in a more-or-less straightforward way about some of the more mysterious and esoteric dimensions of yoga.

In fact, I’ve come to see this kind of writing as part of my own personal practice. Because if yoga is about union, then doesn’t using all of our mental capacities – creating an integrated dialog between those left and right hemispheres – make perfect yogic sense? Sure, I’ve heard a lot of “turn off your mind” directives during my years in the yoga community. But I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t want to turn anything off. Process and drain off accumulated mental and emotional crap? Yes. But “turn off” the innate and incredible human capacity to think? No.

As I see it, yoga is not about turning any part of ourselves “off,” most certainly including our brains. Rather, it’s about learning to work with the multi-dimensionality of our minds and beings more adeptly and fluidly. Yes, I want to dial down the distracting thoughts and hopefully (eventually) root out all that negative internal chatter. But I also want to amp up both my ability to think and my capacity to intuit – sometimes serially, and other times more in tandem.

Through practicing yoga, I’ve gradually come to realize that our brains and the larger bodymind in which they’re embedded offer us much, much more to work with than we’ve been habituated to believe in our culture.

Before I got heavily into yoga, I was super-invested in learning via what we normally call “thinking” – which, put in more precise terms, is really analytic rationality. So I spent a lot of time reading and studying, interviewing and analyzing, taking notes and writing outlines. Learning through asana, meditation, synchronicities, and dreams was most certainly not on the agenda.

And while I could certainly see that the “big questions” couldn’t be answered that way (recognizing what Kant called “the limits of practical reason”) – I didn’t have anything else in my life to enable me to work in an alternative way. So I believed that questions that took us beyond the limits of rational consciousness (as we used to jokingly say in grad school, “why is there air and what’s the meaning of life”), put us squarely into the realm of either existentialism or religion.

We might hope and hazard that God would speak to us there – and there were periods in my life where I was convinced that He Did. But I also always remembered – and respected – the heart-felt anguish of a friend who confessed to me that while he wanted to believe in God, and wanted God to speak to him, he couldn’t and He Didn’t.

Now I’m not at all interested in pronouncing on any ultimate questions. Some of the people that I respect most are serious Christians. Others are nontraditional Buddhists, observant Jews, and/or Leftist intellectuals. Many are simply life-affirming souls who don’t necessarily care to grapple with vexing theological or existential issues. So if I’m committed to any religious/spiritual view, it’s that there are many paths up the mountain, that the mountain is a metaphor that resonates with us deeply even if we can’t categorize and explain it, and that those tracks have been forged in ways that confound all our culturally-bound categories of atheist, agnostic, or believer.

But what I think is so profoundly valuable about yoga and meditation is that they are accessible practices designed (among other things) to train our minds in ways that allow us to access both the left and right hemispheres of our brains – the rational and the extra-rational, the logical and the artistic, the analytic and the intuitive. This was not a skill that I was taught – or even led to believe might exist – in grad school.

Since the 2000s, however, there’s been lots of interest in connecting Buddhist-based mindfulness practices with contemporary neuroscience. And there’s more and more empirical evidence coming out everyday that the claim that yoga and meditation can, in fact, “change your brain” is not some airy-fairy, woo woo, New Age-y notion. The fact of the matter is that practiced properly, these methods work.

Which doesn’t necessarily mean that we get our ultimate questions answered on our mats and/or cushions. But it does mean that we have tools for working with the mind that are capable of bringing us to a state of consciousness that’s bigger than any such question/answer dichotomies allow. This is, I think, what the yogic tradition points to when teaching about Samadhi – a state of realization in which human consciousness becomes integrated into and one with all that is.

Now yoga traditionalists might insist that attaining (and remaining in) this state is the only true aim of yoga, but I don’t agree. While that may be the right aim for unique individuals, I don’t believe that there’s ever been a time in human history when such an absolutely ambitious goal made sense as a mass movement. And today, of course, we have millions and millions of people who practice yoga and meditation but are not devoted to Realization. On the contrary, they spend most of their time fully engaged in the super-demanding practicalities of everyday life.

Not to mention, of course, that most contemporary practitioners have never even heard of Samadhi.

But if I disagree with those hard-core purists who insist that if practitioners don’t set their sights that high, they’re not really practicing yoga, I do agree that most of us are setting our sights too low.

Once you move beyond the purely physical, essentially athletic dimensions of yoga, most of us today are in it for stress relief. Which is deeply, and often desperately needed, and shouldn’t be disparaged in any way. Yoga (and meditation) give millions a means of siphoning off stress in order to function in an increasingly psycho society. But surely we need to set our sights higher than this? Because if stress reduction is vital for coping, ultimately it would be much better to go beyond coping to positive change.

What about viewing yoga and meditation as practices that allow us to develop our human capacities to both reason and intuit – to value both science and spirituality – to care about teaching our children both math and art? What if we insisted that this is not some post-hippie flaky fantasy, but rather grounded in what some of our most sophisticated neuroscientists are discovering about the innate capacities of mind?

What if we got hard-headedly rational and insistent about the intrinsic value of our heart-felt, extra-rational experiences and revolutionized our world?

Because if there’s one thing that most people today can agree on, it’s that we need to radically change the dominant paradigm. And based on what I’ve learned through yoga, I believe that this might best be done by learning to equally develop and value the capacities of both sides of our brains.

Carol Horton has been practicing yoga for 15 years and is a Certified Forrest Yoga Teacher. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and is the author of Race and the Making of American Liberalism(Oxford University Press, 2005). Currently, she’s working on a new book tentatively entitled “21st Century Yoga: A Sociological Memoir.” You can read more of her work on Think Body Electric and Elephant Journal, and follow her onFacebook and Twitter.

From My Life Yoga

Quantum theory is an enigma. Richard Feynman a Nobel Prize winning physicist said, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” Which is another way of saying that quantum theory is not humanly understandable.

Niels Bohr, another Nobel Prize winning physicists, and an architect of quantum theory said, “If anybody is not shocked by quantum theory, he has not understood it.”

Quantum theory is a description of reality at the atomic level. However at this point all we have is mathematics that describes quantum mechanics. We have no corresponding physical description of what it means. It seems that there is a break down in our ability to describe what the mathematics in the theory is telling us.

So why is this? One reason is due to the fact that physicists have to by necessity use language and the mathematics that has an underlying basis on a space-time framework. When this hits against a reality that is not mechanical and is beyond space-time, the mathematics starts giving paradoxical answers.

Niels Bohr understood this and said, “We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.”

Clearly Bohr understood that our view of “reality” as describing something that “exists” implies an objectified picture of the world in space and time. He clearly understood the pitfall of language and words as there is within them a preexisting space-time framework and bias. This is why he said: “The word “reality” is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.”

The paradoxical nature of quantum theory has given rise to varying interpretation to what it all means. In spite of the caution pronounced by Bohr, many scientists and others have valiantly tried to interpret quantum theory. This has lead to mixed results and much confusion. We can only increase the confusion by trying to speak more about what quantum theory means. We already have a mess at our hands, best described as a “quantum mess”, as all and sundry try to take advantage of the confusion to pronounce interpretations that suit their own agenda.

We must hence be cautious about this. The attempt to over interpret quantum theory to show that it conforms to some eastern or mystical ideas may also be misguided as there is great room for misunderstanding and mistakes. The situation is equivalent to hearing somebody speak in a language that we do not understand, and then hearing somebody else speak in another language that we do not understand, and pronouncing that though we have no idea what each is saying, that both are speaking the same gibberish as it sounds similar!

But does this mean that there is nothing at all we can talk about reality? Is there no way out of the “quantum mess”? Well, we must proceed with caution. It may be safer to speak in terms of what reality is not rather than what it is. At this point this is what we can say what quantum science says for sure:

1. Reality is not local. This means that the concept of separation in space-time does not hold. This means that what we may think as separate and distinct objects may at some deeper level be connected.
2. What this seems to imply is that there seems to be vital aspects of reality that are best described asbeing beyond space-time.

If there is any other branch of thought in east or west, religion or philosophy, which speaks to the same ideas then we can say that we have some convergence. But going beyond this, we must tread with extreme care.

What does this mean from the point of view of yoga? All we can way from the point of view of yoga is that we do see some reinforcement of the idea of quieting the mind. The fact that quantum mechanics seems to imply the limitation of thoughts and ideas in understanding reality, provides some credence to the idea of quieting the mind to allow it to directly experience reality “as it is” without the lens of words and thoughts.

In the end, quantum theory should give those who are enamored by the power of science and logic to provide all the answers some pause. Finally, Einstien gets the last word:

“A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man.”

The San Francisco Bay Guardian listed Yoga on the Labyrinth in there annual ‘Best of the Bay’ issue.

“The donation-yoga class on the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral on Tuesday nights: beautiful setting, soulful music excellent teacher, diverse attendees.”

Written by Josh Fleet on Huffington Post

A Zen Master and a Kabbalist walk beside a lake. The roshi turns to the rabbi and says, “You know, the Japanese always leave without saying goodbye. But the Jews — they say goodbye without leaving.”

So summed up “Zen and Zohar On Repairing The World,” a recent weeklong spiritual gathering at theIsabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, Conn.

With koanic precision, the joke also highlights the differences between two meditation practices — Zen Buddhist sitting, with its emphasis on personal wisdom attained through silence, and Jewish contemplation, characterized by text-based reflection in a communal context — that have seemed, in the past half-century, to be one and the same.

Just look at the names. Many of the major American Buddhist teachers are Jewish. Besides Bernie Glassman and Eve Marko, who taught at the Zen and Zohar retreat, there’s Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Norman Fischer and Sylvia Boorstein, to name a few.

“They both feed ultimately into the same place,” says Gail Albert, a retreat participant, “Seeing the extraordinary complexity of the world … as manifestation of the same source.”

Jewish and Buddhist meditation may have the same goal, but they manifest differently. And increasingly, the Jewish practice is asserting its unique identity.

The Zen and Zohar retreat was as much a merging of Buddhism and Judaism as it was a pulling apart of the two worlds. Co-sponsored by the Jewish Meditation Center of Brooklyn, it brought together Kabbalah teachers Daniel and Hana Matt and Buddhist practitioners Glassman and Marko. Two dozen participants practiced meditation and Jewish mystical text study in the mornings and took part in Zen sits and counsel sessions in the afternoons.

All participants at the Zen and Zohar retreat were Jewish. Some, though, were recently returned to their roots after a journey into the belly of the Buddha.

Alison Laichter, 31, the founder of the Jewish Meditation Center (JMC), says that many people at the retreat asked her similar questions: How is this different than Buddhism? How is this related to Buddhism?

“Look,” she would respond, “Buddhism doesn’t have a monopoly on the breath.”

In other words, breathing is not a Buddhist act. And following the breath is not inherently religious — it’s human.

It took a while for Laichter to realize this for herself. Having grown up in a Conservative Jewish community with Holocaust survivor grandparents, she says she did everything “right,” Jewishly. But eventually, she only participated out of guilty obligation. Meanwhile, Laichter discovered meditation and, seeking to learn more, found that all the teachers and books on the subject were Buddhist.

“And then I was all Buddhist all the time,” she says.

Though she’d discarded her Jewish identity, Laichter went on Birthright, a free trip to Israel. During the program, someone handed her a book on Jewish meditation — “God Is A Verb: Kabbalah and the Practice of Mystical Judaism” by Rabbi David A. Cooper — and her eyes were opened. “It was like, ‘How come nobody mentioned this to me?’”

The book propelled her to learn more about Jewish contemplative practice and, after seeking other books and teachers in California, Laichter decided maybe she wasn’t fully Buddhist. For a time, she embraced her inner “Jubu,” a term popularized in “The Jew in the Lotus,” Rodger Kamenetz’ book about a delegation of Jews meeting with the Dalai Lama. Eventually though, the label felt inauthentic and unfair to both traditions.

“I decided I would declare myself post-Jubu,” Laichter says, and as she got deeper into a practice of Jewish meditation, she realized she could be culturally and spiritually Jewish. Now, at the Jewish Meditation Center, which is the fulfillment of a dream to have a place to meditate in a Jewish context with friends, she’s professionally Jewish. And her center is empowering a new generation of Jewish meditators to become teachers.

At the JMC, Jews (and non-Jews) gather weekly for communal meditation, or “sits.” Beginner sits, which happen once a month, are usually attended by 30 to 40 people and include brief, guided meditations, like one that Daniel Matt shared at the Zen and Zohar retreat: The most powerful name of God, Matt says — the one no one knows how to pronounce, the one people have all sorts of ways to avoid announcing — is spelled in Hebrew Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh. Switch the letters around to Heh-Vav-Yod-Heh, which pronounced Havaya and means “Being.” Following the breath in meditation, simply inhale Hava and exhale Yah. Over and over.

At the regular sits, a volunteer provides a kavannah, or intention, for the meditation. This is based on the Torah portion for that specific week and is an interpretation that arose for the person while sitting with the text. Community members, many of whom never connected with Jewish text before finding the JMC, now discover deep meaning in Bible stories, often related to meditative practice.

Miriam Eisenberger, 31, who was at the Zen and Zohar retreat, attended the first ever JMC sit almost three years ago. Now, she is a program associate for the center and often leads the meditations.

If meditation is a tool for redirection, a retraining of the brain, then infusing that sitting practice with Jewish texts, ideas and understanding make it “Jewish meditation.” Conversely, infuse Jewish texts with meditation, and the stories come alive.

“When you start off,” Eisenberger says, “it just seems like, ‘God says this and Moses did that and blah blah blah blah blah.’ And then something starts popping out.”

Another retreat participant, Gail Albert, through her own Jewish meditation practice, found hidden beneath those Five Books of Moses a narrative of internal spiritual growth through meditation. She has never been to the JMC, but the same book that brought Laicther back to Judaism, brought Albert to the Zen and Zohar retreat in early July.

Like meditation, how she got there is a story of diversion and return: She missed a different retreat with Rabbi Cooper, the author of “God Is A Verb,” at the Isabella Freedman Center because of an illness. In his book, God is described not as a being, but as a process. God is not “God,” a static thing. God is God-ing. Similarly, humans are not cookie-cutter creations. Humans are creation-ing. Even while sitting in silence — especially while sitting in silence — there is movement. Albert had a credit to attend another retreat, and Rabbi Cooper recommended she go to this one. So she went.

Previously, Albert received certification to teach Jewish meditation from Chochmat Halev, an independent renewal center for Jewish learning and meditation. Now, she teaches a weekly meditation class at her synagogue in Woodstock, N.Y., and has recently finished writing a book, “Mending the Heart, Tending the Soul: A Seeker’s Path to the Garden Within,” which retraces the narrative of the Torah into a guide for inner transformation. Just like the Israelites, she says, a dedicated meditation practitioner moves from innocence to self aggrandizement to enslavement to freedom to compassion and lovingkindness.

The meditation at Isabella Freedman altered her consciousness more than ever, Albert says. For her, that consciousness is one in which she directly experiences a sense of divinity. But just as Moses never went into the Land of Israel, the Jewish meditator never reaches enlightenment.

“Maybe the Dalai Lama does,” Albert says. “We get closer to it, but we don’t get there.”

By Shannon O’Brien- Press Mentor

In yoga, the breath is used as a way to center the body and mind. A yoga instructor will ask participants to focus on their breath as they gently move from position to position.

In yoga that is dedicated to assisting people dealing with trauma, or trauma-sensitive yoga, great attention is also placed on the language the instructor uses to guide the participants through the various yoga moves, while still focusing on the breath.

Kristal Perry-Gutierrez teaches “Healing Through Yoga” at Namaste Yoga Center in Springfield, Ill.

“I’ve been teaching yoga for 16 years, and this is a very different way of teaching,” she says.

In other forms of yoga, the instructor tells participants what to do as they move from step to step. In trauma-sensitive yoga, “we give them options gently, rather than telling them. We invite them; we encourage them. We just gently coach them into an awareness of a situation in the body,” she explains.

“We use words like notice, investigate, experiment, curious … language of inquiry. The purpose of using this kind of language is to build up tolerance to sensation,” she says.

Many people who have experienced trauma, “they haven’t had a choice often. They haven’t had a choice presented to them,” Perry-Gutierrez says.

In trauma-sensitive yoga, the language of the instructor reflects choices.

“The choice and control always remain with them,” she says.

Perry-Gutierrez received her master’s degree in human development counseling from the University of Illinois-Springfield. She was a yoga student at the time and decided to incorporate yoga into her master’s project.

“I decided to do yoga with children who had been sexually abused. I did a yoga course for eight weeks, twice a week with girls between the ages of 7 and 11,” she says. The girls gave her feedback with comments like, “Yoga helps you get the bad stuff out,” and “Yoga helps you be less afraid.”

“It was a qualitative study, and the results were pretty significant,” she says.

The skills developed while practicing the ancient discipline of yoga can assist trauma victims in several ways.

“Yoga helps people experience themselves in the presen

t moment,” Perry-Gutierrez says. “Trauma victims often are more oriented to past events and behave as though they are responding to past events.”

The practice also emphasizes mindfulness.

nse of self and your ability to feel secure is altered.”

Yoga helps trauma victims become reacquainted with their bodies.

“Many people who have experienced trauma may not even not

ice their body. It’s a way for them to befriend the body and remember what they already know but may have forgotten. They can learn how to use the body as a resource to help them calm down and return to a normal state of awareness (when they find themselves dealing with flashbacks or other trauma-induced stress).”
Colleen Dracos of Springfield has been participating in Perry

-Gutierrez’s class for two months and says it’s different each time she goes.

“Yoga helps you figure out what those (triggers) are and develop the realization that you are no longer balanced or centered, and you need to get back to center. It’s a process.”

This class was her first experience with yoga, and it’s made a diffe

r

ence in her life.

“When you have trauma, you actually lose the ability to sleep at night. After my first class with Kristal, I was amazed I could just go home and sleep. Tha

t’

s very significant,” she says.

She attends yoga class once a week and says she walks out with a smile on her face and a peaceful feeling that nearly lasts until the next session.

“It’s almost as if life returns,” she says, describing the effects the class has on her.

While Perry-Gutierrez’s class is open to the public, her goal is to keep the class small.

“We want it to be a safe place where people can create community connections,” she says. For those interested in taking the class, she likes to speak with them beforehand to discuss trauma-sensitive yoga and to determine if the class is an appropriate fit.

By Laura Stampler

Four years ago, in a small sewing cooperative in Rwanda’s capital city of Kigali, yoga instructor and author Deirdre Summerbell stepped in front of a class of a dozen frail women, each standing on a green or purple mat, and asked them to move their bodies in a series of twists and bends that make up the basic practice of Ashtanga yoga.

The women, HIV-positive survivors of the widespread rape that occurred during Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, reacted with confusion and trepidation.

“Their jaws dropped, and they opened their eyes wide during my demonstration,” Summerbell, 55, told The Huffington Post. “When I finished, a young woman put out her hand and said, ‘You know, that’s for children, and we have already reached old age. We are sick.’” The woman was 28.

So began the first class offered by Project Air, an initiative that uses yoga to help over 400 HIV-positive Rwandan women and their families cope with the trauma they endured when an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in only 100 days — and countless women were raped — as the Hutu majority tribe tried to wipe out the Tutsi minority. Even after the violation, mutilation and murder were over and the machetes were sheathed, the bodies and minds of the Rwandan women Project Air serves remained battlefields. While their immune systems struggled to fight even the most common illnesses, their minds were warding off traumatic flashbacks of war.

READ MORE

By Janine Robichaud Chase, Fosters.com
Using yoga with children at bedtime can be a very relaxing, unique way to make your nighttime routine a wonderful and loving experience. As adults, we view yoga as standing quietly on our mat, listening to the instructor giving us direction, following in silence. Adults try to tune in to the voice of the teacher, tune out the clutter in their mind and relax into each pose. Oh, but it’s so different for children!

Yoga has similar benefits for children as it does for adults. Benefits include increased flexibility, increased calmness, reduced stress, improved concentration, and a healthy body. The big difference in using yoga with children is the approach taken in introducing this ancient practice.

A great first step for parents who are interested in using yoga with children is to build yoga into the child’s nighttime routine. Nighttime yoga will calm your child before climbing into bed for the evening. Let’s take a look at how this might look for a parent . . .

Start by sitting on the floor with your child. The child can be seated on your lap, sitting beside you or even face to face. Take some deep breaths, filling your belly with lots of air — place your hand on your belly and feel the air as it moves in and out of your body. Count to four as you bring the air in, hold for one count and then allow the air to release as you count to four again. Repeat this two or three times. It is important to make the air fill your belly and not just your upper chest. Sometimes it is fun to lay on your back, put a small stuffed animal on your belly and watch it move up and down as you breathe in and out.

Next, you may move into a more active form of yoga practice. You may use poses that represent animals or living things, such as a cow, dog, cat or cobra. Always start in a quiet pose, such as a child’s pose or a rock pose (see description below), and then move into a more active pose, such as cobra pose, cow pose, cat pose or dog pose, and end back in a child’s pose to quiet the body and the mind. Consider using these poses to create a story with your child.

Use the following pose descriptions to incorporate into your bedtime ritual or routine:

– Child pose: Sit on your heels, with your arms at your side. Lean forward, head to floor.

– Cow pose: Kneel on the floor on all fours. Raise your head up and sink your back down into a deep curve.

– Cobra pose: Lie on your stomach, feet together, palms on the floor. Raise your head and shoulders and look up.

– Cat pose: Kneel on the floor on all fours. Arch your back like an angry cat.

– Dog pose: Hands and feet on the floor with buttocks in the air (an upside-down triangle).

– Relaxation pose: Lie flat on your back, arms at sides, feet slightly apart. Close your eyes and rest.

Finally, you may end nighttime yoga in one of two ways. You may use a simple body scan to relax each body part as it rests and melts into the bed. You may also end with a story. As the child lies on his or her back in a quiet relaxation pose with eyes closed, guide the child in imagining a story in his or her mind.

From Psych Central

A new study suggests practicing transcendental meditation (TM) improves brain function and reduces symptoms among students diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Researchers investigated the effects of the meditation practice on task performance and brain functioning in 18 ADHD students, ages 11 to 14 years old.

The study was conducted over a period of six months in an independent school for children with language-based learning disabilities in Washington, D.C., and is published in Mind & Brain, The Journal of Psychiatry.

Neuroscientist Fred Travis, Ph.D., and other researchers performed electroencephalogram (EEG) tests to measure and record the electrical activity of students’ brains as they performed a demanding computer-based visual-motor task. Successful performance on the task required attention, focus, memory, and impulse control.

The study showed improved brain functioning, increased brain processing, and improved language-based skills among ADHD students practicing the meditation technique.

In addition, students were administered a verbal fluency test. This test measured higher-order executive functions, including initiation, simultaneous processing, and systematic retrieval of knowledge. Performance on this task depends on several fundamental cognitive components, including vocabulary knowledge, spelling, and attention.

Experts say that EEG measurement can help to diagnose ADHD as the ratio of theta brain waves can be used to accurately identify students with ADHD from those without it.

“In normal individuals, theta activity in the brain during tasks suggests that the brain is blocking out irrelevant information so the person can focus on the task,” said  Travis. “But in individuals with ADHD, the theta activity is even higher, suggesting that the brain is also blocking out relevant information.”

And when beta activity, which is associated with focus, is lower than normal, Travis added, “it affects the ability to concentrate on task for extended periods of time.”

“Prior research shows ADHD children have slower brain development and a reduced ability to cope with stress,” said co-researcher William Stixrud, Ph.D.

“Virtually everyone finds it difficult to pay attention, organize themselves and get things done when they’re under stress,” he said. “Stress interferes with the ability to learn—it shuts down the brain. Functions such as attention, memory, organization, and integration are compromised.”