Meditation has proven benefits that range from increased well-being to pain relief. For instance: * People who meditated for eight weeks produced more antibodies to a flu vaccine, which indicates it changed immune function in a positive way. * Meditation may help you maintain your ability to remember and focus on details as you age, according to research by Sara Lazar of Harvard Medical School. * Meditation lowers anxiety, depression, anger, and fatigue.

The goal of a creative mindfulness practice—the kind of practice that you really want—is not only the nonjudgmental observation of your thoughts but complete right thinking that leads to authenticity, creativity, and mental health.

We all know that the road of life is bumpy with unexpected drop-offs, accidents, and only the occasional smooth-sailing highway. I believe that meditation -- a practice for increasing awareness -- is truly a seat belt of mental health, a protection for us on the hazardous road of life.

Overall, adding meditation to one's life appears to improve an overall state of well-being (happiness, if you will), reduce anxiety, and foster healthy relationships. A geneticist I know describes Buddhist meditation techniques as a "technology with some 2,000 years of research and development."

Meditation is known to alter resting brain patterns, suggesting long lasting brain changes, but a new study by researchers from Yale, Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows meditation also is associated with increased cortical thickness.

Music and art have the strongest capacity to lead us to a meditating path, to produce that state in which we forget about all of our anxieties, worries, problems at work...

It has been said that men and women start to become great when they begin to listen to their inner voice, or their intuition. Intuition is so powerful that it has been studied and written about for thousands of years by some of the greatest men and women in history.

Many us of are addicted to thinking. We believe if we can just figure things out we can control others and the outcome of things. We want to control how people feel about us and treat us by saying just the right thing - so we have to think about it over and over to discover the right thing to say.

An interview. Based on his experience as a therapist and creativity coach, Eric Maisel created his book Ten Zen Seconds to provide an accessible mindfulness strategy based on traditional practices and cognitive psychology.