Medicine Philosophy

Meditation is a wonderful way to decrease stress, improve your health, and feel happier and more at peace in your life. Learn eight of the best, most basic meditations to reduce your stress, relieve anxiety, and improve your overall mental well-being.

Grandmaster Chan represents the sixth generation of the Wah Lum Kung Fu system and has over 60 years of martial arts experience. He has instructed thousands of students and has schools throughout the world. Grandmaster Chan has appeared on national television in Discovery Channel’s Secret of the Warrior’s Power and in ESPN.

We all know the history of science that we learned from grade school textbooks: how Galileo used his telescope to show that the earth was not the center of the universe; how Newton divined gravity from the falling apple; how Einstein unlocked the mysteries of time and space with a simple equation. This history is made up of long periods of ignorance and confusion, punctuated once an age by a brilliant thinker who puts it all together. These few tower over the ordinary masses, and in the traditional account, it is to them that we owe science in its entirety. This belief is wrong.

We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning-cost-benefit analysis-to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton reveals, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives.

At the height of World War I, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of science and epidemic disease.

This mindfulness meditation primer is really two books in one. The first is a guide for parents to the basics and benefits of meditation for children in terms of health, managing emotions, and promoting success in school. The second is a concise practice program for children, featuring Yupsi, the magical dragon. The tales of Yupsi, which are infused with a sense of adventure as well as compassion and empathy, provide a fun and engaging entree to the practice.

No matter where we are in our spiritual development, we all have questions about our practice and what we are experiencing - both the challenges and opportunities. How can I overcome my struggles to meditate more deeply? Is there a need for a guru, or can I rely on myself? Can I trust my intuition? Is it possible to hear the “Inner Word”, the voice of the soul, and how can I be sure that’s what I’m hearing? Is the Higher Self in the heart?

Feeling feverish, tired, or achy? Listening to Gina Kolata's engrossing account of the 1918 Influenza epidemic is sure to give you the chills. A gripping work of science writing, Flu addresses the prospects for a great epidemic recurring, and considers what can be done to prevent it.

Mind training is a comprehensive practice that is suitable for all types of students. It contains the entire path and does not depend on a person's background. Mind training nurses and cultivates the Buddha Nature - that pure seed of awakening that is at the very heart of every sentient being. It has the power to transform even egotistical self-clinging into self-lessness. Put into practice diligently, it is enough to lead you all the way to awakening.

This riveting audiobook takes the listener around the globe and through the centuries to discover how different cultures have sought to combat and treat physical pain. With colorful stories and sometimes frightening anecdotes, Dr. Thomas Dormandy describes a checkered progression of breakthroughs, haphazard experiments, ignorant attitudes, and surprising developments in human efforts to control pain.

“Hast thou attuned thy being to Humanity's great pain, O candidate for light?” This extraordinary, essential, sacred theosophical text has been carefully cross-referenced and reproduced for republication. It is a verbatim copy of the original 1889 edition, as close as can be reproduced digitally. The only exception being the correction of a very few extremely minor printing press typographical errors. Absolutely no changes have been made to the original writings, the teachings remain pure and completely intact.

This compassionate, personal, and illuminating work of nonfiction draws on the author's celebrated work as a director of socially conscious theater to connect listeners with the power of an ancient artistic tradition. For years Bryan Doerries has been producing ancient tragedies for current and returned servicemen and women, addicts, tornado and hurricane victims, and a wide range of other at-risk people in society.

In the late 1990s, shortly after arriving in the United States, it became clear to Dza Kilung Rinpoche that his Western students were unable to progress in meditation, as well as his students had back in Asia - and he realized that was because the pace of Western life made it difficult for them to relax. The Relaxed Mind contains instructions for the seven-phase meditation practice Dza Kilung Rinpoche developed for Westerners. It's very traditional but adapted to help those of us who live in a culture of distraction.

In 1953, a 27-year-old factory worker named Henry Molaison - who suffered from severe epilepsy - received a radical new version of the then-common lobotomy, targeting the most mysterious structures in the brain. The operation failed to eliminate Henry’s seizures, but it did have an unintended effect: Henry was left profoundly amnesic, unable to create long-term memories. Over the next 60 years, Patient H.M., as Henry was known, became the most studied individual in the history of neuroscience, a human guinea pig who would teach us much of what we know about memory today.

In the spring of 1940, the aspiring but unknown writer Albert Camus and budding scientist Jacques Monod were quietly pursuing ordinary, separate lives in Paris. After the German invasion and occupation of France, each joined the Resistance to help liberate the country from the Nazis and ascended to prominent, dangerous roles. After the war and through twists of circumstance, they became friends, and through their passionate determination and rare talent they emerged as leading voices of modern literature and biology, each receiving the Nobel Prize in their respective fields.

Blood carries life, yet the sight of it makes people faint. It is a waste product and a commodity pricier than oil. It can save lives and transmit deadly infections. Each one of us has roughly nine pints of it, yet many don’t even know their own blood type. And for all its ubiquitousness, the few tablespoons of blood discharged by 800 million women are still regarded as taboo: menstruation is perhaps the single most demonized biological event.

The West has taken to meditation with great enthusiasm. We contemplate. We concentrate. We embrace mindfulness techniques and a multitude of mantras. We have undertaken to “do” meditation. The Aspects of Meditation series is comprised of brief, precious texts in which Osho shows us the core of meditation is not about sitting silently or chanting a mantra. It is, instead, a question of understanding the subtle workings of the mind. In book one, Osho reintroduces us to our body, focusing on the “root” of the human, the soul.

Based on extensive cultural studies and long years of practice, Livia Kohn creates a new typology of meditation, based on six distinct ways of accessing the subconscious. In a special chapter on each type, she outlines the physiology, world view, and traditional practice as well as its modern medical adaptations and organizational settings. Providing a thorough theoretical framework combined with a comprehensive, analytical overview, the book greatly advances our understanding of meditation.

Ancient medical science told us our minds and bodies are one. So did philosophers of old. Now modern science and new research are helping us to understand these connections. In Healing and the Mind, Bill Moyers talks with physicians, scientists, therapists, and patients - people who are taking a new look at the meaning of sickness and health.

Thinkers everywhere are conscious of two things, first, that the region of mystery has never before been so clearly defined, and secondly, that that region can be entered more easily than has hitherto been the case; it may, therefore, perhaps be induced to render up some of its secrets if investigators of all schools pursue their search with determination.