Hatha Yoga is an important foundation for meditation according to Patanjali, meditation happens far more effectively, readily, once the body has been prepared.
In ” The Leaders Way, The Art of Making The Right Decisions“, the Dalai Lama and a Management Consultant, Van Den Muyzenberg see how Eastern Philosophy and better Corporate Lesdership are compatible. They site a Harvard study which found that long time meditators have more gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with working memory and executive decision-making. It’s well documented that our frontal cortex shrinks as we get older, it’s harder to remember things. But here, 50 year old meditators had as much Gray matter as 25 year olds.
Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, was one of the first scientists to take the anecdotal claims about the benefits of meditation and mindfulness and test them in brain scans… [more]