Venue : Illawong community centre, Illawong . Time 3.00 to 5.00pm. Places filling up fast enq 0419 236266

Today the movement has spread the world over and it started in America. Not surprisingly the movement is made up largely from writers, artists, musicians, alternate life stylers, health care providers and leading edge thinkers.

The common conception is that capital means wealth or money in the bank. This thinking fails to recognise that the true source of capital is the creativity of the mind from which the accumulation of money is only the consequence. America has inspired the world with it’s creative genius. It is this that is the “capital” out of which wealth has come about along with millions of jobs and the rise in prosperity. It not only lifted it’s own people but carried the rest of the world with it. Everyone is free to create the next new idea or great invention. Creative minds birthed the majority of great industries and inventions that support the economy.

An enormous side benefit that has come out of this has been the emergence of another great American institution, that of philanthropy. These amazing people have returned to the world great and immeasuarable benefits of their generosity.

My wife Vicki and I have had the great honour of been invited to America to celebrate and honour such a life and to play our music at a most inspiring event. We return to Australia with great faith in the American dream. Long live America.

Fifteen healthy volunteers (who had never meditated) attended four 20-minute classes to learn a meditation technique known as “focused attention.” This is a form of mindfulness meditation where people are taught to attend to the breath and let go of distracting thoughts and emotions.

Both before and after meditation training, study participants’ brain activity was examined using arterial spin labeling magnetic resonance imaging (ASL MRI) to capture longer duration brain processes. During these scans, a pain-inducing heat device was placed on each participant’s right leg. This device heated a small area of their skin to 120 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature that most people find painful, over a 5-minute period.

Scans taken after meditation training showed that the pain ratings for every participant were reduced.

At the same time, meditation significantly reduced brain activity in the primary somatosensory cortex, an area that is crucially involved in creating the feeling of where and how intense a painful stimulus is.

The research also showed that meditation increased brain activity in areas including the anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula and the orbito-frontal cortex, which shape how the brain builds an experience of pain from nerve signals from the body. The more these areas were activated by meditation, the more that pain was reduced.

The decreases ranged from 11 to 93 percent, which is a greater reduction in pain than with morphine or other pain-relieving drugs, says researcher Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D.

Zeidan and colleagues believe that meditation has great potential for clinical use because so little training was required to produce such dramatic pain-relieving effects. “This study shows that meditation produces real effects in the brain and can provide an effective way for people to substantially reduce their pain without medications,” he said.

Their work appears April 6 in The Journal of Neuroscience.

At the beginning of the study, each participant had an EEG. They were told: “Relax with your eyes closed, and focus on the flow of your breath at the tip of your nose; if a random thought arises, acknowledge the thought and then simply let it go by gently bringing your attention back to the flow of your breath.”

Eleven people were then invited to take part in meditation training, while a control group of another 10 were told they would be trained later. The 11 were offered two half-hour sessions a week, and encouraged to practice as much as they could between sessions, but there wasn’t any particular requirement for how much they should practice.

After five weeks, the researchers did an EEG again on the 11 persons who did the meditation training. Each had done, on average, about seven hours of training and practice.

Ref.: Jane Anderson, et al., Frontal EEG Asymmetry Associated with Positive Emotion is Produced by Very Brief Meditation Training, Psychological Science, 2011; in press

Tonight Vicki and I will cook up a storm for our friends and hosts as we watch the traditional fireworks as they light up the night time skies in Burbank.