How to activate your happiness center


21 Apr, 2012
 None    Philosophy

This is what Rael has been teaching for the past 38 years: Happiness is a decision and you can activate your happiness center at will through meditation.


maitreya2.jpg

This is what Rael has been teaching for the past 38 years: Happiness is a decision and you can activate your happiness center at will through meditation.
All Raelians have measured the benefits of their daily meditation regimen in their overall well being and scientific researches have confirmed over the past 10 years that meditation induces functional changes in the brain of the practitioners.
Richard Davidson at the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience, UW-Madison is one of the pioneers in that domain and his studies on the brain of a group of Tibetan monks who had practiced meditation for a minimum of 10,000 hours have shown the differences between the monk's brains and a 'normal' brain.
Neurobiologist Sara Lazar from the Massachusetts General Hospital, has also been looking at how the practice of yoga and meditation affect emotions and cognitive performance and found a significant activity in the prefrontal cortex as well as the insula — a region near the frontal portion of the brain — of long-term meditators who participated in a 1-week intensive meditation retreat.
All these researchers actually report a greater activation of the left prefrontal brain compared to the right part of the brain during meditation, and more so when the meditation focused on loving-kindness and compassion.
It is also commonly accepted that positive emotions are associated with a greater activity in the left prefrontal region, while negative emotions are linked to a greater activity in the right prefrontal cortex.
Based on the principle that meditation brings about a state of well being, it was reasonable to expect to see a greater activity in the left prefrontal cortex among meditation practitioners compared to non-practitioners.
Some studies using brain imaging techniques like the single photon emission computed tomography, or SPECT, or Infrared Spectroscopy, IR, have shown that during meditation the blood flow increases in the prefrontal regions, and more specifically, the left prefrontal region. However most of these studies have measured the brain activity at rest and during meditation and compare the results under these two conditions. To our knowledge, no research has been conducted to determine if it is possible to stimulate the blood flow at will in the left prefrontal region during meditation.

What Maitreya Rael is however saying is that it is possible to target the left prefrontal region of our brain and increase the blood flow there and thus the activity of this region and the positive emotions associated to it.

This is how he formulates this meditation exercise: “Concentrate on your brain’s power and strength and its exceptional ability to harmonize itself and to choose happiness, by visualizing the blood flow and the heat that is created in the left frontal region, where happiness lies.”

«Remember to always focus on the front left side of your brain, where the happiness centre lies. Every time you are happy, more blood comes here. At the same time, each time you send blood here through meditation, you are happier. So you can create happiness by feeling this part more than the rest of your body. Feel it. Feel this part becoming hotter, like a little fire inside. Happiness centre. And you will have a beautiful life. Never stop feeling it…»

In other words, just as several therapeutic visualization exercises that invite the subject to visualize the healing of a specific organ, or the scarring of a wound, or the strengthening of the immune system, Maitreya Rael invites the meditation practitioner to intentionally stimulate the blood flow in the left prefrontal region of the brain in order to increase the level of happiness that it generates.

To our knowledge, no scientific research has shown it was possible to target the left prefrontal cortex and intentionally stimulate the blood flow in that area.

Daniel Chabot, a Raelian Guide, MA, in charge of teaching in the Raelian Movement Structure, decided to explore that possibility. To do so, he used a device marketed by the company Thought Technology: the TT-pIR and Procomp Infinity Device. Thought Technology's latest innovation provides easy measurement of forehead infrared temperature emissions. The headgear incorporates two very sensitive and highly accurate passive infrared sensors 3.8cm apart and mounted on a headset to provide responsive monitoring and training of heat radiated from the forehead, i.e., the prefrontal lobes of the brain.
What makes this technology interesting is that it is possible, through neurofeedback, to measure and even train the prefrontal region of the brain without worrying about background noise from muscle contractions or even blinking, which can affect the electroencephalogram (EEG) and make the recording of electrical activities in this important region of the brain difficult, to the point of skewing the results.

You may read the full account of his first experiments downloading this file now Happiness Center (English).
Happinesscenter Rn
This Figure shows the difference in heat in his left and right prefrontal cortex during a 30-minute meditation, with eyes opened. In the very beginning, we see that the heat was higher in the right prefrontal region than in the left. But quickly, the heat in the left prefrontal region gradually increased throughout the exercise and surpassed the heat in the right. According to Daniel, the sensations of inner well being were very powerful. In fact, the meditation exercise consisted in generating a state of great inner well being, while visualizing the blood flow in the left prefrontal area. “With my eyes opened, I could simultaneously use the visual feedback from the graphs in order to stimulate the progression.” says Daniel.
“While examining my results, I remembered Maitreya Raël’s teachings about how meditation, happiness, and awakening are states of mind. “We cannot do happy, we cannot know happy, we cannot have happy. We can only BE happy because happiness is a state of mind and not something we can own, do or know,” as Maitreya Rael said and taught us for years. And the evidence of this was unfolding before my very eyes. When I would see myself “do” rather than “be,” nothing would be working.”

To learn more about the happiness teachings of Maitreya Rael, you may attend his one week Happiness Academies. The next one starts next week, on April 28th, in Okinawa, Japan. To find the nearest Happiness Academy for you, please go to www.rael.org/seminars.
See you there...?