Research has shown that the state of your mental health has an impact on your physical health; thus, ameliorating mental health problems might improve physical health, extend lifespan, and reduce healthcare costs. Not every tool or practice works for every person. It takes some experimentation to learn which techniques effectively calm your fight-or-flight response and engage your rest-and-digest recovery system. Those who are willing to try might just gain a competitive edge. Mentally strong people are willing to learn new modes of self-development, adapt to our constantly changing world, take responsibility for their improvements and periodic failures, and assume control of their lives. They do not let negative environments or distractions deter them from their goals. The research-based practices here are divided into exercises that address specific obstacles to mental strength (perfectionism, imposter syndrome, pessimism, emotion regulation, and self-awareness of introversion, extroversion, and neurosignature strengths) and proactive strategies to empower your rest-and-digest system (growth mindset, mindfulness, meditation, nature therapy, creative play, and interacting with dogs).

We follow Teresa Langford in her efforts to navigate the treatment options she faced with her multiple illnesses. Through barriers and breakthroughs she found a way to retrain her stress response system and achieve a sense of resilience for a renewed life as a partner and parent and teacher. This chapter discusses the range of approaches that have shown promise for improving the treatment of stress-related conditions, closing with some lessons learned about the challenges of retraining our dysregulated stress response systems.

The Epilogue argues that, during the first decades of the twenty-first century, the Buddha has become part of Western popular culture, on occasion little more than a commodity on the shelf in the modern supermarket of individual spiritualities. Thus, whether the story of the Buddha is history or legend, fact or fiction, he remains an exemplary human figure, whose life provides a ‘romantic’ ideal to be followed. As the Oriental ‘other’, now acceptably disenchanted, the Buddha is a symbolic antidote to the ills of modernity in the West. The disenchanted Buddha is thus able to serve as the foundation of a new Western naturalised Buddhism. Naturalised Buddhism provides technologies of self-formation for everyday life in this world. Here, the Buddha is a this-worldly sage and the philosopher of a new form of human consciousness focused upon the practices of meditation and mindfulness.

This chapter presents the ideas, concepts, and terminology of "The basic teachings of the Buddha" as they are found in the earliest sources of the Pali texts and the Theravada tradition.

This chapter considers the merits of the Buddha’s epistemological and moral claims that meditation and mindfulness are conducive to the fully enlightened state in which no kamma is generated and one lives as a liberated Arahant.

Focusing on the Middle English poem, Pearl (with evidence from other literary works), this essay considers how the initial situation of the Dreamer explores a half-dozen principles for literary invention that are distinctively medieval, including personal displacement and feelings of anxiety, bewilderment and marvelling. These qualities define the initial state of mind which enables the Dreamer’s visions to occur and develop. Aristotle wrote in his Metaphysics (I. 2) that philosophising begins with wondering and questioning, a principle revered throughout the Middle Ages. Though all these elements of what we now call ‘creativity’ have their roots in practices of invention and argumentation described in ancient philosophy and rhetoric, the particular shapes that these classical principles assume by the late Middle Ages derive from long-established traditions of monastic meditation and contemplative envisioning more than from academic rhetoric and logic. Bonaventure’s opening to his Itinerarium mentis ad Deum recounts the marvel of Francis of Assisi’s seraphic vision, adapting it as a general method for meditation; Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale turns the marvels of the flying horse and visionary mirror into problems in optics and engineering. Pearl turns the dreamer’s initial wondering within a brilliant fantasy to the means for understanding his own human condition.

It is necessary to maintain healthy and productive responses to the stresses and declines associated with aging. A key factor is the choice of attitude. It is critical to see opportunities for growth in aging – they are there to be had. Aging is accompanied by declines in the speed of learning, working memory, and memory capacity. These declines are not caused by disease and are nearly universal. Devoting memory resources to what is important, and ignoring things that are not important is an excellent strategy. The best way to avoid negative emotions caused by events and experiences in the past is to be actively involved in the present moment and planning for the future. Meditation is a valuable method to practice letting go and enhancing your awareness of the opportunities that are available now. Aging also presents an opportunity to demonstrate self-compassion. Frequently, persons express compassion to others throughout their lives with loving devotion and selfless actions, without realizing that that are worthy of compassion themselves. Psychological reserve can be enhanced by attention to the development of self-compassion and appreciation of what give your life meaning.

The concluding chapter provides a summary of the comparative textual analyses that have contributed to the proposed reconstruction of the sequence of practices the Buddha is most likely to have personally taught as the means to achieve enlightenment. It goes on to offer an interpretation of the advanced meditative techniques through which each of the three knowledges is achieved. This interpretation is based on personal introspective examination of the efficacy of specific meditative practices and draws on the Thai monk Buddhadasa’s understanding of how the language used by the Buddha to describe these knowledges should be construed. Support is provided by reference to the widespread belief at the time of the Buddha in microcosm–macrocosm parallelism. The chapter concludes by drawing out some of the implications that the methodology of comparative analysis of texts has for the wider field of Buddhist studies.

Our attitude is something we carry around with us at all times. As the psychiatrist Victor Frankl said, “Our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude.” Our attitude is determined in large part by the focusing of our attention. If our attention is focused on losses and regrets, our attitude will be gloomy. If our attention is focused on opportunities, such as the opportunity of aging, our attitude will be more positive. This is a fundamental daily choice. Because the world is too multifaceted for us to process all possible perceptions, it is our attention which is critical for the quality of our experience. Our attitude is determined by the object of our attention. And our capacity of paying attention can be exercised and practiced every day. Viewing aging as an opportunity helps to focus the reality that what happens to us is determined in large part by what we do. Paying attention can enhance all of our reserves. Diet, physical and mental activities, and social and family contacts are all critical. Our enhancement of the four reserve factors will increase our chance to be healthy and fit as we age.

Buddhist origins and discussion of the Buddha’s teachings are amongst the most controversial and contested areas in the field. This bold and authoritative book tackles head-on some of the key questions regarding early Buddhism and its primary canon of precepts. Noting that the earliest texts in Pali, Sanskrit, and Chinese belong to different Buddhist schools, Roderick S. Bucknell addresses the development of these writings during the period of oral transmission between the Buddha’s death and their initial redaction in the first century bce. A meticulous comparative analysis reveals the likely original path of meditative practice applied and taught by Gotama. Fresh perspectives now emerge on both the Buddha himself and his enlightenment. Drawing on his own years of meditative experience as a Buddhist monk, the author offers here remarkable new interpretations of advanced practices of meditation, as well as of Buddhism itself. It is a landmark work in Buddhist studies.

Traditional Western science has had little interest in the concept of mind, and has only recently begun to recognise the relationship between spirituality and health. A better understanding of mind has allowed us to establish the scientific concepts behind the spiritual dimension of healing, and the close correlation between religious and spiritual practice and positive changes in a number of stress-related physiological systems. Meditation and prayer have both been shown to improve brain function, and together with practices such as forgiveness and positive thinking, and a supportive social structure, have been shown to benefit both mental and physical health. Meditation has particular clinical applications in those conditions where high arousal and anxiety are a part of the pathology. Controlled studies of prayer have produced mixed outcomes, but prayer is a widespread religious practice and may have positive effects on the person praying – for example, in terms of pain relief.

This chapter addresses some of the discrepancies and anomalies that occur in textual accounts of mindfulness. Analysis begins by comparing three different versions of the core text, the “Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness”, one in Pali and two in Chinese, deriving from three different schools of early Buddhism. Discrepancies exist not only among these three versions but also between this core text and other accounts of mindfulness practice. These inconsistencies have attracted the attention of meditators and scholars alike. Three previous studies are discussed, from which it is concluded that confusion has arisen from failure clearly to distinguish between awareness (of breathing, body posture, etc.) and mindfulness as a mental discipline and that the ancestral practice from which the three versions derive is most likely to have comprised just the components that the three versions have in common.

Women over 40 who are hoping to conceive or pregnant should optimize their lifestyle as quickly as possible to improve their fecundity and chance of having a healthy baby. There is a paucity of data regarding lifestyle factors and fertility and pregnancy. Women should be informed of the areas in which there is extensive evidence such as the need for preconception folic acid and optimizing BMI and be counselled on the matters that are less clear cut for instance physical activity. A Mediterranean diet has been shown to improve fecundity in women who had previously had difficulty conceiving. Women should be counselled on taking folic acid whilst trying to conceive, and vitamin D if they are found to be deplete. All women undergoing fertility treatment should not smoke and should be educated about possible risks of alcohol and caffeine consumption. The importance of sleep and stress reduction should be recognized and women over 40 planning to undergo fertility treatments should manage these as best as possible.

Hermetic spirituality was focused on healing the embodied soul from its corruption by the passions. Analysis of the Poimandres as a visionary revelation in which Hermes Trismegistus receives enlightenment about the nature of reality and the human predicament.

The mind is the seat of trance. The ways that we think, consciously and unconsciously, shape our creative process and structure its creative trance. Every thought we have, every movement we make, changes the landscape of our brain, producing its own neural signature from the solution of everyday problems to meditations that progress toward transcendent states. With its contradictory styles of thought, creativity has a unique assembly of neural processes not usually found in ordinary cognition, and is associated with the release of dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, and oxytocin, and can be shaped by insight and synesthesia. Cognitive neuroscience reveals the heterogeneity of creative trance states through activation of different brain regions, such as the medial temporal lobe memory network, the prefrontal cortex, both brain hemispheres, and significantly the default mode network, which is associated with divergent thinking and daydreaming. As the Nobel Prize–winning pharmacologist James Black said, “I daydream like mad.”