How I learned to stop worrying and love high-tech meditation

lean back against the gray, microfiber-lined cushions inside an egg-shaped pod, and prop my feet on the matching footrest. Black headphones fit snugly over my ears as a spa concierge taps on a Samsung tablet mounted beside me.

"This meditation dome is your personal retreat," the screen reads. "It is a space to calm your senses, relieve stress and align your mind and body."

Exactly what I need.

The concierge lowers an illuminated white dome over my body, making me feel like I'm inside a cocoon. I can see my feet peeking out from under the pod, warding off any sense of claustrophobia. The dome is bathed in a soft light from the LEDs, which glow bright green (a color that "stimulates inner peace," according to the brochure).

A woman's soothing voice tells me to close my eyes. "Take the brief pause we all need to live our most meaningful lives," the voice says through my headphones. "Your body and mind need different things every day, and that undefinable part of yourself will respond in turn. So take this time, just for you, and breathe. Welcome to your journey to the present."

For the next 20 minutes, all I have to do is relax.  This may be the best assignment I've ever had.

The author tries out a Somadome, where dark blue light eases stress. It seems to be working.

I'm at the Ojai Valley Inn & Spa, about 33 miles from Santa Barbara, California, and I'm sitting in a Somadome. This "personal meditation pod" combines color therapy, binaural beats (using sound to influence mood) and special energy healing tiles to help people bliss out. 

Yep, it's a high-tech machine that helps people shed stress that's too often brought on by a nonstop diet of emails, texts, tweets and world events. All our tech is freaking us out.

The result is that most Americans — me included — are feeling stressed, according to theAmerican Psychological Association's anxiety meter, which has been surveying the population's stress levels since 2007. More than four out of five US adults constantly or often check their email, texts and social media accounts, says the APA, adding "this attachment to devices and the constant use of technology is associated with higher stress levels for these Americans."

We can't help ourselves. That's because every time we post, share, "like" a comment or look for something on our phones, we get a sense of reward that keeps us coming back for more. This feeling triggers our brains to release dopamine, the same chemical that causes us to crave food, sex and drugs. Dopamine is at its most stimulating when the rewards come at unpredictable times, such as phone alerts, social media likes and texts.

"Really, we're still cave people," says Martin Talks, founder of the Digital Detoxing consultancy and author of the book, "A to Z of Digital Detoxing."

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What do you want to do today? Somadome offers 20 different sessions, depending on your goal. Some are guided, while others simply have calming sounds like waves and pulsing binaural beats. Josh Miller/CNET

"When there's an alert, I must see it. It literally becomes a matter of life or death because people can't resist looking at it, [even] while driving a car."

Meditation — the 5,000-year-old practice of shutting out the mental noise rattling in our heads — can help.  Studies show it may lower blood pressure, improve heart rate and reduce anxiety. Researchers at Harvard University found that meditation can rebuild gray matter in the hippocampus — part of the brain associated with learning, memory, compassion and self-awareness — in just eight weeks. Cancer patients say it makes treatment more bearable.

"There's something really powerful about just being in your own little world for a minute," Sarah Attia, the CEO and creator of Somadome, tells me before I visit Ojai.

When my mother, who was diagnosed with breast cancer almost two years ago, told me she found meditation to be calming, I wondered if it could help me too. But the question was how to get my brain — and gadgets — to shut off long enough to actually de-stress. Just thinking about feeling less stressed makes me more tense. Could technology actually calm me down instead of being the conduit to my stress?

So began my "journey to the present."

No smudgment here

I stand very still in the dimly lit treatment room, arms raised slightly as a woman waves a piece of burning sage around me. The scent wafts through the air, calming me even as my brain tries to process what the heck is going on.

I'm being smudged.

This is the first step in Ojai's Sound Energy Therapy treatment. "Smudging is just clearing the energetic fields of you, of me, of the room," says Susan Wichmann, the bodyworker and healer conducting my session.

I lie down on a massage table, close my eyes and slow my breathing. The sound of wind chimes echoes softly in the room. The next thing I know, I'm jolted awake by a feeling of vibrations on my abdomen. I had dozed off somewhere between the wind chimes and vibrating Tibetan bowls placed on different parts of my body where my energy was "stuck." Wichmann says her techniques get my energy moving again.

Link Source: cnet.com