Sara Lazar

11 articles
UP 3 IF 2 SC 2 HW 1 NW 3
UP addiction recovery

Meditation and Mindfulness in Recovery

The integration of meditation and mindfulness practices into addiction recovery represents one of the most significant developments in the field over the past two decades. What began as a countercultural curiosity — "hippies meditating instead of medicating" — has become an evidence-based...

17 min · 6 researchers · 32 concepts
IF contemplative neuroscience

Interoception: The Hidden Sense That Connects Body Awareness to Consciousness

You were taught five senses in school: sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell. This taxonomy, inherited from Aristotle, is wrong.

17 min · 2 researchers · 19 concepts
SC consciousness

Neuroplasticity and Meditation: How Meditation Literally Rewires the Brain

In 1949, a Canadian neuropsychologist named Donald Hebb published a book called The Organization of Behavior that contained a single idea so powerful it rewrote the trajectory of brain science. The idea, later distilled into a seven-word axiom, is this: "Neurons that fire together wire together."

11 min · 5 researchers · 16 concepts
HW functional medicine

How Stress Makes You Sick: The Mind-Body Connection

Your stress response is 200 million years old. It was engineered for one scenario: something is trying to kill you right now.

17 min · 3 researchers · 49 concepts
UP intuition somatic intelligence

Cultivating Intuition: Practical Protocols for Upgrading the Intuitive Antenna

You already have intuition. You have always had it.

23 min · 4 researchers · 21 concepts
UP intuition somatic intelligence

Developing Somatic Intelligence: A Step-by-Step Protocol for Building the Body as a Consciousness Instrument

You spent twelve or more years in school learning to read, write, and calculate. You learned to analyze arguments, construct essays, and solve equations.

18 min · 4 researchers · 26 concepts
NW mirror neurons social consciousness

Interpersonal Neurobiology: Daniel Siegel's Framework for the Relational Mind

Ask a neuroscientist where the mind is, and they will point to the brain. Ask a philosopher, and they will point to the brain (or claim the question is meaningless).

19 min · 3 researchers · 34 concepts
SC neurochemistry mystical states

The Neurochemistry of the Dark Night of the Soul: Why the Path Through Darkness Has a Biological Basis

Every contemplative tradition describes it. Every serious practitioner encounters it.

17 min · 5 researchers · 25 concepts
IF sound frequency entrainment

40 Hz Gamma Entrainment and Alzheimer's Disease: How Flickering Light and Pulsing Sound Clear the Brain

In 2016, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology led by Li-Huei Tsai and Ed Boyden published a paper in Nature that stunned the neuroscience world. The finding was almost too simple to believe: when mice genetically engineered to develop Alzheimer's disease were exposed to flickering...

15 min · 2 researchers · 14 concepts
NW soul psychology

Meditation as Medicine: A Deep Dive

Meditation is not one thing. It is a family of practices as diverse as the cultures that produced them — spanning continents, millennia, and radically different models of what the mind is, what consciousness is, and what liberation means.

14 min · 7 researchers · 26 concepts
NW soul psychology

Mindfulness: The Clinical Evidence

In 1979, a molecular biologist named Jon Kabat-Zinn did something audacious. He took the essence of Buddhist meditation — stripped of religious language, ritual, and cosmology — and brought it into the basement of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.

11 min · 2 researchers · 15 concepts