Usually, the most competitive aspect of meditation is how many likes you’re going to get on the ensuing Instagram post.

Drop those hashtags in – #namaste #meditation #zen #namaslay – and watch the magic happen.

Well, that’s old school stuff, because now you can actually compete in something dubbed “Competitive Meditation”.

For the deets on how you can make the mindful art of meditation competitive, we head to Mashable, who actually invented the ‘sport’ last year.

Competitive Meditation is a fledgling sport I invented in which two players go head to head, literally, for 5 minutes. The game is administered by a referee.

In a Competitive Meditation match, players wear a brain-sensing headband called the Muse. The headband brings a thin strip of electrodes to the forehead. It is able to pick up weak electrical signals from the brain via EEG (electroencephalogram, a standard medical brainwave-detecting test). The Muse is fast becoming an industry standard device; other apps are building atop its “EEG Anywhere” platform.

The Muse app translates your brain’s sparks of electricity, which fire any time you have a thought, into audio cues. It translates silence into another audio cue. That second cue become an objective measurement of how successful your meditation is — in other words, a score…

When a player’s brain is noisy, various nature sounds are heard (the default is a rainstorm). Every time their brain is quiet for 5 seconds, the sound of a bird chirping is played. Every further 5 seconds of quiet equals one more bird. The app records the total number of birds heard. The player that hears the most birds in 5 minutes — from 1 to a maximum of 60 — is the winner.

OK, hectic.

The current world record is 54 birds, in case you wondering.

Now there’s plenty to be said about all of this, but I’d like to skip ahead to a very important question.

Is trash-talking allowed?

Competitive Meditation matches themselves should be held in silence, with or without a live audience. But players should not be penalized for laughter; it’s a release of tension that can actually help both sides find their calm. It is, after all, an inherently ridiculous setup.

Before and after the game, however, trash-talking is absolutely encouraged.

Superb.

I’m already building up my armoury of chirps about Constantia Village, the swingers club that is La Parada on a Sunday, and the fact that having three glasses of white wine with lunch every day means you have a problem, Janet.

Sorry, actually you can’t talk to the manager.

We are worried because we care.

Some tips from the inventor:

…there is one attitude that seems to work for everyone, and that is lightheartedness about the whole exercise. The players who come into the room with clenched fists — the ones with something to prove to themselves, the preemptively defensive ones, or the ones who won a prior game and think they have to keep up a victory streak — are almost guaranteed to hear nothing but rain.

But the ones who come in with ridiculous grins, the ones who get the joke, who understand it’s just a game, who loosen up and have fun with it? They are the champions, my friends.

I don’t care if you hear rain or if you hear birds – you’re a winner in my books.

Janet, we’re here for you, too.

[source:mashable]