In the material concept of life we are busy in the matter of sense gratification, as if we were in the lower, animal stage. A little elevated from this status of sense gratification, one is engaged in mental speculation for the purpose of getting out of the material clutches. A little elevated from this speculative status, when one is intelligent enough, one tries to find out the supreme cause of all causes-within and without. And when one is factually on the plane of spiritual understanding, surpassing the stages of sense, mind, and intelligence, he is then on the transcendental plane. This chanting of the Hare Krsna mantra is enacted from the spiritual platform, and thus this sound vibration surpasses all lower strata of consciousness-namely sensual, mental, and intellectual. There is no need, therefore, to understand the language of the mantra, nor is there any need for mental speculation nor any intellectual adjustment for chanting this maha-mantra. It is automatic, coming from the spiritual platform, and as such, anyone can take part in the chanting without any previous qualification. In a more advanced stage, of course, one is not expected to commit offenses on the grounds of spiritual understanding.
But there is no doubt that chanting takes one immediately to the spiritual platform, and one shows the first symptom of this in the urge to dance along with the chanting of the mantra. We have seen this practically. Even a child can take part in the chanting and dancing. Of course, for one who is too entangled in material life, it takes a little more time, but even such a materially engrossed man is raised to the spiritual platform very quickly. When the mantra is chanted by a pure devotee of the Lord in love, it has the greatest efficacy on hearers, and as such this chanting should be heard from the lips of a pure devotee of the Lord, so that immediate effects can be achieved.
The word Hara is the form of addressing the energy of the Lord, and the words Krsna and Rama are forms of addressing the Lord Himself. Both Krsna and Rama mean "the supreme pleasure," and Hara is the supreme pleasure energy of the Lord, changed to Hare in the vocative. The supreme pleasure energy of the Lord helps us to reach the Lord.
The material energy, called maya, is also one of the multi-energies of the Lord. And we, the living entities, are the marginal energy of the Lord. The living entities are described as superior to material energy. When the superior energy is in contact with the inferior energy, an incompatible situation arises; but when the superior marginal energy is in contact with the superior energy, Hara, it is established in its happy, normal condition.
These three words, namely Hare, Krsna, and Rama, are the transcendental seeds of the maha-mantra. The chanting is a spiritual call for the Lord and His energy to give protection to the conditioned soul. This chanting is exactly like the genuine cry of a child for its mother
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
More than just relaxing, meditation helps improve self-image of anxiety sufferers, Stanford Research
Before and after meditating, participants in the study went into an MRI scanner that observed their brain activity. The findings suggest that mindfulness meditation might help people view themselves differently.
The thought of public speaking gives most people butterflies in their stomach. But for those suffering from social anxiety disorder (SAD), the idea of addressing a crowd or being evaluated in any other social situation often triggers more than just jittery nerves. Headaches, sleep problems and persistent thoughts of failure and embarrassment are common problems for those with SAD.
Researchers at Stanford now have some advice for those prone to such anxiety: Slow down and listen to the sights and sounds around you, including those of your own body.
In a study headed by psychology researcher Philippe Goldin, participants with SAD underwent Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction—a form of meditation that helped them direct their attention to the sensations of simple things like breathing, lying down or just walking around. After the two-month meditation training, participants were less anxious and thought of themselves more positively.
Results of Goldin's study are slated for publication in the August issue of the Journal of Cognitive Psychology.
People with social anxiety disorder tend to be overly critical of themselves and often believe others are assuming the worst about them. While many people beat themselves up once in a while, people with SAD get stuck on negative views of themselves, Goldin said.
"The idea is that if a person has the psychological flexibility to shift freely from one mode of thinking to another mode, then that is a sign of health," said Goldin. "It's when we get stuck in certain thinking patterns that our beliefs become maladaptive."
Helping people make even small changes to how they think about themselves is a difficult task, but one that has the potential to improve the lives of millions of people, Goldin said.
SAD is one of the most common psychological disorders, affecting up to 12 out of every 100 Americans. It usually strikes early—at around 10 years of age. But the disorder is often not diagnosed or treated and leads to other psychological problems later in life, Goldin said.
"Often people will subsequently show up in their 20s or 30s with depression or substance abuse and then if you dig below that you find that what preceded all of that was an internal anxiety about performing in social situations," Goldin said.
Goldin—along with postdoctoral scholar Wiveka Ramel and psychology Professor James Gross—found that nine sessions of mindfulness meditation training made people with social anxiety disorder feel less anxious and less depressed and improved their self-views.
Goldin said the mindfulness meditation works because it teaches people how to focus on things other than their personal criticisms.
Before and after meditating, participants went into an MRI scanner that observed their brain activity and were told to decide if various positive and negative adjectives presented on a screen appropriately described them.
After meditation, participants were more likely to pick positive words like "admired" and "loved" and less likely to choose negative adjectives like "coward" and "afraid."
Mindfulness meditation helped reduce people's habit of grasping at negative attributes, Goldin said.
"Often, people who have either depression or anxiety have a poor or negative self-view," he said.
The meditation also appeared to calm the brain circuitry associated with self-describing adjectives such as "weak" and "insecure" or "strong" and "able." The finding suggests that mindfulness meditation might make it easier for people to shift between ways of viewing themselves, Goldin said.
The mindfulness meditation also caused an increase in brain activity in areas that involve visual attention. People with social anxiety often try to avoid things by diverting their gaze from people and things that might be threatening. But this increase in visual attention "means that instead of running away they were staying with the stimulus," Goldin said.
Goldin said the next step in his research is to compare the long-term effects of the mindfulness meditation training to aerobic exercise and cognitive-behavioral therapy. This work is currently under way and the researchers are offering free training sessions to people interested in participating. More information can be found at http://waldron.stanford.edu/~caan/.
Casey Lindberg is a writing intern at the Stanford News Service.
Meditation found to increase brain size, Harvard research
People who meditate grow bigger brains than those who don't.
Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of our brains. Brain scans they conducted reveal that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input.
In one area of gray matter, the thickening turns out to be more pronounced in older than in younger people. That's intriguing because those sections of the human cortex, or thinking cap, normally get thinner as we age.
"Our data suggest that meditation practice can promote cortical plasticity in adults in areas important for cognitive and emotional processing and well-being," says Sara Lazar, leader of the study and a psychologist at Harvard Medical School. "These findings are consistent with other studies that demonstrated increased thickness of music areas in the brains of musicians, and visual and motor areas in the brains of jugglers. In other words, the structure of an adult brain can change in response to repeated practice."
The researchers compared brain scans of 20 experienced meditators with those of 15 nonmeditators. Four of the former taught meditation or yoga, but they were not monks living in seclusion. The rest worked in careers such as law, health care, and journalism. All the participants were white. During scanning, the meditators meditated; the others just relaxed and thought about whatever they wanted.
Meditators did Buddhist "insight meditation," which focuses on whatever is there, like noise or body sensations. It doesn't involve "om," other mantras, or chanting.
"The goal is to pay attention to sensory experience, rather than to your thoughts about the sensory experience," Lazar explains. "For example, if you suddenly hear a noise, you just listen to it rather than thinking about it. If your leg falls asleep, you just notice the physical sensations. If nothing is there, you pay attention to your breathing." Successful meditators get used to not thinking or elaborating things in their mind.
Study participants meditated an average of about 40 minutes a day. Some had been doing it for only a year, others for decades. Depth of the meditation was measured by the slowing of breathing rates. Those most deeply involved in the meditation showed the greatest changes in brain structure. "This strongly suggests," Lazar concludes, "that the differences in brain structure were caused by the meditation, rather than that differences in brain thickness got them into meditation in the first place."
Lazar took up meditation about 10 years ago and now practices insight meditation about three times a week. At first she was not sure it would work. But "I have definitely experienced beneficial changes," she says. "It reduces stress [and] increases my clarity of thought and my tolerance for staying focused in difficult situations."
Controlling random thoughts
Insight meditation can be practiced anytime, anywhere. "People who do it quickly realize that much of what goes on in their heads involves random thoughts that often have little substance," Lazar comments. "The goal is not so much to 'empty' your head, but to not get caught up in random thoughts that pop into consciousness."
She uses this example: Facing an important deadline, people tend to worry about what will happen if they miss it, or if the end product will be good enough to suit the boss. You can drive yourself crazy with unproductive "what if" worry. "If, instead, you focus on the present moment, on what needs to be done and what is happening right now, then much of the feeling of stress goes away," Lazar says. "Feelings become less obstructive and more motivational."
The increased thickness of gray matter is not very much, 4 to 8 thousandths of an inch. "These increases are proportional to the time a person has been meditating during their lives," Lazar notes. "This suggests that the thickness differences are acquired through extensive practice and not simply due to differences between meditators and nonmeditators."
As small as they are, you can bet those differences are going to lead to lots more studies to find out just what is going on and how meditation might better be used to improve health and well-being, and even slow aging.
More basic questions need to be answered. What causes the increased thickness? Does meditation produce more connections between brain cells, or more blood vessels? How does increased brain thickness influence daily behavior? Does it promote increased communication between intellectual and emotional areas of the brain?
To get answers, larger studies are planned at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Harvard-affiliated facility where Lazar is a research scientist and where these first studies were done. That work included only 20 meditators and their brains were scanned only once.
"The results were very encouraging," Lazar remarks. "But further research needs to be done using a larger number of people and testing them multiple times. We also need to examine their brains both before and after learning to meditate. Our group is currently planning to do this. Eventually, such research should reveal more about the function of the thickening; that is, how it affects emotions and knowing in terms of both awareness and judgment."
Slowing aging?
Since this type of meditation counteracts the natural thinning of the thinking surface of the brain, could it play a role in slowing - even reversing - aging? That could really be mind-boggling in the most positive sense.
Lazar is cautious in her answer. "Our data suggest that one small bit of brain appears to have a slower rate of cortical thinning, so meditation may help slow some aspects of cognitive aging," she agrees. "But it's important to remember that monks and yogis suffer from the same ailments as the rest of us. They get old and die, too. However, they do claim to enjoy an increased capacity for attention and memory."
Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of our brains. Brain scans they conducted reveal that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input.
In one area of gray matter, the thickening turns out to be more pronounced in older than in younger people. That's intriguing because those sections of the human cortex, or thinking cap, normally get thinner as we age.
"Our data suggest that meditation practice can promote cortical plasticity in adults in areas important for cognitive and emotional processing and well-being," says Sara Lazar, leader of the study and a psychologist at Harvard Medical School. "These findings are consistent with other studies that demonstrated increased thickness of music areas in the brains of musicians, and visual and motor areas in the brains of jugglers. In other words, the structure of an adult brain can change in response to repeated practice."
The researchers compared brain scans of 20 experienced meditators with those of 15 nonmeditators. Four of the former taught meditation or yoga, but they were not monks living in seclusion. The rest worked in careers such as law, health care, and journalism. All the participants were white. During scanning, the meditators meditated; the others just relaxed and thought about whatever they wanted.
Meditators did Buddhist "insight meditation," which focuses on whatever is there, like noise or body sensations. It doesn't involve "om," other mantras, or chanting.
"The goal is to pay attention to sensory experience, rather than to your thoughts about the sensory experience," Lazar explains. "For example, if you suddenly hear a noise, you just listen to it rather than thinking about it. If your leg falls asleep, you just notice the physical sensations. If nothing is there, you pay attention to your breathing." Successful meditators get used to not thinking or elaborating things in their mind.
Study participants meditated an average of about 40 minutes a day. Some had been doing it for only a year, others for decades. Depth of the meditation was measured by the slowing of breathing rates. Those most deeply involved in the meditation showed the greatest changes in brain structure. "This strongly suggests," Lazar concludes, "that the differences in brain structure were caused by the meditation, rather than that differences in brain thickness got them into meditation in the first place."
Lazar took up meditation about 10 years ago and now practices insight meditation about three times a week. At first she was not sure it would work. But "I have definitely experienced beneficial changes," she says. "It reduces stress [and] increases my clarity of thought and my tolerance for staying focused in difficult situations."
Controlling random thoughts
Insight meditation can be practiced anytime, anywhere. "People who do it quickly realize that much of what goes on in their heads involves random thoughts that often have little substance," Lazar comments. "The goal is not so much to 'empty' your head, but to not get caught up in random thoughts that pop into consciousness."
She uses this example: Facing an important deadline, people tend to worry about what will happen if they miss it, or if the end product will be good enough to suit the boss. You can drive yourself crazy with unproductive "what if" worry. "If, instead, you focus on the present moment, on what needs to be done and what is happening right now, then much of the feeling of stress goes away," Lazar says. "Feelings become less obstructive and more motivational."
The increased thickness of gray matter is not very much, 4 to 8 thousandths of an inch. "These increases are proportional to the time a person has been meditating during their lives," Lazar notes. "This suggests that the thickness differences are acquired through extensive practice and not simply due to differences between meditators and nonmeditators."
As small as they are, you can bet those differences are going to lead to lots more studies to find out just what is going on and how meditation might better be used to improve health and well-being, and even slow aging.
More basic questions need to be answered. What causes the increased thickness? Does meditation produce more connections between brain cells, or more blood vessels? How does increased brain thickness influence daily behavior? Does it promote increased communication between intellectual and emotional areas of the brain?
To get answers, larger studies are planned at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Harvard-affiliated facility where Lazar is a research scientist and where these first studies were done. That work included only 20 meditators and their brains were scanned only once.
"The results were very encouraging," Lazar remarks. "But further research needs to be done using a larger number of people and testing them multiple times. We also need to examine their brains both before and after learning to meditate. Our group is currently planning to do this. Eventually, such research should reveal more about the function of the thickening; that is, how it affects emotions and knowing in terms of both awareness and judgment."
Slowing aging?
Since this type of meditation counteracts the natural thinning of the thinking surface of the brain, could it play a role in slowing - even reversing - aging? That could really be mind-boggling in the most positive sense.
Lazar is cautious in her answer. "Our data suggest that one small bit of brain appears to have a slower rate of cortical thinning, so meditation may help slow some aspects of cognitive aging," she agrees. "But it's important to remember that monks and yogis suffer from the same ailments as the rest of us. They get old and die, too. However, they do claim to enjoy an increased capacity for attention and memory."
Train Your Brain, Scientific American
Mental exercises with neurofeedback may ease symptoms of attention-deficit disorder, epilepsy and depression--and even boost cognition in healthy brainsBy Ulrich Kraft
At first the computer game looks awfully easy for an eight-year-old--like something out of the Stone Age of arcades in the 1980s. A red triangle "arrow" appears on the monitor's blue screen, and then the nose of a cartoon airplane glides into view from the left. If the arrow points upward, Ben must make the plane climb. When he succeeds, a spiky yellow sun beams.
A second glance shows that all is not as it seems. For one thing, Ben has no joystick. Instead several electrodes glued to the boy's face and to the skin under his hair let him pilot the plane by thought alone.
Such "mind reading" offers many possible applications. It has, for instance, enabled "locked-in" patients--who cannot speak or gesture--to communicate with caregivers [see "Thinking Out Loud," by Nicola Neumann and Niels Birbaumer; Scientific American Mind, Premier Issue, Vol. 14, No. 5, 2004]. By controlling their brain waves, the patients manipulate letters and words on a computer screen. Practice with neurofeedback may also benefit those who suffer from epilepsy, attention deficits, depression and other debilitating mental disorders. The experimental therapy, also called EEG biofeedback, may even help rev up healthy brains, improving cognitive performance.
From Bio to NeuroThe technique is a high-tech twist on biofeedback--a method long used to treat stress-related disorders. In biofeedback, people see or hear physiological measurements that can indicate stress, such as increases in blood pressure, heart rate or muscle tension. Receiving such information from monitoring devices makes normally undetectable body functions accessible for conscious regulation. A person can realize from listening to his racing pulse, for example, that he is under strain and then learn to bring his heart rate down purposely.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is no magic formula for learning how to harness one's brain waves. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The first clues that brain waves could be altered intentionally came nearly four decades ago. In the late 1960s sleep researcher M. Barry Sterman learned something interesting while tracking the EEGs of cats. He found a previously unknown pattern of brain waves with frequencies between 12 and 15 hertz (Hz), or cycles per second, in a part of the brain called the sensorimotor cortex. Sterman, now professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, dubbed this pattern the sensorimotor rhythm, or SMR. SMR was always present, he learned, in relaxed and awake felines. When he rewarded the animals at those moments with snacks, they began to produce stronger SMRs. Through this conditioning experiment, Sterman demonstrated that it is possible to change one's own brain waves deliberately.
The researcher might well not have followed up on this discovery. But at roughly the same time, he received a request from the U.S. Air Force, which wanted him to test the potential cognitive effects of exposure to monomethylhydrazine, a substance used in some rocket fuels and known to cause seizures. Sterman injected the chemical into cats. About an hour afterward, most of them suffered a seizure. In a few of the subjects, however, the seizure's onset occurred considerably later than usual; three others escaped the convulsions entirely. Seeking an answer for the resistance, Sterman examined his experimental protocol. He observed that the resilient cats had one thing in common: they had previously been involved in his conditioning tests. Could their ability to control their SMR waves have been a factor?
Sterman pursued the question in further experiments. In the early 1970s he found indications that people with epilepsy also could reduce their risk of seizures if they learned to heighten their SMR levels. Yet the idea remained controversial for lack of thorough study.
Brain Control
More than 30 years after Sterman's initial work with SMRs, scientists are exploring how neurofeedback might be used to treat a variety of ailments. In addition to SMRs, other brain waves at different frequencies characterize certain mental states [see illustration on page 63]. In deep sleep, for example, delta waves, with frequencies of up to 4 Hz and high amplitudes, dominate. Frequencies around 10 Hz, known as alpha waves, are present in a relaxed but awake brain; they emerge, for example, when we lie back with our eyes closed. If we then begin to concentrate on something, beta waves, with frequencies greater than 13 Hz, travel across the cortex. Lower-frequency theta waves appear when the brain relaxes. Theta waves, with high amplitudes and frequencies falling between those of delta and alpha waves, normally appear in adults during light sleep and meditation.
At first the computer game looks awfully easy for an eight-year-old--like something out of the Stone Age of arcades in the 1980s. A red triangle "arrow" appears on the monitor's blue screen, and then the nose of a cartoon airplane glides into view from the left. If the arrow points upward, Ben must make the plane climb. When he succeeds, a spiky yellow sun beams.
A second glance shows that all is not as it seems. For one thing, Ben has no joystick. Instead several electrodes glued to the boy's face and to the skin under his hair let him pilot the plane by thought alone.
Such "mind reading" offers many possible applications. It has, for instance, enabled "locked-in" patients--who cannot speak or gesture--to communicate with caregivers [see "Thinking Out Loud," by Nicola Neumann and Niels Birbaumer; Scientific American Mind, Premier Issue, Vol. 14, No. 5, 2004]. By controlling their brain waves, the patients manipulate letters and words on a computer screen. Practice with neurofeedback may also benefit those who suffer from epilepsy, attention deficits, depression and other debilitating mental disorders. The experimental therapy, also called EEG biofeedback, may even help rev up healthy brains, improving cognitive performance.
From Bio to NeuroThe technique is a high-tech twist on biofeedback--a method long used to treat stress-related disorders. In biofeedback, people see or hear physiological measurements that can indicate stress, such as increases in blood pressure, heart rate or muscle tension. Receiving such information from monitoring devices makes normally undetectable body functions accessible for conscious regulation. A person can realize from listening to his racing pulse, for example, that he is under strain and then learn to bring his heart rate down purposely.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is no magic formula for learning how to harness one's brain waves. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The first clues that brain waves could be altered intentionally came nearly four decades ago. In the late 1960s sleep researcher M. Barry Sterman learned something interesting while tracking the EEGs of cats. He found a previously unknown pattern of brain waves with frequencies between 12 and 15 hertz (Hz), or cycles per second, in a part of the brain called the sensorimotor cortex. Sterman, now professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, dubbed this pattern the sensorimotor rhythm, or SMR. SMR was always present, he learned, in relaxed and awake felines. When he rewarded the animals at those moments with snacks, they began to produce stronger SMRs. Through this conditioning experiment, Sterman demonstrated that it is possible to change one's own brain waves deliberately.
The researcher might well not have followed up on this discovery. But at roughly the same time, he received a request from the U.S. Air Force, which wanted him to test the potential cognitive effects of exposure to monomethylhydrazine, a substance used in some rocket fuels and known to cause seizures. Sterman injected the chemical into cats. About an hour afterward, most of them suffered a seizure. In a few of the subjects, however, the seizure's onset occurred considerably later than usual; three others escaped the convulsions entirely. Seeking an answer for the resistance, Sterman examined his experimental protocol. He observed that the resilient cats had one thing in common: they had previously been involved in his conditioning tests. Could their ability to control their SMR waves have been a factor?
Sterman pursued the question in further experiments. In the early 1970s he found indications that people with epilepsy also could reduce their risk of seizures if they learned to heighten their SMR levels. Yet the idea remained controversial for lack of thorough study.
Brain Control
More than 30 years after Sterman's initial work with SMRs, scientists are exploring how neurofeedback might be used to treat a variety of ailments. In addition to SMRs, other brain waves at different frequencies characterize certain mental states [see illustration on page 63]. In deep sleep, for example, delta waves, with frequencies of up to 4 Hz and high amplitudes, dominate. Frequencies around 10 Hz, known as alpha waves, are present in a relaxed but awake brain; they emerge, for example, when we lie back with our eyes closed. If we then begin to concentrate on something, beta waves, with frequencies greater than 13 Hz, travel across the cortex. Lower-frequency theta waves appear when the brain relaxes. Theta waves, with high amplitudes and frequencies falling between those of delta and alpha waves, normally appear in adults during light sleep and meditation.
Meditation changes temperatures:Harvard research
In a monastery in northern India, thinly clad Tibetan monks sat quietly in a room where the temperature was a chilly 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Using a yoga technique known as g Tum-mo, they entered a state of deep meditation. Other monks soaked 3-by-6-foot sheets in cold water (49 degrees) and placed them over the meditators' shoulders. For untrained people, such frigid wrappings would produce uncontrolled shivering.
If body temperatures continue to drop under these conditions, death can result. But it was not long before steam began rising from the sheets. As a result of body heat produced by the monks during meditation, the sheets dried in about an hour.
Attendants removed the sheets, then covered the meditators with a second chilled, wet wrapping. Each monk was required to dry three sheets over a period of several hours.
Why would anyone do this? Herbert Benson, who has been studying g Tum-mo for 20 years, answers that "Buddhists feel the reality we live in is not the ultimate one. There's another reality we can tap into that's unaffected by our emotions, by our everyday world. Buddhists believe this state of mind can be achieved by doing good for others and by meditation. The heat they generate during the process is just a by-product of g Tum-mo meditation."
Benson is an associate professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School and president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He firmly believes that studying advanced forms of meditation "can uncover capacities that will help us to better treat stress-related illnesses."
Benson developed the "relaxation response," which he describes as "a physiological state opposite to stress." It is characterized by decreases in metabolism, breathing rate, heart rate, and blood pressure. He and others have amassed evidence that it can help those suffering from illnesses caused or exacerbated by stress. Benson and colleagues use it to treat anxiety, mild and moderate depression, high blood pressure, heartbeat irregularities, excessive anger, insomnia, and even infertility. His team also uses this type of simple meditation to calm those who have been traumatized by the deaths of others, or by diagnoses of cancer or other painful, life-threatening illnesses.
"More than 60 percent of visits to physicians in the United States are due to stress-related problems, most of which are poorly treated by drugs, surgery, or other medical procedures," Benson maintains.
The Mind/Body Medical Institute is now training people to use the relaxation response to help people working at Ground Zero in New York City, where two airplanes toppled the World Trade Center Towers last Sept. 11. Facilities have been set up at nearby St. Paul's Chapel to aid people still working on clearing wreckage and bodies. Anyone else who feels stressed by those terrible events can also obtain help at the chapel. "We are training the trainers who work there," Benson says.
The relaxation response involves repeating a word, sound, phrase, or short prayer while disregarding intrusive thoughts. "If such an easy-to-master practice can bring about the remarkable changes we observe," Benson notes. "I want to investigate what advanced forms of meditation can do to help the mind control physical processes once thought to be uncontrollable."
Breathtaking results
Some Westerners practice g Tum-mo, but it often takes years to reach states like those achieved by Buddhist monks. In trying to find groups he could study, Benson met Westerners who claimed to have mastered such advanced techniques, but who were, in his words, "fraudulent."
Benson decided that he needed to locate a religious setting, where advanced mediation is traditionally practiced. His opportunity came in 1979 when the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibet, visited Harvard University. "His Holiness agreed to help me," recalls Benson. That visit was the beginning of a long friendship and several expeditions to northern India where many Tibetan monks live in exile.
During visits to remote monasteries in the 1980s, Benson and his team studied monks living in the Himalayan Mountains who could, by g Tum-mo meditation, raise the temperatures of their fingers and toes by as much as 17 degrees. It has yet to be determined how the monks are able to generate such heat.
The researchers also made measurements on practitioners of other forms of advanced meditation in Sikkim, India. They were astonished to find that these monks could lower their metabolism by 64 percent. "It was an astounding, breathtaking [no pun intended] result," Benson exclaims.
To put that decrease in perspective, metabolism, or oxygen consumption, drops only 10-15 percent in sleep and about 17 percent during simple meditation. Benson believes that such a capability could be useful for space travel. Travelers might use meditation to ease stress and oxygen consumption on long flights to other planets.
In 1985, the meditation team made a video of monks drying cold, wet sheets with body heat. They also documented monks spending a winter night on a rocky ledge 15,000 feet high in the Himalayas. The sleep-out took place in February on the night of the winter full moon when temperatures reached zero degrees F. Wearing only woolen or cotton shawls, the monks promptly fell asleep on the rocky ledge, They did not huddle together and the video shows no evidence of shivering. They slept until dawn then walked back to their monastery.
Overcoming obstacles
Working in isolated monasteries in the foothills of the Himalayas proved extremely difficult. Some religious leaders keep their meditative procedures a closely guarded secret. Medical measuring devices require electrical power and wall outlets are not always available. In addition, trying to meditate while strangers attempt to measure your rectal temperature is not something most monks are happy to do.
To avoid these problems, Instructor in Psychology Sara Lazar, a Benson colleague, used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of meditators at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. The subjects were males, aged 22-45, who had practiced a form of advanced mediation called Kundalini daily for at least four years. In these experiments, the obstacles of cold and isolation were replaced by the difficulties of trying to meditate in a cramped, noisy machine. However, the results, published in the May 15, 2000, issue of the journal NeuroReport, turned out to be significant.
"Lazar found a marked decrease in blood flow to the entire brain," Benson explains. "At the same time, certain areas of the brain became more active, specifically those that control attention and autonomic functions like blood pressure and metabolism. In short, she showed the value of using this method to record changes in the brain's activity during meditation."
The biggest obstruction in further studies, whether in India or Boston, has always been money. Research proceeded slowly and intermittently until February 2001, when Benson's team received a $1.25 million grant from Loel Guinness, via the beer magnate's Kalpa Foundation, established to study extraordinary human capacities.
The funds enabled researchers to bring three monks experienced in g Tum-mo to a Guinness estate in Normandy, France, last July. The monks then practiced for 100 days to reach their full meditative capacity. An eye infection sidelined one of the monks, but the other two proved able to dry frigid, wet sheets while wearing sensors that recorded changes in heat production and metabolism.
Although the team obtained valuable data, Benson concludes that "the room was not cold enough to do the tests properly." His team will try again this coming winter with six monks. They will start practice in late summer and should be ready during the coldest part of winter.
Benson feels sure these attempts to understand advanced mediation will lead to better treatments for stress-related illnesses. "My hope," he says, "is that self-care will stand equal with medical drugs, surgery, and other therapies that are now used to alleviate mental and physical suffering. Along with nutrition and exercise, mind/body approaches can be part of self-care practices that could save millions of dollars annually in medical costs."
Meditation... Here the heart/May give a useful lesson to the head. - Cowper
If body temperatures continue to drop under these conditions, death can result. But it was not long before steam began rising from the sheets. As a result of body heat produced by the monks during meditation, the sheets dried in about an hour.
Attendants removed the sheets, then covered the meditators with a second chilled, wet wrapping. Each monk was required to dry three sheets over a period of several hours.
Why would anyone do this? Herbert Benson, who has been studying g Tum-mo for 20 years, answers that "Buddhists feel the reality we live in is not the ultimate one. There's another reality we can tap into that's unaffected by our emotions, by our everyday world. Buddhists believe this state of mind can be achieved by doing good for others and by meditation. The heat they generate during the process is just a by-product of g Tum-mo meditation."
Benson is an associate professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School and president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He firmly believes that studying advanced forms of meditation "can uncover capacities that will help us to better treat stress-related illnesses."
Benson developed the "relaxation response," which he describes as "a physiological state opposite to stress." It is characterized by decreases in metabolism, breathing rate, heart rate, and blood pressure. He and others have amassed evidence that it can help those suffering from illnesses caused or exacerbated by stress. Benson and colleagues use it to treat anxiety, mild and moderate depression, high blood pressure, heartbeat irregularities, excessive anger, insomnia, and even infertility. His team also uses this type of simple meditation to calm those who have been traumatized by the deaths of others, or by diagnoses of cancer or other painful, life-threatening illnesses.
"More than 60 percent of visits to physicians in the United States are due to stress-related problems, most of which are poorly treated by drugs, surgery, or other medical procedures," Benson maintains.
The Mind/Body Medical Institute is now training people to use the relaxation response to help people working at Ground Zero in New York City, where two airplanes toppled the World Trade Center Towers last Sept. 11. Facilities have been set up at nearby St. Paul's Chapel to aid people still working on clearing wreckage and bodies. Anyone else who feels stressed by those terrible events can also obtain help at the chapel. "We are training the trainers who work there," Benson says.
The relaxation response involves repeating a word, sound, phrase, or short prayer while disregarding intrusive thoughts. "If such an easy-to-master practice can bring about the remarkable changes we observe," Benson notes. "I want to investigate what advanced forms of meditation can do to help the mind control physical processes once thought to be uncontrollable."
Breathtaking results
Some Westerners practice g Tum-mo, but it often takes years to reach states like those achieved by Buddhist monks. In trying to find groups he could study, Benson met Westerners who claimed to have mastered such advanced techniques, but who were, in his words, "fraudulent."
Benson decided that he needed to locate a religious setting, where advanced mediation is traditionally practiced. His opportunity came in 1979 when the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibet, visited Harvard University. "His Holiness agreed to help me," recalls Benson. That visit was the beginning of a long friendship and several expeditions to northern India where many Tibetan monks live in exile.
During visits to remote monasteries in the 1980s, Benson and his team studied monks living in the Himalayan Mountains who could, by g Tum-mo meditation, raise the temperatures of their fingers and toes by as much as 17 degrees. It has yet to be determined how the monks are able to generate such heat.
The researchers also made measurements on practitioners of other forms of advanced meditation in Sikkim, India. They were astonished to find that these monks could lower their metabolism by 64 percent. "It was an astounding, breathtaking [no pun intended] result," Benson exclaims.
To put that decrease in perspective, metabolism, or oxygen consumption, drops only 10-15 percent in sleep and about 17 percent during simple meditation. Benson believes that such a capability could be useful for space travel. Travelers might use meditation to ease stress and oxygen consumption on long flights to other planets.
In 1985, the meditation team made a video of monks drying cold, wet sheets with body heat. They also documented monks spending a winter night on a rocky ledge 15,000 feet high in the Himalayas. The sleep-out took place in February on the night of the winter full moon when temperatures reached zero degrees F. Wearing only woolen or cotton shawls, the monks promptly fell asleep on the rocky ledge, They did not huddle together and the video shows no evidence of shivering. They slept until dawn then walked back to their monastery.
Overcoming obstacles
Working in isolated monasteries in the foothills of the Himalayas proved extremely difficult. Some religious leaders keep their meditative procedures a closely guarded secret. Medical measuring devices require electrical power and wall outlets are not always available. In addition, trying to meditate while strangers attempt to measure your rectal temperature is not something most monks are happy to do.
To avoid these problems, Instructor in Psychology Sara Lazar, a Benson colleague, used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of meditators at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. The subjects were males, aged 22-45, who had practiced a form of advanced mediation called Kundalini daily for at least four years. In these experiments, the obstacles of cold and isolation were replaced by the difficulties of trying to meditate in a cramped, noisy machine. However, the results, published in the May 15, 2000, issue of the journal NeuroReport, turned out to be significant.
"Lazar found a marked decrease in blood flow to the entire brain," Benson explains. "At the same time, certain areas of the brain became more active, specifically those that control attention and autonomic functions like blood pressure and metabolism. In short, she showed the value of using this method to record changes in the brain's activity during meditation."
The biggest obstruction in further studies, whether in India or Boston, has always been money. Research proceeded slowly and intermittently until February 2001, when Benson's team received a $1.25 million grant from Loel Guinness, via the beer magnate's Kalpa Foundation, established to study extraordinary human capacities.
The funds enabled researchers to bring three monks experienced in g Tum-mo to a Guinness estate in Normandy, France, last July. The monks then practiced for 100 days to reach their full meditative capacity. An eye infection sidelined one of the monks, but the other two proved able to dry frigid, wet sheets while wearing sensors that recorded changes in heat production and metabolism.
Although the team obtained valuable data, Benson concludes that "the room was not cold enough to do the tests properly." His team will try again this coming winter with six monks. They will start practice in late summer and should be ready during the coldest part of winter.
Benson feels sure these attempts to understand advanced mediation will lead to better treatments for stress-related illnesses. "My hope," he says, "is that self-care will stand equal with medical drugs, surgery, and other therapies that are now used to alleviate mental and physical suffering. Along with nutrition and exercise, mind/body approaches can be part of self-care practices that could save millions of dollars annually in medical costs."
Meditation... Here the heart/May give a useful lesson to the head. - Cowper
Study Suggests Deity Meditation Augments Visuospatial Abilities
Meditation has been practiced for centuries, as a way to calm the soul and bring about inner peace. According to a new study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, there is now evidence that a specific method of meditation may temporarily boost our visuospatial abilities (for example, the ability to retain an image in visual memory for a long time). That is, the meditation allows practitioners to access a heightened state of visual-spatial awareness that lasts for a limited period of time.
Normally when we see something, it is kept in our visual short-term memory for only a brief amount of time (images will begin to fade in a matter of seconds). However, there have been reports of Buddhist monks who have exceptional imagery skills and are able to maintain complex images in their visual short-term memory for minutes, and sometimes even hours. Led by psychologist Maria Kozhevnikov of George Mason University, a team of researchers investigated the effects of different styles of Buddhist meditation on visuospatial skills.
The researchers focused on two styles of meditation: Deity Yoga (DY) and Open Presence (OP). During DY meditation, the practitioner focuses intently on an image of deity and his or her entourage. This requires coming up with an immensely detailed, three-dimensional image of the deity, and also focusing on the deity's emotions and environment. In contrast, practitioners of OP meditation believe that pure awareness cannot be achieved by focusing on a specific image and therefore, they attempt to evenly distribute their attention while meditating, without dwelling on or analyzing any experiences, images, or thoughts that may arise.
In these experiments, experienced DY or OP meditation practitioners along with nonmeditators participated in two types of visuospatial tasks, testing mental rotation abilities (e.g., being able to mentally rotate a 3-D structure) and visual memory (e.g., being shown an image, retaining it in memory and then having to identify it among a number of other, related images). All of the participants completed the tasks, meditators meditated for 20 minutes, while others rested or performed non-meditative activities, and then completed a second round of the tasks.
The results revealed that all of the participants performed similarly on the initial set of tests, suggesting that meditation does not result in an overall, long-lasting improvement of visuospatial abilities. However, following the meditation period, practitioners of the DY style of meditation showed a dramatic improvement on both the mental rotation task and the visual memory task compared to OP practitioners and controls. These results indicate that DY meditation allows practitioners to access greater levels of visuospatial memory resources, compared to when they are not meditating. The authors state that this finding "has many implications for therapy, treatment of memory loss, and mental training." Although, they conclude, future studies will need to examine if these results are specific to DY meditation, or if these effects can also occur using other visual meditation techniques.
Normally when we see something, it is kept in our visual short-term memory for only a brief amount of time (images will begin to fade in a matter of seconds). However, there have been reports of Buddhist monks who have exceptional imagery skills and are able to maintain complex images in their visual short-term memory for minutes, and sometimes even hours. Led by psychologist Maria Kozhevnikov of George Mason University, a team of researchers investigated the effects of different styles of Buddhist meditation on visuospatial skills.
The researchers focused on two styles of meditation: Deity Yoga (DY) and Open Presence (OP). During DY meditation, the practitioner focuses intently on an image of deity and his or her entourage. This requires coming up with an immensely detailed, three-dimensional image of the deity, and also focusing on the deity's emotions and environment. In contrast, practitioners of OP meditation believe that pure awareness cannot be achieved by focusing on a specific image and therefore, they attempt to evenly distribute their attention while meditating, without dwelling on or analyzing any experiences, images, or thoughts that may arise.
In these experiments, experienced DY or OP meditation practitioners along with nonmeditators participated in two types of visuospatial tasks, testing mental rotation abilities (e.g., being able to mentally rotate a 3-D structure) and visual memory (e.g., being shown an image, retaining it in memory and then having to identify it among a number of other, related images). All of the participants completed the tasks, meditators meditated for 20 minutes, while others rested or performed non-meditative activities, and then completed a second round of the tasks.
The results revealed that all of the participants performed similarly on the initial set of tests, suggesting that meditation does not result in an overall, long-lasting improvement of visuospatial abilities. However, following the meditation period, practitioners of the DY style of meditation showed a dramatic improvement on both the mental rotation task and the visual memory task compared to OP practitioners and controls. These results indicate that DY meditation allows practitioners to access greater levels of visuospatial memory resources, compared to when they are not meditating. The authors state that this finding "has many implications for therapy, treatment of memory loss, and mental training." Although, they conclude, future studies will need to examine if these results are specific to DY meditation, or if these effects can also occur using other visual meditation techniques.
Scientists Probe Meditation Secrets, Naomi Law, BBC
Scientists are beginning to uncover evidence that meditation has a tangible effect on the brain.
Skeptics argue that it is not a practical way to try to deal with the stresses of modern life.
But the long years when adherents were unable to point to hard science to support their belief in the technique may finally be coming to an end.
When Carol Cattley's husband died it triggered a relapse of the depression which had not plagued her since she was a teenager.
"I instantly felt as if I wanted to die," she said. "I couldn't think of what else to do."
Carol sought medical help and managed to control her depression with a combination of medication and a psychological treatment called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
However, she believes that a new, increasingly popular course called Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) - which primarily consists of meditation - brought about her full recovery.
It is currently available in every county across the UK, and can be prescribed on the NHS.
One of the pioneers of MBCT is Professor Mark Williams, from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford.
He helps to lead group courses which take place over a period of eight weeks. He describes the approach as 80% meditation, 20% cognitive therapy.
New perspective
He said: "It teaches a way of looking at problems, observing them clearly but not necessarily trying to fix them or solve them.
"It suggests to people that they begin to see all their thoughts as just thoughts, whether they are positive, negative or neutral."
MBCT is recommended for people who are not currently depressed, but who have had three or more bouts of depression in their lives.
Trials suggest that the course reduces the likelihood of another attack of depression by over 50%.
Professor Williams believes that more research is still needed.
He said: "It is becoming enormously popular quite quickly and in many ways we now need to collect the evidence to check that it really is being effective."
However, in the meantime, meditation is being taken seriously as a means of tackling difficult and very modern challenges.
Scientists are beginning to investigate how else meditation could be used, particularly for those at risk of suicide and people struggling with the effects of substance abuse.
What is meditation?
Meditation is difficult to define because it has so many different forms.
Broadly, it can be described as a mental practice in which you focus your attention on a particular subject or object.
It has historically been associated with religion, but it can also be secular, and exactly what you focus your attention on is largely a matter of personal choice.
It may be a mantra (repeated word or phrase), breathing patterns, or simply an awareness of being alive.
Some of the more common forms of meditative practices include Buddhist Meditation, Mindfulness Meditation, Transcendental Meditation, and Zen Meditation.
The claims made for meditation range from increasing immunity, improving asthma and increasing fertility through to reducing the effects of aging.
Limited research
Research into the health claims made for meditation has limitations and few conclusions can be reached, partly because meditation is rarely isolated - it is often practised alongside other lifestyle changes such as diet, or exercise, or as part of group therapy.
So should we dismiss it as quackery? Studies from the field of neuroscience suggest not.
It is a new area of research, but indications are intriguing and suggest that meditation may have a measurable impact on the brain.
In Boston, Massachusetts, Dr Sara Lazar has used a technique called MRI scanning to analyse the brains of people who have been meditating for several years.
She compared the brains of these experienced practitioners with people who had never meditated and found that there were differences in the thickness of certain areas of the brain's cortex, including areas involved in the processing of emotion.
She is continuing research, but she believes that meditation had caused the brain to change physical shape.
Buddhist monks
In Madison, Wisconsin, Dr Richard Davidson has been carrying out studies on Buddhist monks for several years.
His personal belief is that "by meditating, you can become happier, you can concentrate more effectively and you can change your brain in ways that support that."
In one study he observed the brains of a group of office workers before and after they undertook a course of meditation combined with stress reduction techniques.
At the end of the course the participants' brains seemed to have altered in the way they functioned.
They showed greater activity in the left-hand side - a characteristic which Davidson has previously linked to happiness and enthusiasm.
This idea that meditation could improve the wellbeing of everyone, even those not struggling with mental illness, is something that is exciting researchers.
Professor Williams believes it has huge potential.
"It involves dealing with expectations, with constantly judging ourselves - feeling we're not good enough," he said.
"And, that is something which is so widespread in our communities.
"All of these things are just thoughts. And, they will come up in meditation and learning to recognize what they are as thoughts, and let them go, can be enormously empowering for anybody."
There is, of course, a distinct possibility that this research will come to nothing and that interest in meditation will turn out to be a passing fad, but for now this ancient discipline is being taken seriously by scientists as a tool with potential to make each one of us happier and more content.
Skeptics argue that it is not a practical way to try to deal with the stresses of modern life.
But the long years when adherents were unable to point to hard science to support their belief in the technique may finally be coming to an end.
When Carol Cattley's husband died it triggered a relapse of the depression which had not plagued her since she was a teenager.
"I instantly felt as if I wanted to die," she said. "I couldn't think of what else to do."
Carol sought medical help and managed to control her depression with a combination of medication and a psychological treatment called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
However, she believes that a new, increasingly popular course called Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) - which primarily consists of meditation - brought about her full recovery.
It is currently available in every county across the UK, and can be prescribed on the NHS.
One of the pioneers of MBCT is Professor Mark Williams, from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford.
He helps to lead group courses which take place over a period of eight weeks. He describes the approach as 80% meditation, 20% cognitive therapy.
New perspective
He said: "It teaches a way of looking at problems, observing them clearly but not necessarily trying to fix them or solve them.
"It suggests to people that they begin to see all their thoughts as just thoughts, whether they are positive, negative or neutral."
MBCT is recommended for people who are not currently depressed, but who have had three or more bouts of depression in their lives.
Trials suggest that the course reduces the likelihood of another attack of depression by over 50%.
Professor Williams believes that more research is still needed.
He said: "It is becoming enormously popular quite quickly and in many ways we now need to collect the evidence to check that it really is being effective."
However, in the meantime, meditation is being taken seriously as a means of tackling difficult and very modern challenges.
Scientists are beginning to investigate how else meditation could be used, particularly for those at risk of suicide and people struggling with the effects of substance abuse.
What is meditation?
Meditation is difficult to define because it has so many different forms.
Broadly, it can be described as a mental practice in which you focus your attention on a particular subject or object.
It has historically been associated with religion, but it can also be secular, and exactly what you focus your attention on is largely a matter of personal choice.
It may be a mantra (repeated word or phrase), breathing patterns, or simply an awareness of being alive.
Some of the more common forms of meditative practices include Buddhist Meditation, Mindfulness Meditation, Transcendental Meditation, and Zen Meditation.
The claims made for meditation range from increasing immunity, improving asthma and increasing fertility through to reducing the effects of aging.
Limited research
Research into the health claims made for meditation has limitations and few conclusions can be reached, partly because meditation is rarely isolated - it is often practised alongside other lifestyle changes such as diet, or exercise, or as part of group therapy.
So should we dismiss it as quackery? Studies from the field of neuroscience suggest not.
It is a new area of research, but indications are intriguing and suggest that meditation may have a measurable impact on the brain.
In Boston, Massachusetts, Dr Sara Lazar has used a technique called MRI scanning to analyse the brains of people who have been meditating for several years.
She compared the brains of these experienced practitioners with people who had never meditated and found that there were differences in the thickness of certain areas of the brain's cortex, including areas involved in the processing of emotion.
She is continuing research, but she believes that meditation had caused the brain to change physical shape.
Buddhist monks
In Madison, Wisconsin, Dr Richard Davidson has been carrying out studies on Buddhist monks for several years.
His personal belief is that "by meditating, you can become happier, you can concentrate more effectively and you can change your brain in ways that support that."
In one study he observed the brains of a group of office workers before and after they undertook a course of meditation combined with stress reduction techniques.
At the end of the course the participants' brains seemed to have altered in the way they functioned.
They showed greater activity in the left-hand side - a characteristic which Davidson has previously linked to happiness and enthusiasm.
This idea that meditation could improve the wellbeing of everyone, even those not struggling with mental illness, is something that is exciting researchers.
Professor Williams believes it has huge potential.
"It involves dealing with expectations, with constantly judging ourselves - feeling we're not good enough," he said.
"And, that is something which is so widespread in our communities.
"All of these things are just thoughts. And, they will come up in meditation and learning to recognize what they are as thoughts, and let them go, can be enormously empowering for anybody."
There is, of course, a distinct possibility that this research will come to nothing and that interest in meditation will turn out to be a passing fad, but for now this ancient discipline is being taken seriously by scientists as a tool with potential to make each one of us happier and more content.
New research shows that it changes the brain in ways that alleviate stress
In 1999 a Harvard University Magna Cum Laude named Kaleil Isaza Tuzman quit his job as a French-cuffed arbitrageur at Goldman Sachs (GS ) to found a startup called govWorks with his childhood best friend, an experience that was captured in the riveting documentary Startup.com. As the company unwinds, we see the once-smooth Tuzman kick furniture, burn through girlfriends (not to mention $60 million), and, in the company's last gasps, send a two-sentence letter of termination to the best friend -- all before he was 30.
What we don't see, however, is that Tuzman had let his longtime meditation practice slide. When he was at Goldman, Tuzman often closed his eyes on the trading floor to meditate -- a Zen man in Zegna. But when he plunged into govWorks and its 20-hour days, he slacked off. "I have regretted letting it lag for years," says Tuzman. "Because if I had stayed disciplined, I have a feeling I would have been able to see some of the harbingers and perils that I didn't see at the time." Today, Tuzman, now CEO of Recognition Group, is back at his 20-minute-a-day practice, sometimes shutting his office door and sitting ballet-dancer straight in his leather swivel chair.
For decades, researchers at the National Institutes of Health, the University of Massachusetts, and the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Harvard University have sought to document how meditation enhances the qualities companies need in their human capital: sharpened intuition, steely concentration, and plummeting stress levels. What's different today is groundbreaking research showing that when people such as Tuzman meditate, they alter the biochemistry of their brains. The evolution of powerful mind-monitoring technologies has also enabled scientists to scan the minds of meditators on a microscopic scale, revealing fascinating insights about the plasticity of the mind and meditation's ability to sculpt it.
Some of those insights have emerged in the lab of Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Throughout his career, Davidson has pondered why people react so differently to the same stressful situations, and for the past 20 years he has been conducting experiments to find out. With the blessing of the Dalai Lama, who is supporting U.S. neuroscientists in their quest to crack the mysteries of meditation, Davidson has been placing electrodes on meditating Buddhist monks as they sit on his lab floor watching different visual stimuli -- including disturbing images of war -- flash on a screen. Davidson and his team then observe the monks as they meditate while ensconced in the clanking, coffin-like tubes of MRI machines.
What the researchers see are brains unlike any they have observed elsewhere. The monks' left prefrontal cortexes -- the area associated with positive emotion -- are far more active than in nonmeditators' brains. In other words, he says, the monks' meditation practice, which changes their neural physiology, enables them to respond with equanimity to sources of stress. Meditation doesn't lobotomize meditators; it simply allows them to detach from their emotional reactions so they can respond appropriately.
"In our country, people are very involved in the physical-fitness craze, working out several times a week," says Davidson. "But we don't pay that kind of attention to our minds. Modern neuroscience is showing that our minds are as plastic as our bodies. Meditation can help you train your mind in the same way exercise can train your body."
Davidson's research didn't stop with the monks. To find out whether meditation could have lasting, beneficial effects in the workplace, he performed a study at Madison (Wis.) biotech company Promega. Four dozen employees met once a week for eight weeks to practice mindfulness meditation for three hours. The result, published last year in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, showed that the employees' left prefontal cortexes were enlarged, just like those of the monks. "We took typical, middle-class Americans trying to cope with the demands of an active work life and active family life who reported being relatively stressed out," says Davidson. "And what we found out is that after a short time meditating, meditation had profound effects not just on how they felt but on their brains and bodies."
These results matter at a time when companies lose an estimated $200 billion annually in absenteeism, subpar performance, tardiness, and workers' compensation claims related to stress. In fact, stress-related ailments account for upwards of 60% of all doctor visits, according to the Mind/Body Medical Institute. President Herbert Benson, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, notes that stress does amp up performance to a certain level. But sustained too long, it erodes productivity. "If businesses were clever, what they would do is simply put time aside [and have] a quiet room for people to carry out a meditative behavior of their choice," says Benson.
Some are already doing so. AOL (TWX ), Raytheon (RTN ), Nortel Networks (NT ), and even ultra-staid law firm Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton offer their employees meditation classes. At some companies, the practice gets advocacy from the top. Medtronic's (MDT ) former CEO, Bill George, who has meditated twice a day for 20 minutes for the past 30 years, says: "Out of anything, it has had the greatest impact on my career." (Life offers many opportunities: George meditates from the time his plane taxis to when the steward offers him a Diet Coke (KO ).)
Former Aetna International Chairman Michael Stephen also started meditating in 1974 and says it helped transform him from an impatient, demanding know-it-all into a more effective leader. Ex-Monsanto (MON ) CEO Robert Shapiro is such a devotee that he brought in teachers to help his execs learn the practice. And McKinsey Managing Partner Michael Rennie, an avid meditator, has studied the beneficial effects of meditation in corporations.
Health insurers are starting to realize that meditation, like preventive health and exercise programs, may help them control costs. Cigna (CI ) is so intrigued with the new meditation findings that it has hired Davidson's partner, Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, to study the ways in which meditation may be able to reduce costs for everything from chronic fatigue to irritable bowel syndrome.
Of course, as with exercise, it's natural to face difficulties adhering to a schedule or to go through periods when you question the payoff. That's why it's important to find a teacher, a Zen center, or some other authority to turn to in such moments, much as one turns to a personal trainer to help maintain or heighten the challenge of an exercise regimen.
The point is: Don't just do something -- sit there.
What we don't see, however, is that Tuzman had let his longtime meditation practice slide. When he was at Goldman, Tuzman often closed his eyes on the trading floor to meditate -- a Zen man in Zegna. But when he plunged into govWorks and its 20-hour days, he slacked off. "I have regretted letting it lag for years," says Tuzman. "Because if I had stayed disciplined, I have a feeling I would have been able to see some of the harbingers and perils that I didn't see at the time." Today, Tuzman, now CEO of Recognition Group, is back at his 20-minute-a-day practice, sometimes shutting his office door and sitting ballet-dancer straight in his leather swivel chair.
For decades, researchers at the National Institutes of Health, the University of Massachusetts, and the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Harvard University have sought to document how meditation enhances the qualities companies need in their human capital: sharpened intuition, steely concentration, and plummeting stress levels. What's different today is groundbreaking research showing that when people such as Tuzman meditate, they alter the biochemistry of their brains. The evolution of powerful mind-monitoring technologies has also enabled scientists to scan the minds of meditators on a microscopic scale, revealing fascinating insights about the plasticity of the mind and meditation's ability to sculpt it.
Some of those insights have emerged in the lab of Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Throughout his career, Davidson has pondered why people react so differently to the same stressful situations, and for the past 20 years he has been conducting experiments to find out. With the blessing of the Dalai Lama, who is supporting U.S. neuroscientists in their quest to crack the mysteries of meditation, Davidson has been placing electrodes on meditating Buddhist monks as they sit on his lab floor watching different visual stimuli -- including disturbing images of war -- flash on a screen. Davidson and his team then observe the monks as they meditate while ensconced in the clanking, coffin-like tubes of MRI machines.
What the researchers see are brains unlike any they have observed elsewhere. The monks' left prefrontal cortexes -- the area associated with positive emotion -- are far more active than in nonmeditators' brains. In other words, he says, the monks' meditation practice, which changes their neural physiology, enables them to respond with equanimity to sources of stress. Meditation doesn't lobotomize meditators; it simply allows them to detach from their emotional reactions so they can respond appropriately.
"In our country, people are very involved in the physical-fitness craze, working out several times a week," says Davidson. "But we don't pay that kind of attention to our minds. Modern neuroscience is showing that our minds are as plastic as our bodies. Meditation can help you train your mind in the same way exercise can train your body."
Davidson's research didn't stop with the monks. To find out whether meditation could have lasting, beneficial effects in the workplace, he performed a study at Madison (Wis.) biotech company Promega. Four dozen employees met once a week for eight weeks to practice mindfulness meditation for three hours. The result, published last year in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, showed that the employees' left prefontal cortexes were enlarged, just like those of the monks. "We took typical, middle-class Americans trying to cope with the demands of an active work life and active family life who reported being relatively stressed out," says Davidson. "And what we found out is that after a short time meditating, meditation had profound effects not just on how they felt but on their brains and bodies."
These results matter at a time when companies lose an estimated $200 billion annually in absenteeism, subpar performance, tardiness, and workers' compensation claims related to stress. In fact, stress-related ailments account for upwards of 60% of all doctor visits, according to the Mind/Body Medical Institute. President Herbert Benson, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, notes that stress does amp up performance to a certain level. But sustained too long, it erodes productivity. "If businesses were clever, what they would do is simply put time aside [and have] a quiet room for people to carry out a meditative behavior of their choice," says Benson.
Some are already doing so. AOL (TWX ), Raytheon (RTN ), Nortel Networks (NT ), and even ultra-staid law firm Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton offer their employees meditation classes. At some companies, the practice gets advocacy from the top. Medtronic's (MDT ) former CEO, Bill George, who has meditated twice a day for 20 minutes for the past 30 years, says: "Out of anything, it has had the greatest impact on my career." (Life offers many opportunities: George meditates from the time his plane taxis to when the steward offers him a Diet Coke (KO ).)
Former Aetna International Chairman Michael Stephen also started meditating in 1974 and says it helped transform him from an impatient, demanding know-it-all into a more effective leader. Ex-Monsanto (MON ) CEO Robert Shapiro is such a devotee that he brought in teachers to help his execs learn the practice. And McKinsey Managing Partner Michael Rennie, an avid meditator, has studied the beneficial effects of meditation in corporations.
Health insurers are starting to realize that meditation, like preventive health and exercise programs, may help them control costs. Cigna (CI ) is so intrigued with the new meditation findings that it has hired Davidson's partner, Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, to study the ways in which meditation may be able to reduce costs for everything from chronic fatigue to irritable bowel syndrome.
Of course, as with exercise, it's natural to face difficulties adhering to a schedule or to go through periods when you question the payoff. That's why it's important to find a teacher, a Zen center, or some other authority to turn to in such moments, much as one turns to a personal trainer to help maintain or heighten the challenge of an exercise regimen.
The point is: Don't just do something -- sit there.
Zen and the Art of Corporate Productivity , Business week
More companies are battling employee stress with meditation
For Dave Jakubowski, vice-president of business development for Internet service provider United Online (UNTD ) Inc., the job isn't what it used to be. Instead of an unlimited expense account and stays at the plush Chateau Marmont, the 31-year-old Manhattanite now brown-bags his lunch and stays at a Hyatt when he's in Los Angeles on business. He logs 18-hour days to help his Westlake Village (Calif.)-based company hit its quarterly sales targets of around $8 million. How to cope? Jakubowski is no breathe-like-a-tree kind of guy. "I'm in business," he says, "and I need results." So he recently turned to a mat and 60 minutes of silence. "It's amazing," he says of his new meditation practice. "I'm able to sort through work challenges in this state of calm much faster than trying to fight through it. And I make fewer mistakes."
Increasingly, the overstretched and overburdened have a new answer to work lives of gunning harder for what seems like less and less: Don't just do something -- sit there. Companies increasingly are falling for the allure of meditation, too, offering free, on-site classes. They're being won over, in part, by findings at the National Institutes of Health, the University of Massachusetts, and the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Harvard University that meditation enhances the qualities companies need most from their knowledge workers: increased brain-wave activity, enhanced intuition, better concentration, and the alleviation of the kinds of aches and pains that plague employees most.
It doesn't hurt that meditation has some high-profile corporate disciples, including bond-fund king William H. Gross, of Newport Beach (Calif.)'s Pacific Investment Management Co., who often meditates with yoga before a day of trading at his $349 billion money-management firm. Tech outfits like Apple Computer (AAPL ), Yahoo!, and Google, which already offers an organic chef and an on-site masseuse, are also signing up. So are white-shoe, Old Economy outfits like consulting firm McKinsey, Deutsche Bank, and Hughes Aircraft.
There are no hard numbers on how many companies have added meditation benefits, but the anecdotal evidence is mounting. And it's no surprise that more employers are seeking a new corporate balm. The National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health finds that stress-related ailments cost companies about $200 billion a year in increased absenteeism, tardiness, and the loss of talented workers. Between 70% to 90% of employee hospital visits are linked to stress. And job tension is directly tied to a lack of productivity and loss of competitive edge. "Stress is pretty much the No. 1 health problem in the workplace," says Eric Biskamp, co-founder of WorkLife Seminars in Dallas, who has begun teaching one-on-one meditation skills to executives at Texas Instruments (TXN ), Raytheon (RTN ) and Nortel Networks (NT ).
Meditation quiets mental chatter, explains coach Tevis Trower of New York's Balance Integration Corp., which develops meditation and yoga programs for large corporations. "It lays the foundation for better decision-making and communication," she says. Adds Viacom (VIA ) International Inc.'s manager of work/life and training, Lisa Grossman: "These programs sound a little out there. But they have a positive impact."
Sometimes meditation classes are offered as a gesture of thanks for a job well done. Consider AOL Time Warner Inc., where the sales and marketing group was reduced from 850 to 500 people three years ago. Meditation classes were incorporated to help employees deal with the new 12-hour days.
Other companies have added classes to help break up the drudgery of day-long meetings. AstraZeneca (AZN ) Pharmaceuticals in Wilmington, Del., now offers three meditation courses aimed at energizing its 5,000 employees during and after marathon powwows. "We usually had a coffee and a Danish on our meeting breaks and would go right into a sugar slump," says spokeswoman Lorraine Ryan.
The icing for companies is that meditation programs come cheap. "Everybody is dealing with limited dollars," says Grossman. "It's important to keep things going when times aren't so good." So employees can breathe easy: This is one perk that isn't likely to get axed.
By Mara Der Hovanesian in New York
For Dave Jakubowski, vice-president of business development for Internet service provider United Online (UNTD ) Inc., the job isn't what it used to be. Instead of an unlimited expense account and stays at the plush Chateau Marmont, the 31-year-old Manhattanite now brown-bags his lunch and stays at a Hyatt when he's in Los Angeles on business. He logs 18-hour days to help his Westlake Village (Calif.)-based company hit its quarterly sales targets of around $8 million. How to cope? Jakubowski is no breathe-like-a-tree kind of guy. "I'm in business," he says, "and I need results." So he recently turned to a mat and 60 minutes of silence. "It's amazing," he says of his new meditation practice. "I'm able to sort through work challenges in this state of calm much faster than trying to fight through it. And I make fewer mistakes."
Increasingly, the overstretched and overburdened have a new answer to work lives of gunning harder for what seems like less and less: Don't just do something -- sit there. Companies increasingly are falling for the allure of meditation, too, offering free, on-site classes. They're being won over, in part, by findings at the National Institutes of Health, the University of Massachusetts, and the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Harvard University that meditation enhances the qualities companies need most from their knowledge workers: increased brain-wave activity, enhanced intuition, better concentration, and the alleviation of the kinds of aches and pains that plague employees most.
It doesn't hurt that meditation has some high-profile corporate disciples, including bond-fund king William H. Gross, of Newport Beach (Calif.)'s Pacific Investment Management Co., who often meditates with yoga before a day of trading at his $349 billion money-management firm. Tech outfits like Apple Computer (AAPL ), Yahoo!, and Google, which already offers an organic chef and an on-site masseuse, are also signing up. So are white-shoe, Old Economy outfits like consulting firm McKinsey, Deutsche Bank, and Hughes Aircraft.
There are no hard numbers on how many companies have added meditation benefits, but the anecdotal evidence is mounting. And it's no surprise that more employers are seeking a new corporate balm. The National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health finds that stress-related ailments cost companies about $200 billion a year in increased absenteeism, tardiness, and the loss of talented workers. Between 70% to 90% of employee hospital visits are linked to stress. And job tension is directly tied to a lack of productivity and loss of competitive edge. "Stress is pretty much the No. 1 health problem in the workplace," says Eric Biskamp, co-founder of WorkLife Seminars in Dallas, who has begun teaching one-on-one meditation skills to executives at Texas Instruments (TXN ), Raytheon (RTN ) and Nortel Networks (NT ).
Meditation quiets mental chatter, explains coach Tevis Trower of New York's Balance Integration Corp., which develops meditation and yoga programs for large corporations. "It lays the foundation for better decision-making and communication," she says. Adds Viacom (VIA ) International Inc.'s manager of work/life and training, Lisa Grossman: "These programs sound a little out there. But they have a positive impact."
Sometimes meditation classes are offered as a gesture of thanks for a job well done. Consider AOL Time Warner Inc., where the sales and marketing group was reduced from 850 to 500 people three years ago. Meditation classes were incorporated to help employees deal with the new 12-hour days.
Other companies have added classes to help break up the drudgery of day-long meetings. AstraZeneca (AZN ) Pharmaceuticals in Wilmington, Del., now offers three meditation courses aimed at energizing its 5,000 employees during and after marathon powwows. "We usually had a coffee and a Danish on our meeting breaks and would go right into a sugar slump," says spokeswoman Lorraine Ryan.
The icing for companies is that meditation programs come cheap. "Everybody is dealing with limited dollars," says Grossman. "It's important to keep things going when times aren't so good." So employees can breathe easy: This is one perk that isn't likely to get axed.
By Mara Der Hovanesian in New York
Meditation Associated with Increased Grey Matter in the Brain
Published: November 10, 2005
Jeremy Gray, Yale Univ
New Haven, Conn. — Meditation is known to alter resting brain patterns, suggesting long lasting brain changes, but a new study by researchers from Yale, Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows meditation also is associated with increased cortical thickness.
The structural changes were found in areas of the brain that are important for sensory, cognitive and emotional processing, the researchers report in the November issue of NeuroReport.
Although the study included only 20 participants, all with extensive training in Buddhist Insight meditation, the results are significant, said Jeremy Gray, assistant professor of psychology at Yale and co-author of the study led by Sara Lazar, assistant in psychology at Massachusetts General Hospital.
“What is most fascinating to me is the suggestion that meditation practice can change anyone’s grey matter,” Gray said. “The study participants were people with jobs and families. They just meditated on average 40 minutes each day, you don’t have to be a monk.”
Magnetic resonance imaging showed that regular practice of meditation is associated with increased thickness in a subset of cortical regions related to sensory, auditory, visual and internal perception, such as heart rate or breathing. The researchers also found that regular meditation practice may slow age-related thinning of the frontal cortex.
“Most of the regions identified in this study were found in the right hemisphere,” the researchers said. “The right hemisphere is essential for sustaining attention, which is a central practice of Insight meditation.”
They said other forms of yoga and meditation likely have a similar impact on cortical structure, although each tradition would be expected to have a slightly different pattern of cortical thickening based on the specific mental exercises involved.
Co-authors include Catherine Kerr, Rachel Wasserman Jeffery Dusek, Herbert Benson and Metta McGarvey, Harvard; Douglas Greve, Brian Quinn, Bruce Fischl, Michael Treadway and Scott Rauch, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Christopher Moore, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
NeuroReport 16: 1893-1897 (November 28, 2005)
Jeremy Gray, Yale Univ
New Haven, Conn. — Meditation is known to alter resting brain patterns, suggesting long lasting brain changes, but a new study by researchers from Yale, Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows meditation also is associated with increased cortical thickness.
The structural changes were found in areas of the brain that are important for sensory, cognitive and emotional processing, the researchers report in the November issue of NeuroReport.
Although the study included only 20 participants, all with extensive training in Buddhist Insight meditation, the results are significant, said Jeremy Gray, assistant professor of psychology at Yale and co-author of the study led by Sara Lazar, assistant in psychology at Massachusetts General Hospital.
“What is most fascinating to me is the suggestion that meditation practice can change anyone’s grey matter,” Gray said. “The study participants were people with jobs and families. They just meditated on average 40 minutes each day, you don’t have to be a monk.”
Magnetic resonance imaging showed that regular practice of meditation is associated with increased thickness in a subset of cortical regions related to sensory, auditory, visual and internal perception, such as heart rate or breathing. The researchers also found that regular meditation practice may slow age-related thinning of the frontal cortex.
“Most of the regions identified in this study were found in the right hemisphere,” the researchers said. “The right hemisphere is essential for sustaining attention, which is a central practice of Insight meditation.”
They said other forms of yoga and meditation likely have a similar impact on cortical structure, although each tradition would be expected to have a slightly different pattern of cortical thickening based on the specific mental exercises involved.
Co-authors include Catherine Kerr, Rachel Wasserman Jeffery Dusek, Herbert Benson and Metta McGarvey, Harvard; Douglas Greve, Brian Quinn, Bruce Fischl, Michael Treadway and Scott Rauch, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Christopher Moore, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
NeuroReport 16: 1893-1897 (November 28, 2005)
Meditation For Health & Wellbeing
The following are just some of the potential benefits to health and wellbeing and some of the conditions which can be helped.
Taken daily, it can untangle tension, fight fatigue and even lower your blood pressure. It can lift your spirits…it costs nothing, has no side effects and doesn't require medical help.
Arthritis Today - magazine of the Arthritis Foundation
RESEARCH AND EVIDENCE FOR HEALTH & WELLBEING BENEFITS
There are hundreds of studies, ranging from Harvard Medical School and Yale University, through to the Swedish Airforce, which provide strong research on these benefits (and many others). Research on one form of meditation alone has been conducted at over 200 different universities, hospitals and research institutions in over 30 countries. Included below are just a few
Dr Craig Hassed, senior lecturer, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing & Health Sciences at Melbourne's Monash University, says:
Meditation is a great adjunct for a lot of things, from chronic pain to improving sleep, helping reduce blood pressure and coping with stress, anxiety and depression.
Stress Reduction & Relaxation
• Meditation is the only activity that reduces blood lactate, a marker of stress and anxiety.
• The calming hormones melatonin and serotonin are increased by meditation and the stress hormone cortisol is decreased (cortisol is an adrenal hormone that is found in extremely high levels in people with pain).
• Meditation creates a unique state, in which the metabolism is in an even deeper state of rest than during sleep. During sleep, oxen consumption drops by 8 percent, but during meditation, it drops by 10 to 20 percent.
• Meditating 45 year old women and men had on average, respectively, 47% and 23% more DHEA (the youth related hormone) than non-meditators -this helps decrease stress, heighten memory, preserve sexual function, and control weight.
Extracts from Meditation as Medicine - D. S. Khalsa, M.D. and C. Stauth - Pocket Books, 2001
Meditation provides a far deeper state of relaxation than does simple eyes-closed rest. The breath rate and plasma lactate decreases and the basal skin resistance increases significantly more during meditation than during eyes-closed rest. Prior to the meditation sessions, meditating subjects had lower levels of breath rate, plasma lactate, spontaneous skin conductance, and heart rate than did the controls and this deeper level of relaxation before starting the practice suggests that reduced physiological stress through meditation is cumulative.
American Psychologist 1987.
Experiments conducted by Dr H Benson of Harvard University into meditation techniques established that the techniques had a very real effect on reducing stress - direct effects included slowed heartbeat and breathing, reduced oxygen consumption and increased skin resistance. "The Relaxation Response" Dr H Benson 1968
According to a randomised study conducted by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, a stress-reducing meditation technique can significantly reduce the severity of congestive heart failure, the leading cause of death in the U.S. This study is in the winter 2007 issue of Ethnicity & Disease.
Even the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have recommended meditation (along with salt and dietary restrictions) above prescription drugs as the first treatment for mild hypertension.
Improved Sleep
75 percent of insomniacs were able to sleep normally when they meditated. Meditation as Medicine. D.S. Khalsa, M.D. and C Stauth 2001
One hundred percent of insomnia patients reported improved sleep and 91% either eliminated or reduced the use of sleeping medication. The American Journal of Medicine 1996
Living Younger & Longer and slowing the ageing process
Reversal of Ageing Process - A study group of long-term meditators (practising meditation for five years or more) were physiologically twelve years younger than their chronological age, as measured by reduction of blood pressure, and better near-point vision and auditory discrimination. Short-term meditators were physiologically five years younger than their chronological age. The study controlled for the effects of diet and exercise.
International Journal of Neuroscience 1982.
• Meditators secrete more of the youth-related hormone DHEA as they age than non-meditators.
• Meditating 45 year old women and men had on average, respectively, 47% and 23% more DHEA than non-meditators - this helps decrease stress, heighten memory, preserve sexual function, and control weight.
• Meditation has a profound effect upon three key indicators of ageing: hearing ability, blood pressure, and vision of close objects.
Extracts from Meditation as Medicine - D. S. Khalsa, M.D. and C. Stauth - Pocket Books, 2001
A study by neuroscientist Sara Lazar Ph.D (who leads Meditation research at Harvard Medical School) showed that the part of the brain known as the cerebral cortex (critical in decision making and working memory) was thicker in people who meditated for as little as 40 minutes a day, compared with people who did not. It is possible that meditation may protect against age-related thinning of this part of the brain.
Weight Management
According to Dr Pamela Peeke, assistant clinical professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, stress can be a major contributor in weight gain and an increase of body fat and particularly abdominal fat.
This is because when stressed or anxious, the body produces stress hormones such as cortisol. These are the "fight or flight" hormones and would normally be discharged/dispersed if either of those physical options were followed. However, in modern society, these options are often not realistic possibilities and the stress hormones do not get released - particularly when a person is under regular stress or unable to manage/release their stress.
When held in this way, these hormones signal the fat cells to hold tight and this makes weight loss even harder. Additionally, stress hormones signal the brain to increase appetite. Finally, these hormones can have an effect on the "happy hormones" such as serotonin, which can lead to depressed moods and potentially, comfort eating.
Meditators secrete more of the youth-related hormone DHEA as they age than non-meditators and this can help decrease stress and control weight. Extracts from Meditation as Medicine - D. S. Khalsa, M.D. and C. Stauth - Pocket Books, 2001
Blood pressure
Meditation lowers blood pressure
BBC News report, August 1999
A randomised study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine showed that a widely practised, stress-reducing meditation technique can significantly reduce the severity of congestive heart failure. Referenced in Ethnicity & Disease journal 2007.
"People with high blood pressure may want to medicate and meditate" American Heart Association journal. Results published in the Association's journal Hypertension, showed that the Transcendental Meditation technique significantly lowered blood pressure in older African American men and women who were at high risk for five major risk factor groups. August 1996
Practising meditation may play an important role in controlling certain risk factors for heart disease…practice for 20 minutes a day has a positive, measurable effect on the build up of fatty deposits in arteries or atherosclerosis…just a small reduction could reduce the risk of heart attack by 11 % and reduce the risk of stroke by 15%.
CNN, July 2000 and referencing the March edition of the journal Stroke.
Eighty percent of hypertensive patients have lowered blood pressure and decreased medications - 16% are able to discontinue all of their medications. These results lasted at least three years. Journal of Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation 1989
A relaxation technique known as transcendental meditation may decrease blood pressure and reduce insulin resistance among patients with coronary heart disease, according to a report in the June 12 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Even the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have recommended meditation (along with salt and dietary restrictions) above prescription drugs as the first treatment for mild hypertension.
Greater Energy
TIME Magazine
Many people who meditate claim the practice restores their energy, allowing them to perform better at tasks that require attention and concentration. If so, wouldn't a midday nap work just as well? No, says Bruce O'Hara, associate professor of biology at the University of Kentucky. In a study he had college students either meditate, sleep or watch TV. Then he tested them for what psychologists call psychomotor vigilance. Those who had been taught to meditate performed 10% better - "a huge jump, statistically speaking," says O'Hara. Those who snoozed did significantly worse.
Improved General Health & Immune System
There is significant data that meditation can enhance healing - Executive Director, Centre for Mindfulness in Medicine, University of Massachusetts, as quoted in Arthritis Today magazine.
Recent studies suggest meditation may balance the immune system to help the body resist disease. Arthritis Today magazine.
Extensive research on the benefits of meditation has shown significant improvements in-patients with cancer, diabetes, asthma, psoriasis, headache, multiple sclerosis, and other ailments. University of Massachusetts Medical School
"...Meanwhile, the evidence from meditation researchers continues to mount. One study, for example, shows that women who meditate and use guided imagery have higher levels of the immune cells known to combat tumours in the breast. This comes after many studies have established that meditation can significantly reduce blood pressure.
TIME Magazine
A 5-year study of medical care statistics on 2,000 people who regularly practised Transcendental Meditation found that their overall rate of hospitalisation was 56% lower than the norm. Psychosomatic Medicine 1987.
A new study shows that meditation can help produce antibodies against illness and also lift your spirits. Researchers say biological effects seen in the study are long lasting -- up to four months after the end of meditation training. Psychosomatic Medicine 2003.
Medical outcomes from 15,000 patients' participation since 1979 have shown a 35% reduction in the number of medical symptoms and a 40% reduction in psychological symptoms. University of Massachusetts Medical School
The managers and employees in two companies which introduced meditation and who regularly practised meditation improved significantly in overall physical health and mental well being, as compared to control subjects with similar jobs in the same companies. The meditation practitioners also reported significant reductions in health problems such as headaches and backaches, improved quality of sleep, and a significant reduction in the use of hard liquor and cigarettes, compared to personnel in the control groups.
Anxiety, Stress and Coping International Journal.
Better Cardiovascular Health
In a randomised study conducted by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, a widely practised, stress-reducing meditation technique can significantly reduce the severity of congestive heart failure." The results of this study indicate that transcendental meditation can be effective in improving the functional capacity and quality of life of congestive heart failure patients" said Ravishankar Jayadevappa, PhD, lead author and Research Assistant Professor in Penn's Division of Geriatric Medicine. "These results also suggest long-term improvements in survival in these individuals." The study appears in the Winter 2007 issue of Ethnicity & Disease.
This study was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health-National Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, in a collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania with the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention at Maharishi University of Management.
Pain Management
65 percent of the patients who spent 10 weeks in Jon Kabat-Zinn's Stress Reduction Clinic reported that their pain was reduced by one-third or more. This study was published in the April 1982 issue of General Hospital Psychiatry.
Research shows meditation can help relieve many arthritis symptoms, such as pain, anxiety, stress and depression, as well as relieve the fatigue and insomnia associated with fibromyalgia. Arthritis Foundation.
Meditation reduces cortisol, the stress hormone, which is found in very high levels with people in pain. As referenced by DK Singh M.D. in his book, Meditation as Medicine.
"We're decreasing their bodily pain, decreasing the intensity of their pain and we're increasing the quality of their life" Dr Jackie Gardner-Nix, (who runs a meditation programme at Sunnybrook and St Michael's hospitals in Toronto).
Twelve healthy long-term meditators who had been practising Transcendental Meditation for 30 years showed a 40-50% lower brain response to pain compared to 12 healthy controls, reported by a latest NeuroReport journal article, published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins August 2006. Further, when the 12 controls then learned and practised Transcendental Meditation for 5 months, their brain responses to pain also decreased by a comparable 40-50%. According to Orme-Johnson, lead author of this research, "Prior research indicates that Transcendental Meditation creates a more balanced outlook on life and greater equanimity in reacting to stress. This study suggests that this is not just an attitudinal change, but a fundamental change in how the brain functions".
Improved Mental Function, Intelligence & Memory
Significant performance improvements in memory and cognition were shown by students instructed in meditation, as compared with students randomly allocated a routine of 'eyes closed' rest twice a day and those who did not have any change to their routine.
Memory and Cognition 1982.
Intelligence increased significantly in University students who regularly practised meditation over a 2-year period. Personality and Individual Differences 1991 and Perceptual and Motor Skills 1986.
Results showed that the practice of meditation techniques develops greater field independence (which is associated with a greater ability to assimilate and structure experience, greater organisation of mind and cognitive clarity, improved memory and greater creative expression). This improvement in meditators is remarkable because it was previously thought that these basic perceptual abilities do not improve beyond early adulthood.
Perceptual Motor Skills.
A study using the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (measuring figural and verbal creativity) in a control group and in a group that subsequently learned meditation, showed five months later that the meditation group scored significantly higher on figural originality, flexibility and verbal fluency. Journal of Creative Behaviour.
Depression
In the 1990s British psychiatrist John Teasdale became intrigued with mindfulness meditation, a Buddhist practice in which you sit quietly and observe whatever thoughts and perceptions arise in your consciousness, but without judging them. He and colleagues showed that mindfulness training halves the rate at which people treated for depression relapse. Newsweek 2007
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
This is an extract taken from additudemag.com from an interview with psychiatrist L Zylowska MD who heads the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Centre's ADHD programme.
"We just completed a study involving 25 adults and eight adolescents, half of whom had the combined (both inattentive and hyperactive) form of ADHD, and the results were very promising. We observed significant improvements in both inattention and hyperactivity. In cognitive tests, the participants got better at staying focused, even when different things were competing for their attention. Many of them also felt less anxious and depressed by the end of study. Researchers have shown that, compared with people who don't meditate, long-time meditators have different EEG and MRI patterns, particularly in the brain's frontal region-the region that is involved with AD/HD. Another study found a rise in the level of the neurotransmitter dopamine during meditative states. Lowered levels of dopamine have been found regularly in people with ADHD.
Respiratory Conditions
Asthma, emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) all restrict breathing and raise fears of suffocation, which in turn makes breathing even more difficult. Studies show that when people with these respiratory conditions learn breath meditation, they have fewer respiratory crises.
Improved mental function in older age
A study by neuroscientist Sara Lazar Ph.D (who leads Meditation research at Harvard Medical School) showed that the part of the brain known as the cerebral cortex (critical in decision making and working memory) was thicker in people who meditated for as little as 40 minutes a day, compared with people who did not. It is possible that meditation may protect against age-related thinning of this part of the brain.
The structural changes were found in areas of the brain that are important for sensory, cognitive and emotional processing. Jeremy Gray, assistant professor of psychology at Yale and co-author of the study led by Sara Lazar, said "What is most fascinating to me is the suggestion that meditation practice can change anyone's grey matter. The study participants were people with jobs and families. They just meditated on average 40 minutes each day, you don't have to be a monk.
Magnetic resonance imaging showed that regular practice of meditation is associated with increased thickness in a subset of cortical regions related to sensory, auditory, visual and internal perception, such as heart rate or breathing. The researchers also found that regular meditation practice may slow age-related thinning of the frontal cortex. November issue of NeuroReport.
The hormones cortisol and adrenaline, which are over produced under stress "accelerate the ageing process and is a major risk factor not only in Alzheimer's disease but also in the far more common condition of age-associated memory disorder". D S Khalsa M.D. Meditation as Medicine 2001.
Cancer Management
Meditation and other approaches to deep relaxation help centre people so they can figure out how they'd like to handle the illness and proceed with life. An Australian psychiatrist who uses meditation with cancer patients, studied seventy-three patients who had attended at least twenty sessions of intensive meditation, and wrote: "Nearly all such patients can expect significant reduction of anxiety and depression, together with much less discomfort and pain. There is reason to expect a 10 percent chance of quite remarkable slowing of the rate of growth of the tumour, and a 50 percent chance of greatly improved quality of life.
Long-term meditators experience 80 percent less heart disease and 50 percent less cancer than nonmeditators.
Meditation as Medicine 2001 D S Khalsa and C Stuath
Reduced Hospitalisation
In a study reported in Psychosomatic Medicine 1987, a study was compiled from health insurance statistics on over 2,000 people who had practised meditation for a five or more years period. This study found that the meditators consistently underwent less than half of any hospitalisation undertaken by other groups and this factored in those of comparable age, gender and profession. This difference increased in older-age brackets and the meditators had fewer incidents of illness in seventeen medical treatment categories, including 87% less hospitalisation for heart disease and 55% less for cancer. Finally, the meditators consistently had more than 50% fewer doctor visits than did other groups.
Multiple Sclerosis
Extensive research on the benefits of meditation has shown significant improvements in-patients with cancer, diabetes, asthma, psoriasis, headache, multiple sclerosis, and other ailments. University of Massachusetts Medical School Centre for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society.
Taken daily, it can untangle tension, fight fatigue and even lower your blood pressure. It can lift your spirits…it costs nothing, has no side effects and doesn't require medical help.
Arthritis Today - magazine of the Arthritis Foundation
RESEARCH AND EVIDENCE FOR HEALTH & WELLBEING BENEFITS
There are hundreds of studies, ranging from Harvard Medical School and Yale University, through to the Swedish Airforce, which provide strong research on these benefits (and many others). Research on one form of meditation alone has been conducted at over 200 different universities, hospitals and research institutions in over 30 countries. Included below are just a few
Dr Craig Hassed, senior lecturer, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing & Health Sciences at Melbourne's Monash University, says:
Meditation is a great adjunct for a lot of things, from chronic pain to improving sleep, helping reduce blood pressure and coping with stress, anxiety and depression.
Stress Reduction & Relaxation
• Meditation is the only activity that reduces blood lactate, a marker of stress and anxiety.
• The calming hormones melatonin and serotonin are increased by meditation and the stress hormone cortisol is decreased (cortisol is an adrenal hormone that is found in extremely high levels in people with pain).
• Meditation creates a unique state, in which the metabolism is in an even deeper state of rest than during sleep. During sleep, oxen consumption drops by 8 percent, but during meditation, it drops by 10 to 20 percent.
• Meditating 45 year old women and men had on average, respectively, 47% and 23% more DHEA (the youth related hormone) than non-meditators -this helps decrease stress, heighten memory, preserve sexual function, and control weight.
Extracts from Meditation as Medicine - D. S. Khalsa, M.D. and C. Stauth - Pocket Books, 2001
Meditation provides a far deeper state of relaxation than does simple eyes-closed rest. The breath rate and plasma lactate decreases and the basal skin resistance increases significantly more during meditation than during eyes-closed rest. Prior to the meditation sessions, meditating subjects had lower levels of breath rate, plasma lactate, spontaneous skin conductance, and heart rate than did the controls and this deeper level of relaxation before starting the practice suggests that reduced physiological stress through meditation is cumulative.
American Psychologist 1987.
Experiments conducted by Dr H Benson of Harvard University into meditation techniques established that the techniques had a very real effect on reducing stress - direct effects included slowed heartbeat and breathing, reduced oxygen consumption and increased skin resistance. "The Relaxation Response" Dr H Benson 1968
According to a randomised study conducted by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, a stress-reducing meditation technique can significantly reduce the severity of congestive heart failure, the leading cause of death in the U.S. This study is in the winter 2007 issue of Ethnicity & Disease.
Even the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have recommended meditation (along with salt and dietary restrictions) above prescription drugs as the first treatment for mild hypertension.
Improved Sleep
75 percent of insomniacs were able to sleep normally when they meditated. Meditation as Medicine. D.S. Khalsa, M.D. and C Stauth 2001
One hundred percent of insomnia patients reported improved sleep and 91% either eliminated or reduced the use of sleeping medication. The American Journal of Medicine 1996
Living Younger & Longer and slowing the ageing process
Reversal of Ageing Process - A study group of long-term meditators (practising meditation for five years or more) were physiologically twelve years younger than their chronological age, as measured by reduction of blood pressure, and better near-point vision and auditory discrimination. Short-term meditators were physiologically five years younger than their chronological age. The study controlled for the effects of diet and exercise.
International Journal of Neuroscience 1982.
• Meditators secrete more of the youth-related hormone DHEA as they age than non-meditators.
• Meditating 45 year old women and men had on average, respectively, 47% and 23% more DHEA than non-meditators - this helps decrease stress, heighten memory, preserve sexual function, and control weight.
• Meditation has a profound effect upon three key indicators of ageing: hearing ability, blood pressure, and vision of close objects.
Extracts from Meditation as Medicine - D. S. Khalsa, M.D. and C. Stauth - Pocket Books, 2001
A study by neuroscientist Sara Lazar Ph.D (who leads Meditation research at Harvard Medical School) showed that the part of the brain known as the cerebral cortex (critical in decision making and working memory) was thicker in people who meditated for as little as 40 minutes a day, compared with people who did not. It is possible that meditation may protect against age-related thinning of this part of the brain.
Weight Management
According to Dr Pamela Peeke, assistant clinical professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, stress can be a major contributor in weight gain and an increase of body fat and particularly abdominal fat.
This is because when stressed or anxious, the body produces stress hormones such as cortisol. These are the "fight or flight" hormones and would normally be discharged/dispersed if either of those physical options were followed. However, in modern society, these options are often not realistic possibilities and the stress hormones do not get released - particularly when a person is under regular stress or unable to manage/release their stress.
When held in this way, these hormones signal the fat cells to hold tight and this makes weight loss even harder. Additionally, stress hormones signal the brain to increase appetite. Finally, these hormones can have an effect on the "happy hormones" such as serotonin, which can lead to depressed moods and potentially, comfort eating.
Meditators secrete more of the youth-related hormone DHEA as they age than non-meditators and this can help decrease stress and control weight. Extracts from Meditation as Medicine - D. S. Khalsa, M.D. and C. Stauth - Pocket Books, 2001
Blood pressure
Meditation lowers blood pressure
BBC News report, August 1999
A randomised study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine showed that a widely practised, stress-reducing meditation technique can significantly reduce the severity of congestive heart failure. Referenced in Ethnicity & Disease journal 2007.
"People with high blood pressure may want to medicate and meditate" American Heart Association journal. Results published in the Association's journal Hypertension, showed that the Transcendental Meditation technique significantly lowered blood pressure in older African American men and women who were at high risk for five major risk factor groups. August 1996
Practising meditation may play an important role in controlling certain risk factors for heart disease…practice for 20 minutes a day has a positive, measurable effect on the build up of fatty deposits in arteries or atherosclerosis…just a small reduction could reduce the risk of heart attack by 11 % and reduce the risk of stroke by 15%.
CNN, July 2000 and referencing the March edition of the journal Stroke.
Eighty percent of hypertensive patients have lowered blood pressure and decreased medications - 16% are able to discontinue all of their medications. These results lasted at least three years. Journal of Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation 1989
A relaxation technique known as transcendental meditation may decrease blood pressure and reduce insulin resistance among patients with coronary heart disease, according to a report in the June 12 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Even the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have recommended meditation (along with salt and dietary restrictions) above prescription drugs as the first treatment for mild hypertension.
Greater Energy
TIME Magazine
Many people who meditate claim the practice restores their energy, allowing them to perform better at tasks that require attention and concentration. If so, wouldn't a midday nap work just as well? No, says Bruce O'Hara, associate professor of biology at the University of Kentucky. In a study he had college students either meditate, sleep or watch TV. Then he tested them for what psychologists call psychomotor vigilance. Those who had been taught to meditate performed 10% better - "a huge jump, statistically speaking," says O'Hara. Those who snoozed did significantly worse.
Improved General Health & Immune System
There is significant data that meditation can enhance healing - Executive Director, Centre for Mindfulness in Medicine, University of Massachusetts, as quoted in Arthritis Today magazine.
Recent studies suggest meditation may balance the immune system to help the body resist disease. Arthritis Today magazine.
Extensive research on the benefits of meditation has shown significant improvements in-patients with cancer, diabetes, asthma, psoriasis, headache, multiple sclerosis, and other ailments. University of Massachusetts Medical School
"...Meanwhile, the evidence from meditation researchers continues to mount. One study, for example, shows that women who meditate and use guided imagery have higher levels of the immune cells known to combat tumours in the breast. This comes after many studies have established that meditation can significantly reduce blood pressure.
TIME Magazine
A 5-year study of medical care statistics on 2,000 people who regularly practised Transcendental Meditation found that their overall rate of hospitalisation was 56% lower than the norm. Psychosomatic Medicine 1987.
A new study shows that meditation can help produce antibodies against illness and also lift your spirits. Researchers say biological effects seen in the study are long lasting -- up to four months after the end of meditation training. Psychosomatic Medicine 2003.
Medical outcomes from 15,000 patients' participation since 1979 have shown a 35% reduction in the number of medical symptoms and a 40% reduction in psychological symptoms. University of Massachusetts Medical School
The managers and employees in two companies which introduced meditation and who regularly practised meditation improved significantly in overall physical health and mental well being, as compared to control subjects with similar jobs in the same companies. The meditation practitioners also reported significant reductions in health problems such as headaches and backaches, improved quality of sleep, and a significant reduction in the use of hard liquor and cigarettes, compared to personnel in the control groups.
Anxiety, Stress and Coping International Journal.
Better Cardiovascular Health
In a randomised study conducted by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, a widely practised, stress-reducing meditation technique can significantly reduce the severity of congestive heart failure." The results of this study indicate that transcendental meditation can be effective in improving the functional capacity and quality of life of congestive heart failure patients" said Ravishankar Jayadevappa, PhD, lead author and Research Assistant Professor in Penn's Division of Geriatric Medicine. "These results also suggest long-term improvements in survival in these individuals." The study appears in the Winter 2007 issue of Ethnicity & Disease.
This study was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health-National Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, in a collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania with the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention at Maharishi University of Management.
Pain Management
65 percent of the patients who spent 10 weeks in Jon Kabat-Zinn's Stress Reduction Clinic reported that their pain was reduced by one-third or more. This study was published in the April 1982 issue of General Hospital Psychiatry.
Research shows meditation can help relieve many arthritis symptoms, such as pain, anxiety, stress and depression, as well as relieve the fatigue and insomnia associated with fibromyalgia. Arthritis Foundation.
Meditation reduces cortisol, the stress hormone, which is found in very high levels with people in pain. As referenced by DK Singh M.D. in his book, Meditation as Medicine.
"We're decreasing their bodily pain, decreasing the intensity of their pain and we're increasing the quality of their life" Dr Jackie Gardner-Nix, (who runs a meditation programme at Sunnybrook and St Michael's hospitals in Toronto).
Twelve healthy long-term meditators who had been practising Transcendental Meditation for 30 years showed a 40-50% lower brain response to pain compared to 12 healthy controls, reported by a latest NeuroReport journal article, published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins August 2006. Further, when the 12 controls then learned and practised Transcendental Meditation for 5 months, their brain responses to pain also decreased by a comparable 40-50%. According to Orme-Johnson, lead author of this research, "Prior research indicates that Transcendental Meditation creates a more balanced outlook on life and greater equanimity in reacting to stress. This study suggests that this is not just an attitudinal change, but a fundamental change in how the brain functions".
Improved Mental Function, Intelligence & Memory
Significant performance improvements in memory and cognition were shown by students instructed in meditation, as compared with students randomly allocated a routine of 'eyes closed' rest twice a day and those who did not have any change to their routine.
Memory and Cognition 1982.
Intelligence increased significantly in University students who regularly practised meditation over a 2-year period. Personality and Individual Differences 1991 and Perceptual and Motor Skills 1986.
Results showed that the practice of meditation techniques develops greater field independence (which is associated with a greater ability to assimilate and structure experience, greater organisation of mind and cognitive clarity, improved memory and greater creative expression). This improvement in meditators is remarkable because it was previously thought that these basic perceptual abilities do not improve beyond early adulthood.
Perceptual Motor Skills.
A study using the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (measuring figural and verbal creativity) in a control group and in a group that subsequently learned meditation, showed five months later that the meditation group scored significantly higher on figural originality, flexibility and verbal fluency. Journal of Creative Behaviour.
Depression
In the 1990s British psychiatrist John Teasdale became intrigued with mindfulness meditation, a Buddhist practice in which you sit quietly and observe whatever thoughts and perceptions arise in your consciousness, but without judging them. He and colleagues showed that mindfulness training halves the rate at which people treated for depression relapse. Newsweek 2007
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
This is an extract taken from additudemag.com from an interview with psychiatrist L Zylowska MD who heads the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Centre's ADHD programme.
"We just completed a study involving 25 adults and eight adolescents, half of whom had the combined (both inattentive and hyperactive) form of ADHD, and the results were very promising. We observed significant improvements in both inattention and hyperactivity. In cognitive tests, the participants got better at staying focused, even when different things were competing for their attention. Many of them also felt less anxious and depressed by the end of study. Researchers have shown that, compared with people who don't meditate, long-time meditators have different EEG and MRI patterns, particularly in the brain's frontal region-the region that is involved with AD/HD. Another study found a rise in the level of the neurotransmitter dopamine during meditative states. Lowered levels of dopamine have been found regularly in people with ADHD.
Respiratory Conditions
Asthma, emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) all restrict breathing and raise fears of suffocation, which in turn makes breathing even more difficult. Studies show that when people with these respiratory conditions learn breath meditation, they have fewer respiratory crises.
Improved mental function in older age
A study by neuroscientist Sara Lazar Ph.D (who leads Meditation research at Harvard Medical School) showed that the part of the brain known as the cerebral cortex (critical in decision making and working memory) was thicker in people who meditated for as little as 40 minutes a day, compared with people who did not. It is possible that meditation may protect against age-related thinning of this part of the brain.
The structural changes were found in areas of the brain that are important for sensory, cognitive and emotional processing. Jeremy Gray, assistant professor of psychology at Yale and co-author of the study led by Sara Lazar, said "What is most fascinating to me is the suggestion that meditation practice can change anyone's grey matter. The study participants were people with jobs and families. They just meditated on average 40 minutes each day, you don't have to be a monk.
Magnetic resonance imaging showed that regular practice of meditation is associated with increased thickness in a subset of cortical regions related to sensory, auditory, visual and internal perception, such as heart rate or breathing. The researchers also found that regular meditation practice may slow age-related thinning of the frontal cortex. November issue of NeuroReport.
The hormones cortisol and adrenaline, which are over produced under stress "accelerate the ageing process and is a major risk factor not only in Alzheimer's disease but also in the far more common condition of age-associated memory disorder". D S Khalsa M.D. Meditation as Medicine 2001.
Cancer Management
Meditation and other approaches to deep relaxation help centre people so they can figure out how they'd like to handle the illness and proceed with life. An Australian psychiatrist who uses meditation with cancer patients, studied seventy-three patients who had attended at least twenty sessions of intensive meditation, and wrote: "Nearly all such patients can expect significant reduction of anxiety and depression, together with much less discomfort and pain. There is reason to expect a 10 percent chance of quite remarkable slowing of the rate of growth of the tumour, and a 50 percent chance of greatly improved quality of life.
Long-term meditators experience 80 percent less heart disease and 50 percent less cancer than nonmeditators.
Meditation as Medicine 2001 D S Khalsa and C Stuath
Reduced Hospitalisation
In a study reported in Psychosomatic Medicine 1987, a study was compiled from health insurance statistics on over 2,000 people who had practised meditation for a five or more years period. This study found that the meditators consistently underwent less than half of any hospitalisation undertaken by other groups and this factored in those of comparable age, gender and profession. This difference increased in older-age brackets and the meditators had fewer incidents of illness in seventeen medical treatment categories, including 87% less hospitalisation for heart disease and 55% less for cancer. Finally, the meditators consistently had more than 50% fewer doctor visits than did other groups.
Multiple Sclerosis
Extensive research on the benefits of meditation has shown significant improvements in-patients with cancer, diabetes, asthma, psoriasis, headache, multiple sclerosis, and other ailments. University of Massachusetts Medical School Centre for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society.
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