Meditation finally gets credit for health benefits

By Elizabeth Large
Baltimore Sun

An age-old discipline is gaining broad acceptance as a treatment for a variety of ailments. Gannett News Service How to get started meditating Get some help. Books, tapes or the Internet are an option, but in-person training is best. Find a place to practice. It should be quiet, and comfortable for you. "Setting up a place cues us," says Baltimore psychologist Elaine Yamada. "It tells our bodies this is the time to be in that quiet way." Practice daily, even if only for a few minutes. Pick a word or phrase to repeat; the rhythm helps you focus. Close or half-close your eyes and chant a chosen word(s) silently. "Any phrase that resonates with you will do," says Yamada. Another option: Concentrate on the sensation of breathing, to the exclusion of everything else. Let any thoughts that intrude float away like a leaf on the river. With practice, distracting thoughts will subside. — Baltimore Sun

You won't hear people talking about nirvana much with today's Westernized meditation, and there's hardly a crystal in sight. Instead scientists are studying Buddhist monks with electroencephalographs and magnetic resonance imaging. Health-care professionals are recommending meditation when drugs and other therapies don't work, and sometimes when they do — they may call it a "relaxation technique," to avoid the m-word.

Meditation, a discipline nearly as old as human life and a mainstay of Eastern spirituality, has gained reluctant acceptance as a treatment for everything from high blood pressure to attention deficit disorder. By sitting quietly and concentrating on a word, breath or image, meditators can put themselves into a state of deep relaxation. Recent scientific studies have shown the process may boost the immune system, control pain and lower stress.

"Its effectiveness has been fairly well established with controlled research," says Glenn Schiraldi, who is on the stress management faculty of the University of Maryland's College Park Department of Public and Community Health. Schiraldi meditates 10 or 15 minutes every morning. "It creates changes in the body opposite in every way to stress, and it's intrinsically pleasant to do."

Several months ago, an unusual conference took place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tibetan Buddhist monks and their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, met with leading U.S. neuroscientists and behavioral researchers to plan future studies. The conference sold out to an audience of 1,200 (most of them scientists) and had a waiting list of 1,600.

"Meditation works," a cover story in Time magazine proclaimed this summer, detailing the scientific research that shows it can profoundly affect the body and actually reshape the brain. Millions of Americans seem to agree.

And while it's true that meditation is being stripped of the mystical trappings that make some Westerners uneasy — the chanting, incense and Sanskrit mantras (a repeated word or phrase to quiet the mind) — people who start practicing for health reasons often end up finding the spirituality of meditation on their own. Reaching nirvana might be even better than, say, controlling migraines.

A few months ago, Bob Parrott, a 49-year-old car salesman who lives in Abingdon, Md., was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer. He started to meditate daily, using a bargain-table book he picked up at a Barnes & Noble as a guide. When he talks about the benefits of meditating, he doesn't mention pain or stress, or the fact that he's able to tolerate the radiation treatments better.

"The system has helped me live in the here and now," he says. "I'm not wearing any of my hats. I'm not a car salesman. Not a husband. Not a father. The discovery of a deeper self erases a lot of the fear of mortality."

The latest science suggests meditation can have long-term health benefits, maybe even life-extending ones. Sophisticated scans have shown it can actually rewire the brain.

You don't need any special equipment to practice, although a whole industry has sprung up in the last few years selling cushions, clothes, audio and videotapes, books and focusing aids like meditation crystals. You don't have to wait for an appointment or worry about whether your health insurance will pay for it. And you don't have to be a New Age follower.

Lisa Sanders, a Towson, Md., graduate student whose field is human resources development, has been practicing for the last three years. Three or four evenings a week she goes into her bedroom, puts on a compact disc of meditation musicy, sits with her legs crossed and meditates for 15 or 20 minutes.

"I relax, I get a new start on whatever I'm into, it calms me down," she says.

If scientists were recording the 23-year-old's EEGs as she focuses on her breathing, shuts out the outside world and enters a meditative state, they would find that the activity slows down in the areas of her brain that process sensory information. Conscious thought decreases and relaxation increases.

In a small but intriguing study, Richard Davidson, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found that "mindfulness meditation" — focusing on the present moment and appreciating it fully — seems to increase activity in the area of the brain associated with lower anxiety and a more optimistic outlook in general, a result that lasts after the meditation ends. His research team also studied immune function by giving participants in the study flu shots. Two months later, those who meditated had developed significantly more antibodies to the vaccine than the control group.

So why isn't everyone meditating? For one thing, it isn't easy. Getting your mind to focus on the present and become quiet isn't something many Westerners are comfortable doing — oms or no oms. Meditating takes patience and perseverance. To get good at it, you have to do it daily.

But meditation does have a major advantage over other alternative medicines. Doctors and hospitals are comfortable suggesting patients try it because the only downside is feeling foolish or getting bored. Even the sickest patients don't require supervision, just a little gentle instruction and an open mind.