Western medicine gives meditation the OK

An ancient practice that used to be reserved for ascetics who spent many hours a day in uncomfortable positions. Often coupled with Gregorian or Sanskrit chanting or some other obscure sacred language, strange yoga positions, or Zen Kohans, meditation has gradually joined the mainstream over the past 20 years.

Every fitness, spa or resort advertisement now features the obligatory picture of a thin, young woman sitting cross legged, eyes closed, palms up in some Indian mudra, chin toward the sunset her tiny butt perched on a beautiful hillock. Her face looks calm and resolute, her make up is light, her hair is pulled back in virginal purity.

Chakras?

Still, due to the overabundance of gurus in long flowing robes who spew a lot of unfamiliar things about meditation and chakras, and kundalini there is a lot of confusion about how to meditate. Many people do not understand what meditation is or what it does physiologically psychologically or emotionally.

Western medicine gives meditation the OK

Doctors, scientists and respected western universities have stripped away the layers of mystique and given meditation the thumbs up.

Harvard Medical School, Stanford University, University of Chicago and UCLA are all in agreement that a regular practice can improve the quality of life and health. Proven benefits include

• lowering blood pressure
• reduced stress
• reduced heart disease
• reduced anxiety and depression
• increased mental abilities
• increased focus and concentration
• increased longevity and much more…

As science confirms the benefits of sitting quietly and perfectly still with the spine long and balanced many people have begun to use meditation techniques for stress relief. Brain wave technology has also helped accelerate progress

Accelerating your progress with brain wave technology

I recently found Holosync, developed by Bill Harris one of the teachers from the Secret movie. Over the last 20 years he has been working with developing carrier frequencies beyond what jose Silva began in the 60’s so that you can get the brain down to lower frequencies faster and get the healing and mental benefits more rapidly. It requires stereo head phones and an hour a day of meditation but the results are noticeable.

What I like about Holosync is that Harris backs up his claims with lots research information and support for people doing the program. you know how it works and why it works because of the book and tapes and extensive forum he provides. Because of the carrier frequencies you don’t have to work so hard to keep your mind calm it still works even when the mind wanders where as traditional meditation requires many years just to get quiet enough to reach the healing levels of the mind and brain though slowing the brain waves.

Meditation: an over view of various forms

There are many schools of thought about what constitutes meditation. But scientists have found that what ever type of sitting still with a focus on relaxation stillness and calm is done results in a slowing of of brain waves. The brain runs on electrical impulses and vibrates at different frequencies depending on the state of mind and state of alertness.

The more experience cd the meditator the more able she will be to control and to slow the brain waves to alpha and even lower while still remaining alert and awake. Our regular waking state is rather frenetic and quick. In those who are upset or angry the brainwaves can speed up to even higher levels so the practice of slowing and calming the brain seems to keep meditators on a more even keel even when under stress.

Chanting

I first stumbled upon meditation in 1979. I went to a “Sidda yoga” class expecting to do yoga stretches and found that sidda yoga was actually a meditation practice with about 30 minutes of group chanting and then silent meditation. the monotony of repeating the chant seemed to calm the mind and make it ready to go deeper.

It was pretty relaxing but I did not quite understand what we were supposed to be doing. it was steeped in Hindu practices and worship of the living saint Muktananda. It was not quite my thing so I drifted on after a few months.

I continued to practice yoga and martial arts which included some meditation and concentration and later Pilates which encouraged the use of the breath and focused concentration during movement.

Transcendental meditation

TM had gained wide acceptance in the 80s when I took it up. Deepak Chopra gave TM further respectability with his notoriety. I attended a few weeks of classes where we all meditated as a group in chairs with the feet flat and the breathing slow and calm.

We used a generic mantra and then were assigned our own mantra in a little ceremony with an advanced practitioner. We sat for a while and he began to do some sanskrit chanting and segued into my new mantra, he then sprung up and did some little sanskrit incantation over the incense and assigned me the mantra that had come to him. I thought it was a little hokey but I did not care because the mantra seemed to work nicely to calm and focus me.

One was expected to sit for 20 minutes twice a day and repeat a mantra silently. In esoteric circles this would have been considered merely a concentration and relaxation exercise. Only a pre-meditation exercise instead of actual deeper more spiritual “meditation”. But it did seem to help me cope with life’s ups and downs. In studies people who used TM regularly had less signs of stress than the control subjects.

Vipassina Meditation Center

Later I attended a 10 day silent yoga retreat where we sat for longer and longer periods starting with a half an hour and ending up with 2 hours at a time. we had daily lectures and meal breaks. This is said to be the technique the Buddha had used but again I suspect this was one of the early” pre-mediation” thechniques that he may have used. focusing on the breath and scanning the body minutely with no use of mantra. It was to be practiced 2 hours a day one hour in the morning and one hour at night. I felt that this was a limited way to meditate and that there must be more so I kept looking.

Other meditation and focus techniques

Silva Mind Control Technique, was developed by Jose Silva, an electrical engineer who discovered he could help his kids learn better by teaching them to slow the brainwaves . He later adapted his technique for adults, to teach people to visualize outcomes in order to learn faster or modify a behavior.

Super Learning began to use specific types of classical music to slow brain waves for accelerated learning. These brain wave techniques have been used with Russian athletes and later in other countries during olympic training as far back as the late 1960’s.

There are a lot of books and tapes on meditation that go into further detail on many different techniques for stilling the mind. “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle is pretty mind bending in a good way.

“The Attention Revolution” by Alan Wallace, PH.D. offers a step by step method for learning to focus the mind. He was lucky enough to have long periods of study in India with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and other Learned Lamas.

All these practices are good but they take a lot of time and the results can be frustratingly slow and variable. So for me so far, Holosync is the best technique for accelerating other meditation practices or it can be used on its own. I am sure the above teachers would squirm uncomfortably if they knew I was advocating speeding up the process. But darn it, we are a busy society with things to do and they would be a whole lot easier to do if we were more enlightened.