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Cambodia’s Buddhist monks, dragged last year into the front line of the southeast Asian nation’s fight against smoking, are proving surprisingly adept at kicking the habit, campaigners said on Friday.

About a thousand saffron-robed monks were urged 12 months ago to quit smoking in a bid to get the general public in deeply impoverished Cambodia to follow suit.

Of that trial group, only 13 percent have lit up again, a very impressive level of abstinence, said Yel Daravuth of the Adventist Development and Relief Agency.

The United States-funded missionary group now wants to roll out its smoke-free monks project across the rest of Cambodia, where around a third of monks and two thirds of the male population are avowed puffers.

“The monks act as role models in society,” said Yel Daravuth. “We found that if monks quit, most laypeople said they would be prepared to quit as well, so we are targeting as many monks as possible to give up smoking.”

The guinea-pig monks even took saliva tests to prove they were not lying about not smoking. “Only two were cheating,” Yel Daravuth said.

And the secret of their success? Many hours of meditation, he said.

themercury.co.za: Read more

Keep things simple in your meditation space

March 30, 2003

When designing your own space for meditation or reflection, the most important thing to remember is you.

This is a place to rejuvenate your spirit, says interior designer Ronda Webb of the Design Studio of Gabberts. In your home, you’re not always decorating only for yourself, but making compromises for your husband, your kids, your guests.

“In your space, you should use things that you don’t get to have everywhere else,” Webb says.

Choose a comfortable mat, chair or pillow to help you relax. Clear out all the clutter and avoid having bills, paperwork or computers in view. Don’t have things you “don’t” like or that bring on potential stress in this space.

Other advice from designing experts:

When choosing paint, look for cool tones like green, blue or lavender. These are considered calming colors….

Independent Record: Read the rest of this article…

North Carolina Supreme Court rejects tax-exemption for meditation center

March 3, 2003

A spiritual center near Boone where patrons practice transcendental meditation is not exempt from taxes, despite claims that it’s an educational institution, the state Supreme Court ruled Friday.

The decision reversed the Court of Appeals’ opinion and upholds a ruling by the N.C. Property Tax Commission that the Maharishi Spiritual Center of America is not an educational, scientific or charitable institution that qualifies for a tax exemption.

The center is part of the 7,000-acre Heavenly Mountain resort established by followers of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Beatles’ guru and founder of the Transcendental Meditation movement.

The resort also includes the campus of Maharishi Spiritual University of America, which is accredited by the University of North Carolina Board of Governors to issue bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in Vedic science. The sciences are the study of consciousness and are based on classical Indian Vedic literature.

The Supreme Court, in an unsigned opinion, said it sided with a dissenting opinion by Court of Appeals Judge John Tyson in August.

The appellate court was supposed to review the process used by the tax commission, but otherwise respect its conclusion, Tyson said.

In addition, the judges failed to consider that “the granting of exemption from taxation to some necessarily increases the tax burden on others,” Tyson wrote.

In his own review, Tyson said he concluded that providing some short- and long-term meditation courses, as well as Vedic science and Sanskrit courses, did not qualify the spiritual center for tax exemption.

“Thus, while the spiritual center does offer some educational activity that is not its primary purpose. The record clearly establishes that the primary purpose of the spiritual center is the practice of meditation” by adherents who have been a part of their group for 20 years, Tyson wrote.

The Spiritual Center of America had pursued its county tax exemption since 1997 on property valued at about $6 million.

Watauga County collected about $468,000 in fire and property taxes for the 1999 and 2000 tax years from the spiritual center site.

RickRoss.com: Read an archive of the original article…

Coping with anxiety

February 23, 2003

There’s Cipro, potassium iodide and the smallpox vaccine to ward off biological agents. But is there an antidote to anxiety? “I’m very frightened,” said Julie White, as she exited Manhattan’s Sonic Yoga last week. But she has a remedy: the stretching and deep breathing of yoga. The practice is so calming that after the terror upgrade, White made an upgrade of her own–from one class a day to two. Yoga, she says, “is my tranquilizer.”

You may find the lotus pose hopelessly warm and fuzzy in the face of terror. But there are a host of activities, from working out to going for a massage, that can temper the anxiety. Many of these techniques have been used for decades, if not centuries; now advances in science are showing they can reduce the hormones associated with stress and even affect brain activity. The common trait among all: maintaining control and recognizing that our concerns are a natural response to the world we live in. “We’re justified in having this fear,” says Dr. Herbert Benson, president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute of Boston. “Life was stressful before 9-11. It’s gotten progressively worse.”

The first step toward combating fear is identifying it…

Newsweek: Read the rest of this article…

Meditation improves immune-system function, study finds

February 13, 2003

For the first time, meditation has been shown to produce lasting beneficial changes in immune-system function as well as brain electrical activity, according to a University of Wisconsin-Madison study released Monday.

The study, which looked at a group of 25 employees of a Madison-area company who underwent an eight-week meditation training program, is the latest in a growing body of research into the mind-body connection.

As a part of the study at the end of the eight weeks, flu shots were given to the employees and a group of 16 other employees who did not receive meditation training.

When researchers checked for antibodies to the vaccine at one month and two months later, the meditators had significantly higher levels than the nonmeditators.

On average, the meditators had about a 5 percent increase in antibodies, but some had increases of up to 25 percent, Davidson said.

More importantly, the level of antibodies increased directly in relation to the level of increased brain-wave activity, he said.

To measure brain activity, electroencephalograms were done. Researchers found about 50 percent more electrical activity in the left frontal regions of the brains of the meditators. Other research has showed that part of the brain is associated with positive emotions and anxiety reduction.

The study’s findings will be published in the upcoming issue of the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.

While many researchers have presumed that the benefits of meditation endure, there has been a shortage of such research, said Andrew Newberg, an assistant professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania who has done several neuroimaging studies involving meditation and prayer.

“The fact they can show long-term or chronic changes… is not completely surprising, but it’s important they were able to show that,” he said. “These kinds of studies, when done by high-quality researchers, are really what has been lacking in the field of alternative medicine.”

The meditation training for the study was done by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a noted meditation author who developed a stress-reduction program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.

Judith Stevens, one of the test subjects, said her training has helped her think more clearly and react less emotionally to stressful situations.

“The road rage went down,” she said, laughing.

She said she now practices meditation for about 10 to 20 minutes, five times a week.

A weakness of the study is the relatively small number of participants and use of EEG, which is considered a relatively crude measurement of brain function.

HDLighthouse.org: Read more

Meditation “Good for Brain”

February 5, 2003

Scientists say they have found evidence that meditation has a biological effect on the body.

A small-scale study suggests it could boost parts of the brain and the immune system.

Meditation has been practised since ancient times, mainly in the East.

It is now catching on worldwide as a means to reduce stress or to help with pain caused by various illnesses.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States enrolled 41 people in a trial of so-called “mindfulness” meditation.

It is a technique developed by an American stress reduction specialist – Jon Kabat-Zinn – for helping hospital patients deal with pain and discomfort.

BBC.com: Read the rest of the article…

Finding happiness: cajole your brain to lean to the left

February 4, 2003

NY Times article by Daniel Goleman (author of Emotional Intelligence) on scientific explanations of how meditation acts as an antidote to stress:

All too many years ago, while I was still a psychology graduate student, I ran an experiment to assess how well meditation might work as an antidote to stress. My professors were skeptical, my measures were weak, and my subjects were mainly college sophomores. Not surprisingly, my results were inconclusive.

But today I feel vindicated.

To be sure, over the years there have been scores of studies that have looked at meditation, some suggesting its powers to alleviate the adverse effects of stress. But only last month did what I see as a definitive study confirm my once-shaky hypothesis, by revealing the brain mechanism that may account for meditation’s singular ability to soothe.

The data has emerged as one of many experimental fruits of an unlikely research collaboration: the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan religious and political leader in exile, and some of top psychologists and neuroscientists from the United States. The scientists met with the Dalai Lama for five days in Dharamsala, India, in March 2000, to discuss how people might better control their destructive emotions.

One of my personal heroes in this rapprochement between modern science and ancient wisdom is Dr. Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Davidson, in recent research using functional M.R.I. and advanced EEG analysis, has identified an index for the brain’s set point for moods.

The functional M.R.I. images reveal that when people are emotionally distressed — anxious, angry, depressed — the most active sites in the brain are circuitry converging on the amygdala, part of the brain’s emotional centers, and the right prefrontal cortex, a brain region important for the hypervigilance typical of people under stress.

By contrast, when people are in positive moods — upbeat, enthusiastic and energized — those sites are quiet, with the heightened activity in the left prefrontal cortex.

NY Times: Read the rest of this article…

The fine art of doing nothing

January 25, 2003

Original article no longer available…

Simran Bhargava, Financial Express, India: Sit back, close your eyes and relax. Allow any thoughts that surface to pass through your mind like clouds floating in the sky. Simply watch them come and go, without getting hooked into them.

This simple act of doing — well, nothing at all — is one of the most potent tools yet discovered to banish stress from your life. Doing a little bit of “nothing” every day can, over time, change the texture of your life. It can also significantly bring down blood pressure and according to some doctors, reverse cardiac disease.

Meditation is such a humble little technique that for years no one took it seriously at all. Much too flaky, hardcore medical practitioners said, leave it to the yogi types.

Since then, meditation has come a long way. After politely refusing to study the impact of Transcendental Meditation on blood pressure in 1968, the Harvard Medical School, as well as dozens of other medical schools, now include alternative medicine — also known as integrative medicine — in their curricula.

More recently, Dr Dean Ornish’s landmark research found that diet and lifestyle changes-including daily meditation-could actually reverse heart disease. So significant was this study that for the first time US insurance companies agreed to cover costs of patients learning these lifestyle strategies: this was good business because a high percentage of patients who were candidates for angioplasty and bypass surgeries were actually able to avoid it.

And last month, Time magazine’s annual issue on the latest advances in health and science put “How your mind can heal your body” on its cover. It quotes well-known US cardiologist Dr Mehmet Oz who, although trained in western scientific techniques, now also relies heavily on the ancient eastern technique of meditation to help steer patients toward recovery. Why? “Because it works,” he says.

And so something 2,500 years old is new again. Signed and delivered with a seal of approval from some of the highest medical authorities on the planet.

How did meditation become mainstream? Perhaps our suffering — rampant heart disease, hypertension, strokes — caught our attention, with every man over 35 now carrying around with him the very real fear that such an event could happen to him at any time. Perhaps it was just too many people facing too much stress. Perhaps it was the growing voices of meditation converts all around that couldn’t be ignored any longer. And so, many people, including doctors who wouldn’t have earlier given it a second look, said: “Okay, let’s give it a try.”

And what do you know, it works.

Meditation is simply a route to stillness, a way to create a calm centre in a chaotic universe. It is an antidote to the feeling of being overloaded. If mental stress can lead to irritability, anxiety, heart trouble, hypertension, then holding the reverse feeling in the system — mental calm — would lead to wellness. Makes sense doesn’t it?

Too much stress floods the body with the stress hormone cortisol which, unrelieved, can turn toxic — and dangerous. The old ways of dealing with stress didn’t seem to work because the mental noises followed everywhere. To work, to a party, even into sleep. You could take a vacation to get away from chronic stress — only to find that wherever you go, there you are. Alongwith all the excess baggage in your head.

Meditation is a way to regularly defuse the steam. There are many ways to meditate: from Buddha’s 2,500 year old Vipassana to Mahesh Yogi’s TM to Osho’s active meditations to the Mindfulness practices of Thich Naht Hanh to the whirling of the Sufi dervishes which symbolise a still centre in a turning universe.

It doesn’t matter which vehicle you board to reach a stillpoint. All work on the same principle of emptying the mind of its overload: the noises within become a blur — and slowly fall away, leaving a feeling of inner quiet.

According to the Harvard doctor and hypertension expert Herbert Benson triggering the relaxation response in the body is remarkably simple. All it requires is four factors: One, a quiet environment. Two, a short word or mantra which you repeat over and over to row you back to centre when your mind wanders. Three, a passive attitude, which is the most critical element for meditation. And four, a comfortable position. Start with a few minutes and build up to about 20 minutes a day. That’s it.

Several people find sitting still difficult and practitioners say that the mistake they make is trying too hard to shut out the mental chatter. The key is to accept it — to let all thoughts simply pass through the mind. It means also reversing the old programming of “Don’t just sit there, do something” to the new one of “Don’t just do something, sit there.”

Meditation isn’t a quick fix. Its effects are long-term. If you do it regularly, you may begin to notice subtle changes. Earlier an inner restlessness went with you everywhere, now perhaps an inner calm does. Maybe you react with less annoyance at what other people do. Perhaps you sleep better. Perhaps you have sudden clarity on a problem that had you befuddled before. Perhaps there is a lot to be done and you do it — calmly.

And perhaps the doctor straps a blood pressure monitor on your arm and says: “Surprise, normal.”

That’s pretty life-changing.

The spiritual recovery programmes like Alcoholics Anonymous — which have helped millions — suggest regular time for both, prayer and meditation. They say prayer is asking whatever higher power you believe in for help. And meditation is listening quietly for the answers. You may be surprised at some of the answers you get while meditating.

Others say you should ideally meditate for half an hour everyday. And when you can’t find the time to do it, you should do it for an hour. That’s usually a signal that you are overloaded and need to de-stress.

Chances are that, by now, pretty much everyone is convinced of the benefits of meditation. The more important question is: How many actually do it ? Knowing counts for nothing, doing for everything.

The most important words I ever heard on the subject were from a meditation teacher who said that this simple practice is so powerful, that done regularly, it can change your life. You close your eyes and sit still and nothing seems to have changed. But each time you meditate, it’s like putting a drop of blue into a glass of clear water. You don’t even notice it in the beginning.

And then one day the water turns blue.

Simran Bhargava has been a writer and editor for several years. She writes a weekly column on the business of life.

Meditation Benefits Schoolchildren, Study Finds

January 21, 2003