Canada

Ok, kids, chill out (Montreal Gazette)

January 13, 2007

Children as young as 10 are picking up Transcendental Meditation, and they’re not the only ones feeling good about it

Stephanie Whittaker: Every morning, as soon as she awakens, 13-year-old Joelle Cazeault sits up in her bed, closes her eyes and performs a ritual unknown to most children. She spends 10 minutes doing Transcendental Meditation.

“I repeat my mantra and it slows my breathing,” says the student at College St. Maurice in Ste. Hyacinthe.

Ditto for the afternoon. Joelle meditates when she gets home from school and, she says, it gives her the alertness and focus she needs to do her homework.

Meditation is a ritual she began three years ago when her parents, who have meditated since the 1970s, enrolled her in a Transcendental Meditation course: “They think it’s important for my life and that it can help me become enlightened.”

Perhaps it is inevitable that baby boomers, the generation that learned to chill out in heightened states of consciousness, want their offspring to experience the same.

Children as young as 10 are learning Transcendental Meditation and are reaping the rewards at school. “I always had good marks but they got even better after I learned to meditate,” says Joelle.

She’s at the forefront of a coming trend. There is a growing push in the U.S. to put “ohm” in schools by making Transcendental Meditation part of the curriculum. The movement is poised to take Canada with it.

A U.S.-based group called Stress-Free Schools has helped set up T.M. programs in 50 schools south of the border and has piqued the interest of educators in Canada.

Six Montreal-area schools want the program.

“My students deserve to have this, and it will transform the whole school,” says Marielle Mayers, an elementary school principal in Ville d’Anjou.

Michele Beausoleil, a Montreal teacher of T.M., is keen to get started: “We’re ready to teach the children, teachers and principals and I’ll work to help the schools find funding from foundations.”

Stress-Free Schools was founded in 2004 by a group of meditating parents in New York City, who were concerned about social problems in their schools.

Two months ago, the organization held a conference at Montreal’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel to explain to educators how teaching T.M. to children as young as 10 can benefit their schools.

Original article no longer available.

Cancer as a ‘reversible disease’ (Globe and Mail, Canada)

May 7, 2004

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Mark Hume, Globe and Mail: Doctors at a centre in B.C. are involving cancer patients with their own healing in a holistic approach, with surprising results.

When Dennis Thulin was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1999, he wanted to play an active role in searching for a way to get healthy again.

In the hope of avoiding the invasive, traditional treatments of surgery or radiation therapy, he changed his diet, began to exercise more, had his mercury fillings removed, started to relieve stress through meditation and fasted to detoxify his body.

The attitude of his doctors, he said recalling the frustration he felt then, was that “everything I was doing was a waste of time.”

But he thought differently, and when he learned about the Centre for Integrated Healing — where doctors seek to combine traditional medicine with alternative approaches that empower patients — Mr. Thulin went to investigate.

“I was euphoric,” he said of his feelings after he visited the clinic for the first time and learned the philosophy of the team that runs the only centre of its kind in North America.

“It’s a wonderful place with a wonderful attitude,” said Mr. Thulin, who is on a treatment program at the centre, where he now works as a volunteer.

“It’s a whole different attitude. It’s not just a doctor saying do this, this and this,” said Mr. Thulin. “There’s so much support and love in that place. That’s what blows people away. It’s not like a typical cancer clinic.”

Founded by Dr. Roger Rogers and Dr. Hal Gunn, the centre stresses that emotional and spiritual healing is as important as physical healing.

Dr. Gunn said that before the centre was established, he went on a tour of cancer facilities in the United States, where he found clinics were offering one aspect or another of complementary care. Some clinics focused on diet, others keyed on stress reduction, or meditation. He and Dr. Rogers, who in 2001 was awarded the Order of British Columbia for his work on cancer care, wanted a fully integrated facility that offered a broad spectrum of treatment.

Patients begin with 12 hours of seminars and workshops that cover “complementary cancer care and healing, meditation, healthful nutrition, visualization, group sharing, decision-making, vitamins and supplements.”

Dr. Gunn believes that the centre is where health care is headed in the future.

“There’s more and more interest in this approach,” he said yesterday. “I think that what has happened in conventional medicine is that we’ve been focused in the 20th century on treating the end result of the disease with chemotherapy and radiation and surgery. And those treatments have certainly been helpful in many circumstances but those treatments . . . don’t address the cause of the disease.”

Linking prevention and treatment, the mind and the body, the Centre for Integrated Healing has accomplished some amazing results.

One patient, Joanne, had inoperable lung cancer but, after treatment at the centre, a recent MRI scan of her lung “showed only residual fibrosis at the site of the original tumour.”

Another patient, Jerry, had multiple myeloma and was given two years to live. The centre’s program led him back to health and more than a decade later “his blood test results are now almost within the normal range.” He has recently qualified for life insurance.

“Why some people are able to recover from incurable cancer is still a very interesting mystery,” said Dr. Gunn. “But there’s so much about the immune system and the relationship between the mind and the spirit and the immune system that we don’t understand. I think it’s important to embrace that mystery and be open to it.”

Dr. Gunn says that 25 years ago, heart disease was seen as an irreversible condition. Now doctors stress the importance of a holistic approach to address the underlying causes.

“I believe we will come to understand cancer in the same way — as a reversible disease,” said Dr. Gunn.

While the hard science isn’t in yet, the Centre for Integrated Healing has taken a leap of faith that the relationship between the mind and the body is a key to helping cancer patients recover.

Mr. Thulin, who is still battling cancer, agrees.

“Complementary medicine doesn’t mean a cure for cancer — but neither does traditional medicine,” said Mr. Thulin. “What the centre is showing is that they work well together.”

Orginal article no longer available…

Stop meditating our children (Globe and Mail, Canada)

April 10, 2004

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Karen von Hahn, Globe and Mail, Canada: David Lynch’s latest production may not involve talking logs or dancing dwarves, but it is, nonetheless, bizarre. The Twin Peaks auteur, who has been meditating for 90 minutes twice a day for the past 30 years, recently became the spokesman for an initiative called the Committee for Stress-Free Schools, which aims to introduce transcendental meditation into classrooms across the United States as a way to combat the stress of high school and improve grades.

“Meditation is the key that opens the door to a vast ocean of pure consciousness, pure bliss,” Lynch said at an April 2 press conference in L.A. “When the light of peace comes up, negativity just goes away.”

One would think that the premise of schools teaching young children to empty their minds rather than fill them would raise a few red flags. Not to mention, in this day and age, when we are freaking about the obesity epidemic among children who are ferried to school from home by car, and spend their precious free time on their widening rear ends in front of computer and TV screens, the notion of introducing a program that forces them to sit still for a few minutes every day as a “health” initiative.

Now, I’m such a New Age-sympathizer that I’ve never met a healing practice I didn’t like, but, sorry, meditating for better marks and a quieter classroom seems to me like a low-rent version of the teachings of the Dalai Lama.

And yet the plan has struck a chord in the United States and Canada, even with Bishop Strachan, this country’s oldest private school for the education of young women. Presumably, for educators in the public system, strapped for both cash and a popular way out of the current education crisis, regular tuning out looks increasingly like a good idea. Hey — it’s not only hip, it’s so cheap they can even afford to do it in India!

On March 10, a group of educators, physicians and parents, members of the New York Committee for Stress-Free Schools, packed a meeting room at the Helmsley Palace Hotel for a conference entitled Improving Academic Achievement and Reversing the Alarming Rise of Classroom Stress through Transcendental Meditation. According to The New Yorker, which covered the event in its Talk of the Town section, high-level scientists and educational theoreticians hyped the physical and psychological benefits of meditation on the younger set.

Dr. Gary Kaplan, the director of clinical neurophysiology at North Shore University Hospital on Long Island, spoke of the “coherence of activity between the hemispheres and the front and the back of the brain.” Rita Benn, a director of education at the Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the University of Michigan, presented data from a recent study of Detroit middle-schoolers who have been practising meditation for the past six years, which found that meditating students had more positive feelings and were more adaptable than their non-meditating peers. And Jane Roman Pitt, a senior fellow at the Institute of Science, Technology and Public policy in Fairfield, Iowa, (the home of the widely respected Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment, where the 300 students practise group meditation and yogic flying daily) described the cultural benefits of meditative silence.

“To walk into a room and see a hundred middle-school students in a state of silence — deep, pure silence that you can feel as well as hear — is wonderful,” Roman Pitt said.

Ben Pollack, a Grade 11 student at the Maharishi School who came and meditated for the TV cameras, told The New Yorker that “transcendental meditation makes my thinking clearer, so now I can get through any amount of homework. I can do five hours if I need to.” Similarly positive was fellow student Riva Winningham, who claimed that meditating had increased her grade point average.

According to a recent Time magazine cover story, 10 million Americans say they practise some form of meditation on a regular basis, twice as many as a decade ago. There are meditation rooms in airports and offices, while Hollywood stars such as Goldie Hawn have fully tricked out ones at home, with all the gongs and whistles. Along with such coping tools as spas and wellness retreats, and yoga and bio-energetic foods, meditation is emerging as a hot button in the extremely healthy stress-management industry. Time called it the “smart person’s bubble bath.”

This bath has become such a tidal wave, that even here in good, auld Upper Canada, Bishop Strachan School, long associated with the Anglican Church, saw fit to follow its guiding principle of educating the whole child, body, mind and spirit, with the introduction of a New Age fair called Women’s Wellness Day, at which they launched weekly guided meditation classes for students. My daughter, who attends the school, is an enthusiastic participant.

Cathy Gibbs, the chaplaincy intern who runs the sessions, came up with the idea when she observed the way the girls at the school “hit the ground running.” In her view, the non-denominational practice of meditation has become necessary because “the girls work so hard and are involved in so many things that they barely have time to breathe.”

What I recall of being an adolescent (the good part) was that it really didn’t take much more than an afternoon of giggling over nothing with a girlfriend, or lying on the floor listening over and over to the same record, to reach nirvana.

Everyone needs a time out. But I say throwing an adult panacea like meditation at young people is basically an admission that we as a culture have failed them. That their lives, crammed as they are with obligations, are just as hopelessly stressful as our own. And that at the end of the day all we can offer them is the spiritual equivalent of a hot bath — with or without aromatic oils.

Original article no longer available…

Dalai Lama a hit before setting foot in Canada (C-News, Canada)

March 28, 2004

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Emily Yaerwood-Lee, C-News, Canada: His Toronto event will be held at SkyDome and in Vancouver, tickets for two spiritual teaching events held in a 4,000-seat auditorium were snapped up in 20 minutes.

A fight reportedly broke out when a man who’d stood in line for tickets found out the appearance was sold out after the Vancouver event was moved to a 15,000-seat venue, the extra tickets were sold out within days. It was a different story when the Dalai Lama last visited Canada in 1993. About 4,000 turned out to see him in Vancouver.

Victor Chan, an organizer of the upcoming Vancouver visit who is also co-authoring a book with the Dalai Lama, suggested the Dalai Lama’s message of peace and compassion is one people are craving in a time of post Sept. 11 uncertainty.

He said the demand for spiritual teaching events is unprecedented.

“This is something I have not come across,” says Chan, who has travelled extensively with the Buddhist leader.

The Dalai Lama, whose celebrity supporters include actors Richard Gere and Goldie Hawn, speaks of common secular ethics and said spiritual growth does not need to come from religious faith.

His mantra of non-violence has been his calling card since he and thousands of his countrymen fled their Himalayan homes in Tibet in 1959 and set up a government-in-exile in India.

The Chinese government claims Tibet as part of its territory and refuses to negotiate even limited autonomy with the Dalai Lama – who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for promoting human rights in his homeland – unless he acknowledges that authority.

Former prime ministers Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien both failed to meet the Dalai Lama during previous visits and it’s not known yet whether Paul Martin will see him.

But Thubten Samdup, national president of the Canada Tibet Committee, says one of the reasons for the Ottawa visit is to thank more than 100 MPs who he says have supported a campaign to have Canada facilitate negotiations between the Dalai Lama and China.

There is a bit of vindication in having his visit to Canada receive more attention this time around, agrees Samdup, who attributes the added interest to the Dalai Lama’s international profile.

“His name has become synonymous with non-violence and peace.”

It’s not just interest in the Dalai Lama that’s on the rise.

The 2001 census found the number of Buddhists in Canada increased 84 per cent over 10 years, representing about 300,000 people or roughly one per cent of the population.

The religion, with its many branches and spinoffs including various types of Tibetan Buddhism, has become attractive in the mainstream, says Suwanda Sugunasiri, founder of Toronto’s Nalanda College of Buddhist Studies and a former president of the Buddhist Council of Canada.

But he doubts the Tibetan style of Buddhism is responsible for much of the increase reflected in the census, attributing it instead to an increase in immigrants from other Buddhist countries.

Some of the religion’s popularity among North Americans could come from its hold on the media, says Frances Garrett, a Tibetan religion scholar at the University of Toronto.

“Probably because it’s kind of more picturesque,” says Garrett. “It films better.

“There are these highly exotic-looking rituals that are fascinating to people. Other forms of Buddhism … are more oriented to meditation and who wants to look at someone sitting on a meditation cushion?”

Its teachers may also seem more glamorous because of “their being exiled from Tibet and everyone’s very interested that they’ve been imprisoned,” says Garrett.

But for all of that interest, the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhism have often been misunderstood in the West, says Tsewang Thethong, a former minister from the government-in-exile who now lives in Victoria.

“The Dalai Lama was called the god-king, which he simply detests,” says Thethong. “Even we don’t use that word.”

The Dalai Lama, born in 1935, is believed to be the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama and the incarnation of Avalokitesvara, the Buddha of Compassion.

He is viewed as an enlightened spiritual master.

But he “works very hard to make sure people do not cling to this idea that he is some kind of a supernatural being with some remarkable powers,” says Chan, who was in Prague with the Dalai Lama when a journalist insisted on asking about the holy man’s telepathic abilities.

“Her question to him was, ‘These days, do you tend to use more e-mail rather than telepathy, or do you use telepathy more?”

The reporter wouldn’t let up, “even after the Dalai Lama said he didn’t know anything about telepathy,” says Chan.

Samdup acknowledges Tibetans of his father’s generation would have viewed the Dalai Lama as a god-king.

“Those Tibetans who believe in him as the ultimate saviour, slowly that generation is dying,” he says.

“In my father’s time, Tibet was very isolated so religion played a very important role. In my life it doesn’t play that big a role.”

Samdup, who counts himself a Buddhist, says he appreciates the Dalai Lama’s humility.

He’s seen the teacher tell crowds they will be disappointed if they’ve come to see him perform a miracle.

“He really doesn’t want people to have this notion that all Buddhists are enlightened and Tibetans are super human beings. People tend to have these preconceived notions that they are all monks and nuns and elevate and fly around.”

For his part, Chan doesn’t expect many of the people who snapped up tickets to see the Dalai Lama are even that interested in his brand of Buddhism or want to become practitioners.

“For me, anyway, what the Dalai Lama represents are very universal, secular values,” says Chan. “He talks a lot about the warm heart. This is something universal that all the religions are advocating.

“It’s not Buddhism or Tibetan Buddhism per say that attracts people. I think people are attracted to him because he transcends that.”

The Dalai Lama will be in Vancouver April 17-20, Ottawa April 21-24, and Toronto April 25-May 5.

[Original article no longer available]