You have had to take a report home. The deadline is looming. Baby is crying. Wife is emotional or husband moody. Dog is barking. TV is blaring. You can feel your heart rate steadily climbing, your palms growing sticky. But there is one thing you could do to make yourself feel better. It does not involve drink, drugs or even leaving the house. It simply involves closing a door behind you for a few minutes and focusing on something you do all the time anyway: breathing.
It is meditation: sit quietly, comfortably but upright, close your eyes and breathe deeply, in through the nose and out through the mouth. Concentrate on your breath, the sensation as it passes through your nose and into your lungs, the rise and fall
of your ribcage as you do so. And here is the tricky part: try to allow your attention to be absorbed by only your breath and its sensation for, say, ten breaths.
It is a sign of how cluttered are our lives and media-bombarded our brains that, without developing the skill, few people can complete this seemingly simple exercise before random, uninvited thoughts crowd in.
"Counting the breaths", as this popular, foundational method of meditation is known, can take extensive practise. Other, no less disciplined forms, may focus on a mental image or a word, the monotonous repetition sometimes aiding focus and providing an element of suggestibility. More unusual forms have you focusing on each step as you walk (Walking Meditation), repeating a Sanskrit syllable (Transcendental Meditation, or TM), or even dancing blindfolded (Trance Dance).
But, whatever the kind of meditation, the results of all are beneficial: just 15 minutes a day can genuinely refresh and realign, with practitioners noting improved clarity of thought, increased creativity and generally greater contentedness. Meditators speak of increasing their "mindfulness" or of "quieting the mind". Think of it as a mental massage. But don't expect to quickly master its more extreme manifestations. It may be a long time, for instance, before you are on a par with the Tibetan monk practitioners of so-called gTummo meditation: their eight-hour sessions allow them to drive their core body temperature high enough to dry wet sheets wrapped around them.
"There is always a tendency to ridicule an idea new to the West because we tend to be so cut off from the notion that there is a subtle energy to life," says Ingrid Collins, author of A Year of Spirituality: A Seasonal Guide to New Awareness and co-director of Soul Therapy, a meditation training clinic. "But the fact is, even some health practitioners argue that mind and body are connected and we now often speak of stress-related diseases," she says.
"The fact is that meditation is not some new, offbeat invention, and it would not have survived for as long as it has if there were no benefits. Meditation has been slow to find acceptance because it is very difficult to research."
Once mocked by naysayers as part of "alternative" culture, meditation has seen an image overhaul and demystification of late. It is increasingly offered in government buildings internationally, in law firms and other high-stress workplaces. Even prisons and schools are getting in on the act. The infamous San Quentin now runs its Mindfulness Meditation course for inmates and meditation practice has been linked to decreased recidivism, while Iowa's groundbreaking Maharishi University elementary schools feature meditation on the timetable. West Point, the elite US military academy, has run courses in it. Indeed, in the US, there are now some ten million regular meditators, double the figure of just a decade ago.
Interest in Scotland is on the rise too: while meditation is now largely a secular practice, it has its origins in Buddhism and the visit of the Dalai Lama to Scotland in 2004 prompted many to look into its benefits. More recently, the death of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian guru made famous when the Beatles took an interest in his teachings, has led to an upturn in interest. The planned opening in Edinburgh of the Invincible University by folk singer Donovan, with the meditation courses it is set to introduce, is likely to encourage more to investigate.
Robert Roth, vice president of the David Lynch Foundation, national director for TM (a non-profit US organisation) and a man who studied meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, says that the misleading image of meditation was a product of the first wave of interest during the 1960s, "Certainly meditation was more of a fad in the Sixties, with the Beatles and flower power spreading the idea that it had everything to do with wearing long hair." But in fact, Maharishi, who is largely credited with bringing meditation to popular attention in the West, promoted its scientific investigation, considering it devoid of religious dogma and more as a life skill that anyone could learn – that it was "as fundamental to life as eating, sleeping and dreaming," says Roth.
"Interest in meditation may be increasing in part because of the celebrity interest in eastern spirituality, which probably says more about how shallow society can be today," says Madeleine Cadwallender, meditation teacher and director of the Western Buddhist Order's Glasgow Buddhist Centre, which runs meditation courses. "But more so because it is finally going through the same process as, for example, vegetarianism, which not so many years ago was regarded as some weirdo deviancy but is now mainstream. People are also identifying that they're stressed by the way society pushes us and they are finding that meditation helps. But being calmed is really just a side-effect of meditation. We don't really have the philosophical language in the West to describe its more subtle effects, but meditation gives a deeper, existential awareness of the self."
That is not to say that any meditation is easy. Initially its effects can be disorientating, and revelatory of quite how cluttered our minds are with many incomplete, concurrent and often muddled thoughts.
"Meditation is really simple to do for five minutes," adds Cadwallender. "Replicating the clarity it brings for 20 minutes or more is when it gets hard."
The practise pays off though. Indeed, its wider acceptance may, in greater part, be down to growing evidence that meditation works. This is not simply to calm the mind and slow the heart rate, which any period of quiet stillness may help to do. The latest scientific research – now funded mostly by medical insurance agencies rather than pharmaceutical companies, which recognise that there is no money in it for them – suggests that meditation may not only boost regular practitioners' immune systems, it may actually rewire their brains to reduce their overall stress levels and reset people's boiling points at a much higher, healthier level.
"Meditation is not a panacea for stress. It can help, though you'd be better off exercising," says Dr Susan Blackmore, lecturer in psychology at the University of West of England, who has meditated daily for 30 years. "In fact, letting all those bad thoughts arise through meditation can be stress-inducing for some people. But on balance, training the mind to maintain focus or to let go of concerns can be extremely useful, especially since we're increasingly bombarded with fears and worries. It has been of enormous benefit to me in giving me the skill to let go of those things that really bother me, and to foster an equanimity in the face of life's difficulties. That kind of long-term personal development is much harder for science to test, though investigations are beginning."
Anecdotally, it has been known of for thousands of years that meditation helps in confronting the big bad world but, says Roth: "It has somehow been forgotten. Now we're remembering it again." In prehistoric times meditation may have been part of mystical practices. It is mentioned in Hindu texts dating back to 3,000BC, long before Buddha found enlightenment through meditation in 588BC and, historically, meditation has been part of some western Christian practices as a means of communing with God (though Catholicism has largely always suppressed it). But, increasingly, scientific investigation is offering validation too.
Studies conducted during the late 1960s in the US, which continues to lead research into meditation's effects, found that practitioners' heart rates lowered by three beats a minute, they used some 17 per cent less oxygen and their brains produced more theta waves. These waves come during deep relaxation, typically shortly before the onset of sleep; they deactivate the sensory processing part of the brain – without actually putting you to sleep. In other words, you shut down, but in a controlled manner.
Other demonstrations have been more striking still: Japanese Zen meditators did not flinch at the sound of an unexpected gunshot, while Indian yogis could meditate themselves into such deep trances that they did not react to hot test tubes being pressed against their bare skin.
The fact that a mental practice can bring physical results, even if science is not quite sure how, has led doctors to increasingly recommend meditation for the easing of chronic ailments, from heart disease to Aids, depression to ADD. They have only been further encouraged to do so in light of the effectiveness of pharmaceutical solutions being increasingly questioned, as with recent reports of anti-depressants being no more effective than placebo pills.
Even the stereotype of the meditator finding a kind of nirvana amid the chimes and herbal tea is not entirely without foundation. More recent studies, conducted by Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, have shown that meditation shifts activity in the pre-frontal cortex (the brain's most developed part, responsible for reasoning and self-awareness) from the right to the left hemispheres. Why is this relevant? People who are left-hemisphere oriented have been found to be typically more positive and upbeat than those who are right-sided, who are more prone to depression.
Kalyanavaca, director of the Edinburgh Buddhist Centre, says: "Meditation is increasingly being seen as a way of approaching mental health problems of all kinds. But for just about everyone life is getting faster and faster, and technology is making more and more intrusions into our private time. Meditation is a practical way to provide the space that, once we meditate, we typically rediscover we really need."
The full article contains 1727 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
