Elysha,
finally made it here from TSF.
place looks good. Many thanks for putting this site together.
thought you and everybody else might be interested in some
results from a conference I attended a while back, one of the presentations was on what works in meditation.
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>the speaker was from Harvard Med School and has been working on this for the last twenty years, since some of the Transcendental Meditation people convinced him to take brain and body activity readings of them while they meditated.
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>turns out they were lowering blood pressure, oxygen consumption, brain activity, and some other stuff I didn't write down.
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>well being a good scientist he didn't jump to the conclusiion tht it was TM that was causing all these changes. so he started looking for the key components of meditating in general.
they are:
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>1. focus on a word, image, short prayer or chant ( OM, Hail Mary, the number One, anything you choose) and keep repeating it to yourself.
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>2. if thoughts distract you let them go and come back to the phrase again.
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>that's all there is to it.
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>he researched many religions and found that these instructions kept poping up in all of them. found them in Hindu writings from 700BC, in early desert christian writings, in middle ages Jewish texts, named a number of others.
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>so these instructions have been found by many different groups to lead to major release of stress from the body. In fact the official scientific label for this whole process is now the "relaxation response".
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>looking at a wide variety of diseases and disorders influenced by stress, he has found that this method practiced regularly results lowers blood pressure enough that 15% of those now on meds for high bloodpressure could quit them entirely, and that meds could be sharply reduced for all the others. Immune system functioning improved among terminal cancer patients taught this method. they lived significantly longer.
>Several other tests of health effects are pending. He talked about some other medical results that include PMS, chronic fatigue syndrome, gastrointestinal disorders, depression.
>the harder stuff to research are the claims of spiritual awakening and well being that religions always attribute to this method.
>could be that just relieving stress leads to a better spiritual outlook. But could be as well that stopping the flow of everyday self-talk (especially for us survivor types who have lots of the negative variety) allows people to get deeper into their own psyche. And that resolving inner emotional conflicts also has positive influences on the rest of the mind-body system.
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>anyway, very encouraging stuff. thought I'd pass it on.
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>if you're interested, the site is mindbody.harvard.edu
>I got to it using Excite, through some intermediate link that also looks interesting.
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>Dale