Meditation: what’s old is new again

Ronald H. Neal
Staff Writer
Increasingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, you’ll find doctors and health care professionals turning to the ancient disciplines of meditation to deal with mental health disorders.
Meditation is the most well-known – and certainly one of the most thoroughly studied – forms of medicine practiced by the Tibetan Buddhists for centuries.  Personified by the dignified and solemn Dali Lama for over 25 centuries, meditation has become a method of refining and exploring the inner self, probing and navigating inner space in much the same way we have preferred to examine our outer.

“The monks, we believe, are the Olympic athletes of certain kinds of mental training,” said Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist from the University of Wisconsin who, as part of a select group of scientists and scholars, travelled to Dharamsala in 2000 to attempt to dissect problems of distress and human suffering.
He analyzed 150 ordinary brains and compared them to the brain of a monk, and discovered a monk’s brain was simply more active on the left, which represented happiness. “This is tantalizing evidence that these practices may indeed be promoting beneficial changes in the brain,” concluded Davidson.
Zindal Segal, a psychologist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health who uses meditation to treat patients with mood disorders, finds that though we may never be able to reach the same heights as Buddhists who spend 10,000 hours sitting and meditating by just spending time clearing out minds we may be able to feel better.
“We’re talking about paying attention, we’re talking about returning wherever our minds are to this present moment. These are things that we all have. We don’t have to earn them, we just have to find a way of clearing away the clutter to see that they are already there,” said Dr. Segal.
The key to meditation is to slow the mind down and examine one’s thoughts and thinking processes and connect that to the present moment. “[Meditation is] a way of training yourself to pay attention in the present moment without judgement [as] to what your experience is,” said Dr. Segal in a Globe and Mail article.
The health benefits are still very much debated, but researchers have found that meditation is good for relieving stress, and dropping blood pressure. This form of medicine changes someone’s attitude from sour to positive and can go a long way especially in our busy lives. “Meditation is a set of practices that have been around for more than 2,500 years, whose principal goal is to cultivate these positive human qualities, to promote flourishing and resilience […]” said Davidson.
At first glance this may seem simple, but it has been shown to be just as effective as antidepressants in treating and preventing depression relapse, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The next time you are feeling blue, or stressed over exams, you shoulder consider your inner strength before popping a pill.
With files from The Globe and Mail