Meditation Research
The German weekly news magazine Focus had a cover story last Saturday on mental training and the latest findings in science about stress and burn-out. Meditation and mindfulness turn out to be effective tools against stress and burn-out symptoms.
Very successful in the US is MBSR: Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, which is offered as an 8 week course in 250 clinics all over the country. It has been developed by the Center for Mindfulness (CFM) at the University of Massachusetts Medical School: “The central focus of the Clinic is intensive training in mindfulness meditation and its integration into the challenges/adventures of everyday life.” Jon Kabat-Zinn invented this methodology and made proof that it is medically effective. It is based on an ancient Buddhist meditation technique: Vipassana Meditation which is also called insight-meditation and aims at self transformation through self observation.
There is more and more evidence from research on the effects of meditation. Psychologist Richard Davidson worked closely with the Dalai Lama who connected him to Tibetan monks with whom he could do his medical studies of the brain as it relates to meditation. The outcome of his work can be read here: Mental Training Affects Distribution of Limited Brain Resources and Alterations in Brain and Immune Function Produced by Mindfulness Meditation.
Sara Lazar at Harvard University found out that meditation influences cortical thickness of people who have meditated for a long time: “Brain regions associated with attention, interoception and sensory processing were thicker in meditation participants than matched controls, including the prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula. Between-group differences in prefrontal cortical thickness were most pronounced in older participants, suggesting that meditation might offset age-related cortical thinning.”
In my previous blog entry I mentioned that meditation is still regarded as strange by many in our Western world. Although there have been already some meditation courses for executives in the past this type of mental training remains outside the corporate world. Through the type of research mentioned here this might change over time.
We see more and more adoption of Eastern philosophy in our Western world. Tools from Buddhism, Yoga, Ayurveda, chinese medical treatment... the list is long. Regularly there are features in the press or television about any one of these techniques. A probably more philosophical question is why we do not stick with our own techniques, our medicine, the belief in our religion? Apparently these are not able to fill a gap that has occured with the ever accelerating pace of the world around us which made us loose contact to our own roots, traditions, ancient wisdoms...??
Posted at
08:37PM May 14, 2008
by Volker Seubert in Personal |
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