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Thread: Meditation

  1. #1
    Founder Luc's Avatar
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    Meditation

    "Is it possible to sort of "rewire" your brain so you can better control imposing symptoms of depression and angst? The short answer, according to recent new research, is yes, and it all it takes in large part is some "mindfulness meditation."

    http://www.naturalnews.com/036313_me..._function.html

    The question is, though, to what extent, and at which stage of WD, meditation/mindfulness/yoga may start to be effective in alleviating the symptoms? How many of you have tried it? What has been your experience so far?
    Keep walking. Just keep walking.

  2. #2
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    Meditation reduces risk of heart attack and stroke



    Huff Post
    by Shelley Emling
    13 Nov 12

    Transcendental meditation has been around since the 1950s, a simple practice that employs the recitation of a mantra to reduce stress and improve focus.

    But there has never been a large-scale study on the health effects of the practice even though smaller studies have in the past linked it with everything from lower blood pressure to better school grades.

    Now new research shows that African-Americans with heart disease who regularly practiced transcendental meditation were 48 percent less likely to have a heart attack, stroke or die from all causes compared with African-Americans who attended a health education class over more than five years.

    The research, published in the American Heart Association's journal "Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes," found that those practicing meditation also lowered their blood pressure and reported less stress and anger. And the more regularly patients meditated, the greater their survival, according to researchers who conducted the study at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

    "We hypothesized that reducing stress by managing the mind-body connection would help improve rates of this epidemic disease," said Robert Schneider, M.D., lead researcher and director of the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention in Fairfield, Iowa. "It appears that transcendental meditation is a technique that turns on the body's own pharmacy -- to repair and maintain itself."

    Schneider, who noted that the average age of those participating in the study was 59, said he recommends practicing trascendental meditation 20 minutes, twice a day.

    "I also would recommend transcendental meditation to white patients or to any other race/ethnicity," Schneider said. "The reason is that the data from other studies indicates that transcendental meditation practice taps into neurophysiological mechanisms present in every human physiology. After all, stress effects everyone's mind and body."


    Some six million people around the world have learned the transcendental meditation technique, said Schneider, including celebrities such as Clint Eastwood, Jerry Seinfeld and director David Lynch. Earlier this year, Oprah Winfrey said the practice was part of her overall attempt to "connect with that which is God."

    Introduced to the world by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1957, transcendental meditation is designed to bring the mind to a state in which there are no thoughts.

    For the study, researchers randomly assigned 201 people to participate in a transcendental meditation stress-reducing program or a health education class on diet and exercise.

    Those in the meditation program sat with eyes closed for about 20 minutes twice a day, practicing the technique and allowing their minds and bodies to rest deeply while remaining alert. Those in the health education group were advised, under the instruction of professional health educators, to spend at least 20 minutes a day at home practicing heart-healthy behaviors such as exercise, healthy meal preparation and nonspecific relaxation.

    Researchers evaluated participants at the start of the study, at three months and every six months thereafter, for body mass index, diet, program adherence, blood pressure and cardiovascular hospitalizations. The trial required approximately 10 years to complete, with the longest follow-up for any one subject being nine years. In the end, researchers found:

    Blood pressure was reduced by 5 mm Hg and anger decreased significantly among transcendental meditation participants compared to controls.
    Both groups showed beneficial changes in exercise and alcohol consumption, and the meditation group showed a trend towards reduced smoking. Although, there were no significant differences between the groups in weight, exercise or diet.
    Regular meditation was correlated with reduced death, heart attack and stroke.
    Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, Schneider notes. But death from heart disease is about 50 percent higher in African-American adults compared to whites in the U.S. To find a local certified transcendental meditation teacher, go here.



    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/1...6pLid%3D234227
    "You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star." -- Nietzsche

  3. #3
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    Meditation and self-regulation

    MIT News Office
    5 May 11

    Studies have shown that meditating regularly can help relieve symptoms in people who suffer from chronic pain, but the neural mechanisms underlying the relief were unclear. Now, MIT and Harvard researchers have found a possible explanation for this phenomenon.

    In a study published online April 21 in the journal Brain Research Bulletin, the researchers found that people trained to meditate over an eight-week period were better able to control a specific type of brain waves called alpha rhythms.

    “These activity patterns are thought to minimize distractions, to diminish the likelihood stimuli will grab your attention,” says Christopher Moore, an MIT neuroscientist and senior author of the paper. “Our data indicate that meditation training makes you better at focusing, in part by allowing you to better regulate how things that arise will impact you.”

    There are several different types of brain waves that help regulate the flow of information between brain cells, similar to the way that radio stations broadcast at specific frequencies. Alpha waves, the focus of this study, flow through cells in the brain’s cortex, where sensory information is processed. The alpha waves help suppress irrelevant or distracting sensory information.

    A 1966 study showed that a group of Buddhist monks who meditated regularly had elevated alpha rhythms across their brains. In the new study, the researchers focused on the waves’ role in a specific part of the brain — cells of the sensory cortex that process tactile information from the hands and feet.

    For this study, the researchers recruited 12 subjects who had never meditated before. Half of the participants were trained in a technique called mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) over an eight-week period, while the other half were told not to meditate.

    The MBSR program calls for participants to meditate for 45 minutes per day, after an initial two-and-a-half-hour training session. The subjects listen to a CD recording that guides them through the sessions.

    The first two weeks are devoted to learning to pay close attention to body sensations. “They’re really learning to maintain and control their attention during the early part of the course. For example, they learn to focus sustained attention to the sensations of the breath; they also learn to engage and focus on body sensations in a specific area, such as the bottom of the feet, and then they practice disengaging and shifting the focus to another body area,” says Catherine Kerr, an instructor at Harvard Medical School and lead author of the paper.

    The researchers did brain scans of the subjects before the study began, three weeks into it, and at the end of eight weeks. At eight weeks, the subjects who had been trained in meditation showed larger changes in the size (amplitude) of their alpha waves when asked to pay attention to a certain body part — for example, “left foot.” These changes in wave size also occurred more rapidly in the meditators.

    The study is a “beautiful demonstration” of the effects of meditation training, and of the ability to cultivate an internal awareness of one’s own bodily sensations, says Clifford Saron, associate research scientist at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California at Davis, who was not involved in the research.

    Subjects in this study did not suffer from chronic pain, but the findings suggest that in pain sufferers who meditate, the beneficial effects may come from an ability to essentially turn down the volume on pain signals. “They learn to be aware of where their attention is focused and not get stuck on the painful area,” Kerr says.

    The subjects trained in meditation also reported that they felt less stress than the non-meditators. “Their objective condition might not have changed, but they’re not as reactive to their situation,” Kerr says. “They’re more able to handle stress.”

    The researchers are now planning follow-up studies in patients who suffer from chronic pain as well as cancer patients, who have also been shown to benefit from meditation.

    http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/meditation-0505.html
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    "An initiation into shamanic healing means a devaluation of all values, an overturning of the profane world, a peeling away of inveterate handed-down notions of the world, liberation from everything preconceived. For that reason, shamanism is closely connected with suffering. One must suffer the disintegration of one's own system of thought in order to perceive a new world in the higher space."
    -- Holger Kalweit

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    the beneficial effects may come from an ability to essentially turn down the volume on pain signals. “They learn to be aware of where their attention is focused and not get stuck on the painful area,” Kerr says
    Good one!
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    "An initiation into shamanic healing means a devaluation of all values, an overturning of the profane world, a peeling away of inveterate handed-down notions of the world, liberation from everything preconceived. For that reason, shamanism is closely connected with suffering. One must suffer the disintegration of one's own system of thought in order to perceive a new world in the higher space."
    -- Holger Kalweit

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    "An initiation into shamanic healing means a devaluation of all values, an overturning of the profane world, a peeling away of inveterate handed-down notions of the world, liberation from everything preconceived. For that reason, shamanism is closely connected with suffering. One must suffer the disintegration of one's own system of thought in order to perceive a new world in the higher space."
    -- Holger Kalweit

  7. #7
    Founder Sheila's Avatar
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    "An initiation into shamanic healing means a devaluation of all values, an overturning of the profane world, a peeling away of inveterate handed-down notions of the world, liberation from everything preconceived. For that reason, shamanism is closely connected with suffering. One must suffer the disintegration of one's own system of thought in order to perceive a new world in the higher space."
    -- Holger Kalweit

  8. #8
    Founder Luc's Avatar
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    A short video about "mindfullness" (basic info); https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoLQ3qkh0w0
    Keep walking. Just keep walking.

  9. #9
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    I would like to get in touch with someone who practices mindfullness DAILY. It seems that when done DAILY for 8 weeks or more, that you can get tremendous benefit. I have been doing it daily for a two weeks, but mainly guided relaxation meditations at night. I like the work of Jon kabatz Zin who has some videos on youtube.
    2004: Effexor-150mg
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  10. #10
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    That's great, bruno. Keep it up; it can only help.
    Meds free since June 2005.

    "An initiation into shamanic healing means a devaluation of all values, an overturning of the profane world, a peeling away of inveterate handed-down notions of the world, liberation from everything preconceived. For that reason, shamanism is closely connected with suffering. One must suffer the disintegration of one's own system of thought in order to perceive a new world in the higher space."
    -- Holger Kalweit

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