Meditation: All Roads Lead To Rome…
By Steve Ross, MA
There have been a number of studies over the years about the health benefits of Transcendental Meditation (TM). To read a recent one, click here. However, I would like to suggest that these positive results are not the sole propriety of TM. One does not need to belong to any group or subscribe to any particular set of beliefs to receive them. I worked with TM and other forms of meditation for over a decade, on a regular, disciplined basis. My conclusion is that any form of meditation, spiritually oriented or not, will show similar results if done regularly for the same amount of time.
Meditation is, in its simplest form, deciding to think about what you want to think about for a prescribed period of time instead of letting your mind wander wherever it wants to. This can be done using a mantra (as in TM and other forms of mantric meditation), beads (like a "mala" or a rosary), or it can be done without words using breathing as the grounding mechanism, or, as in Vipassana, by just paying attention to your own mental landscape as it changes over time, letting the mind run free while observing where it goes and not getting caught up in any particular thought. I like the Vipassana method while focusing on my breathing, which helps me disengage from the action of the mind. In all of these examples, the result is a calming of the entire physical body and mind.
I believe that the uplifting or "spiritual" part of some meditations is an extra. It is not necessary to do a spiritual kind of meditation to get the results mentioned in the TM studies. In fact, TM practitioners are not told the meaning of the mantra they use - at least they weren't when TM was first introduced or in the 70's when I tried it. Whether or not a particular system is "spiritual” depends to a large extent on what you, the practitioner, bring to it. For example, the mantric tradition states that mantras carry inherent spiritual power transmitted from a Guru who has infused them with that power, but that is not something that can be proven one way or the other. If a person believes it, that may be good enough.
A very simple form of meditation that does not involve mantras, beads, or even breathing can get you pretty much the same effect as the TM studies, or at least heading in that direction. This particular meditation is a "body-awareness" meditation and is not necessarily spiritual, in that there are no mystical trappings around it. But again, anything can be spiritual if you bring a spiritual attitude to it.
This form can be done in a quiet or noisy environment. It doesn't matter. You can sit, stand, or lie. It doesn't matter. As you do what you are doing, shift a portion of your attention to your physical body. Pay attention, for example, to your feet. How do they feel? What are the pressures on them? After noticing this for a bit, continue up the body. Attend to your legs. How do they feel? Notice whatever feelings there are, pleasant or unpleasant with the same detached observation. Notice your arms, your hands, your breathing, your facial muscles. Notice temperature differences in the various parts of your body. Try some relaxed abdominal breathing for an even greater relaxation effect.
Now, come back to normal attention. Whether you did this for 5 minutes or longer, you probably feel more relaxed, a bit slowed down, but still alert. If you combined it with abdominal breathing, you'll feel more vital, too. Why? Several reasons. The main thing is that most of our stress comes from our thoughts and by shifting out of your head and into your body you stop most of the stuff clattering around in your mind. If you add abdominal breathing, you get the extra effect of triggering the parasympathetic nervous system, which automatically reverses whatever stress response we have going on in the body.
What you can take away from this is that any form of meditation works just as well as any other because when you shift attention away from ordinary thinking to something neutral or uplifting, and attempt to stay with it, this effort keeps your mind occupied. Since you can only think of one thing at a time anyway (the mind is a wave that moves through time and every point on that wave is a discreet moment in time), you are, during your period of successful concentration, thinking about neutral, non-stressful things. The brain waves smooth out and your physical body relaxes. You get relief from stress and maybe emotional uplift as well, depending on what you are meditating on. Why pain, for example, lessens under these conditions is something the studies can’t explain, but it does. Seems like magic to me. A wonderful perk from using the mind in a different way.
As a final note, the nature of the mind is to wander to new things and get involved with them. Thus the art of meditation involves a special attitude of patience and understanding of this fact such that you are able to remain neutral about the trials and tribulations of the meditation process itself. In other words, you will not be able to successfully focus for very long because your mind will slip away to what it likes to do best - jump around. When you realize that you've lost your focus, bring your attention back to what you want to think about. The mind will slip away again. Bring it back. The real exercising of the men-tal muscle (meditation) is simply this process of patiently and lovingly coming back to the object of your meditation, without frustration or anger. As Jack Kornfield says in Path With Heart, a wonderful book on Vipassana meditation, it's like training a puppy to do something. The puppy is bound to make mistakes. You don't beat the puppy up. You patiently and lovingly keep on training and the puppy eventually gets much better at it. As will you.
--Steve Ross, MA, edits the Multiple Chemical Sensitivity section, and co-edits the Mental Health section, of www.medicine.org.
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