Just as you would pop a pill when something goes wrong with your body, meditation was originally invented to remedy the ills of mind. Because it was subtle and mostly practiced in deeper and often inaccessible parts of East, it remained an enigma for much of West for long time. Even if some scientists decided to comment upon it, they usually took a derogatory tone to dismiss it as another charlatanism of East who have lost touch with reality and objectivity of scientific rigor. There were times when Zen meditators were labeled as psychotics and such a ‘research’ was published in respected journals.
But no more. In the last few decades, meditation has withstood the test of science and has pervaded our popular culture with respected universities like Harvard and Wisconsin running related programs backed by solid research. Now, popular magazines like Time run frontline stories to tell us that it works regardless of what skeptics still say.
What is meditation?
It is a powerful psycho-spiritual tool to correct the imbalances of our mind, thinking and emotional patterns and the way we look at world. The root word for medicine and meditation comes from the same Latin word ‘med’ that means healing. It cures the maladies of mind and soul, so to speak.
How it works?
Elsewhere, we have seen the ravages of stress on both heart and brain. Persistent practice of meditation tends to halt or even in some cases, reverse those damages. Recall from previous sections that our physical body is not as much solid as we have tended to believe in. In fact, it is a highly organized information system. In 2003 & 2005 issues of Scientific American, scientists have once again expressed confidence that our universe is a giant hologram in which information is primary property of our existence while energy and matter could be incidentals. If that is correct, it also makes each of us a hologram. Hologram is special property of an image in which each segment of the image contains the whole image.
If you cut a holographic image of an apple into a million pieces, each cut piece will contain the full image of apple. It might be that scientists are getting closer to find scientific evidence to the poetic claim of William Blake when he said: “To see a world in a grain of sand, And heaven in a wild flower. Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour”.
Let us take the following examples to understand what it means to be an organized information system. Think about a car lying in a garage which is completely rusted or a cup which you just broke when you were drinking your black coffee? What are the chances that the rusted car will restore itself to its younger days or the cup will leap to its unbrokenness? Practically none, you would mutter. Why? They cannot do so because they are bound by the laws of thermodynamics which has damned them to the inevitable entropy.
What makes you different from the chair you are sitting on? It is made of exactly same elements like nitrogen, oxygen, carbon etc. as your body is made of. So what makes a chair a dead element and your body a living entity? Where is the dividing line? It lies in our exceptional quality of awareness and consciousness which we can summon at will.
Awareness and ability to defy the principles of thermodynamics with conscious engagement in renewal and healing process, is what makes you unique and stand you apart from a cup or car even though you are also made of same or similar elements drawn from same periodic table.
Meditation, in its simplest form, can be called cultivating a renewed awareness. Ever since our birth, we start getting conditioned in one form or other. We get on autopilot of life and lose the ability of being aware and conscious. Mindful awareness is what is called Meditation. It helps you to retrain your thinking, emotions, and feelings towards a healthier state. It can also be called a psychological detoxification of our inner self.
Effects of Meditation on Brain and Heart
We have seen that chronic stress can damage functions of heart and brain and can set the stage for serious illnesses. It should be noted here that stress per se does not cause illness; however, it lays the groundwork for diseases to follow by decreasing the vitality of immune system. The heath cost of stress is staggering. More than 60% of visits to family physician are generated by stress alone.
The health promoting effects of meditation are now established by rigorous research. Even simple manipulation of breathing patterns, as practiced in Transcendental Meditation, generates visible effects on brain, and it’s EEG. During meditation, the functions of brain which takes care of daily hustle and bustle of life tends to slow down. During deeper meditation stages, brain also works as a multiple parallel processing systems as opposed to serial processor in waking life. This multilevel processing is what gives the meditator an insight. Neuron firing in the amygdala, the fear center, also slows down with prolonging the out breath. Various parts of the brain also register altered activity under meditation. The EEG patterns snapped under meditation, exhibit distinct patterns in comparison to normal plot. Relaxation reached through meditation starts showing in changing EEG patterns. Once the brain is relaxed, physical body also follows the same suite and tends to fall toward allostasis which is essential for healthy living. It is only when the whole physiological apparatus is running in optimum manner, that physical body starts the process of detoxification, renewal and healing. Recall that reproduction, digestion, repair and healing all tend to go offline when we are under severe stress response.
Benefits
That is why Meditation has been found to be beneficial for women suffering from infertility. It also helps people suffering from post-menopausal hot flushes, depression, anxiety, and irritable bowl syndrome and so on and so forth. The similar effects are noticed on the cardiovascular system. Once the meditation has neutralized the stress reaction, high blood pressure falls down thereby relieving the heart of excessive labor of pumping the blood through narrowed arteries. Deepened relaxation also allows for rapid elimination of lactate acid from blood. Excessive blood lactate indicates fatigue and proneness to anxiety. In a nut shell, meditation fine tunes the bio-chemical system thereby maintaining vital homeostasis.
Parmjit Singh, PhD
Note: please note this article was written in 2000s. Many advances or contradictions may have been recorded since then. Please read it within the context of current science and practice. When in doubt, always consult a professional.
