Meditation is the new Yoga
Remember when yoga became popular, and then it was everywhere? I feel like meditation is like that now. And, I kind of love it. I love that this practice is becoming main stream. I only wish I had known about it sooner. I could have been so much farther ahead.
With that said, I would like to share some cool science behind meditating. Like we need another reason to take a break from the crazy.
In his book, Anticancer, David Servan Schreiber, MD, Ph.D gives us some scientific reasons to practice meditation on the daily.
From the book:
“In his laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, Richard Davidson, Ph.D, studies changes in activity within the brains of people who have practiced meditation for years. Several Tibetan monks have participated in the experiment, among them, Matthieu Ricard, Ph.D, a former cell biologist turned Buhdist monk and philosopher who helped set up the experiment. During meditation, their cerebral rhythms register a larger amplitude of oscillations than in non-meditative states. In addition, activity measured within the different brain regions begins to oscillate in harmony. The regions are said to synchronize. On the scale of the brain, it’s a phenomenon comparable to establishing coherence in the bodies biological processes. Still better, Davidson and his collaborators have discovered that this synchronization lasts even beyond meditation sessions.
Fortunately, the health benefits of such states can accrue even in beginners. The same laboratory ran an experiment with executives from a large bio-technology firm as the test subjects. Two groups were studied. Members of the first group didn’t change anything in their habits, while those in the second group were trained in mindfulness meditation, as it is taught in the hospital program established by Jon Kabat Zinn. After a scant 8 weeks among those who had made a short period of meditation part of their everyday habits significant changes had taken place in the electrical activity of their brains as measured by EEG. Regions associated with positive mood and optimism, the left, frontal regions, were distinctly more active compared to their earlier state or to that of the control group. And this effect reached further than the brain or the subject’s mood. Their immune systems reacted to the flu vaccine more forcefully than those of the members of the control group. All these changes occurred with only two months of practice.”
Sounds pretty good right? If you are new to meditation and would like to give it a try, I would recommend listening to one of Deepak Chopra’s many guided meditations, or one of Emily Fletcher’s guided meditations.
Enjoy!
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