A small-scale study suggests it could boost parts of the brain and the immune system.

Meditation has been practised since ancient times, mainly in the East.

There is increasing evidence that meditation is a useful and, for some people, a powerful therapy. Dr Adrian White, University of Exeter

It is now catching on worldwide as a means to reduce stress or to help with pain caused by various illnesses.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States enrolled 41 people in a trial of so-called “mindfulness” meditation.

It is a technique developed by an American stress reduction specialist – Jon Kabat-Zinn – for helping hospital patients deal with pain and discomfort.

Encouraging

Twenty five of the subjects attended a weekly class and one seven-hour retreat during the study; they were also given exercises to carry out at home. The others did not receive meditation training and acted as a control group.

After eight weeks, the researchers measured electrical activity in the frontal part of the brain. They say this region was more active on the left side in the individuals who meditated and was associated with lower anxiety and a more positive emotional state.

Participants were also given a flu jab at the start of the study and those who meditated had higher levels of antibody, say the researchers, led by Dr Richard Davidson.

“Although our study is preliminary and more research clearly is warranted we are very encouraged by these results,” he said.

The latest in cyber-Buddhism: an iPhone application with timed and guided meditations, all authored and spoken by contributing editor Stephan Bodian, who informs us, “The next two apps will be Open Your Heart to Love, including forgiveness, gratitude, and lovingkindness meditations, and The Happiness Pack, including mindfulness, an adaptation of tonglen, a gratitude meditation, and a brief piece on working with negative emotions.”

The application was produced by Mental Workout, a company specializing in technological approaches to meditation.

Dharma

The fundraising concert at New York’s Radio City Music Hall raised money for the David Lynch Foundation, which aims to promote the benefits of transcendental meditation worldwide.

A portion of the profits will enable the National Meditation Centre of Wales, based in Llandaff, Cardiff, to offer training courses in Welsh schools.

Centre director Helen Evans said: “The money will help teach 10,000 children to meditate across the UK – and some of that will be available for us in Wales.

“It’s fantastic because so little is known about transcendental meditation.

“When people hear it’s from the East they assume it’s a cult or a religion, which is a shame because it’s neither of those things.

“It’s not even a way of life, it’s just a technique to enable you to relax and help you cope better with your day.”

The concert, called Change Begins Within, was the first time Starr and McCartney had played together publicly in seven years. Their involvement was down to their beliefs in the benefits of transcendental meditation, a practice they learnt in the 1960s when The Beatles sought spiritual guidance from an Indian guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

“It was a great gift that Maharishi gave us,” McCartney told a news conference to promote the concert.

“For me, it came at a time when we were looking for something to kind of stabilise us toward the end of the crazy Sixties.

“It’s a lifelong gift. It’s something you can call on at any time. I think it’s a great thing it’s actually coming into the mainstream.”

The concert also featured Sheryl Crow, Donovan, Jerry Seinfeld, Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder, blues-folk star Ben Harper and dance musician Moby.

It raised an estimated $3m (£2m) for the meditative foundation set up by film-maker David Lynch.

While his screen credits include Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive and Eraserhead, Lynch today dedicates his time to making meditation more accessible to schoolchildren.

Studies have claimed that transcendental technique can lower stress levels, anxiety and blood pressure.

It involves relaxing without concentrating on anything by sitting comfortably and chanting a mantra with eyes closed.

James Purvis, a Cardiff-based consultant for the National Meditation Centre of Wales, said the mantra aimed to create a pleasant and calming ambience. He said: “If you’re at school and the teacher’s nail scratches on the blackboard as she’s writing on it, we know that sounds unpleasant.

“But there are certain words or sounds that create an enjoyable melody that the mind can engage with – and that’s what the mantra is.

“Transcendental meditation is sitting quietly and comfortably while enjoying that mantra.”

Neuroscience suggests that Zen meditation — a centuries-old Buddhist practice aimed at mental, physical and emotional balance — can help you achieve those goals, and more.

An increasing body of scientific evidence supports the benefits of Zen meditation — a centuries-old practice aimed at mental and physical balance — in and out of business. Now, brain imaging shows that experienced Zen meditators can clear their minds of distractions more quickly than others are able to do

In the last decade, there has been a growth of scientific studies into meditation, due in part to the increasing availability and sophistication of a variety of brain-scanning techniques.

Mindfulness in particular is increasingly a focus in the business world. It will be a topic at a one- day Leadership Stamina conference to be hosted by the PQ Institute in Bryanston, Gauteng, on July 14. Stellenbosch University Business School MBA lecturer Dina Oleofson will speak on the relevance and benefits of mindfulness for business.

In the latest research, US neuroscientiststs say that electro- encephalography — brain imaging — shows that experienced Zen meditators can clear their minds of distractions more quickly than novices are able to do.

Meditators show “an enhanced ability to control their mind’s focus and disentangle it from distracting or harmful preoccupations”, say researchers, led by Dr Giuseppe Pagnoni, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia.

Pagnoni says after interruption, differences in brain activity between experienced Zen meditators and novices could be seen in a set of cerebral areas often referred to as the “default mode network”.

Earlier studies have associated this network with spontaneous thoughts and mind-wandering during periods known as “wakeful rest”, the researchers say.

Pagnoni’s study, titled Thinking about Not-Thinking: Neural Correlates of Conceptual Processing During Zen Meditation, suggests that “the regular practice of meditation may enhance the capacity to limit the influence of distracting thoughts”. He says this skill could help conditions characterised by excessive rumination, or abnormal production of task-unrelated thoughts. It is a type of mind training that could be a complementary treatment for neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, attention deficit disorder and depression.

On the Live Science website (www.livescience.com), Pagnoni says the default mode network may be “especially vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease”. He freely admits to be entering the field of “wild speculation” here, medically speaking, but believes that meditation, “by providing regular intervals of respite in the incessant working of the default network, (could) have protective effects for Alzheimer disease”, even if only mildly.

Other studies have shown increased activity of alpha and theta waves in the brain’s frontal region during Zen meditation. Alpha waves are associated with “relaxed wakefulness” (with eyes closed) and usually stop when the eyes are opened. Theta waves are known as the “more elusive and extraordinary realms” of brain activity.

Zen meditation may also be a natural analgesic (pain reliever). A study funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health in Psychosomatic Medicine in January this year shows that meditators have lower pain sensitivity in and out a meditative state compared with non- meditators.

Unlike other forms of meditation that involve repeating a mantra, or visualisation exercises such as imagining yourself on a tropical beach, Zen meditation discourages “mental vacations”, and “prescribes a vigilant attitude” towards one’s surroundings, he says. By focusing on “the here and now”, that is, being mindful, practitioners are less likely to “get carried away” by extraneous and superfluous thoughts.

South African advocate Antony Osler agrees. He has had a longstanding interest in law and meditation. On the legal side, he ran the Karoo Law Clinic, an office of Lawyers for Human Rights, for 15 years and now arbitrates in labour disputes. He has been meditating since the early ’70s, and in 1983 was officially ordained as a Zen Buddhist monk at a monastery in Mount Baldy, California.

Osler holds occasional meditation retreats on his Colesberg farm, Poplar Grove, and says enigmatically: “I meditate because I need to, not because I’m particularly good at it.”

He knows all about the manifold psychological and medical benefits said to accrue from meditation, but has “never meditated for those”. Through meditation, he has experienced “the rising of an instinctive sense of internal balance and a sense of deep connectedness with wherever I am.

“For me, that’s enough. If I don’t contact that level of stillness in myself, I feel out of alignment.”

Osler is author of Stoep Zen (Jacana), which he describes as “taking the Zen tradition and giving it South African feet”.

Despite its quirky “thinking about not thinking” approach and irreverent reputation, Zen meditation is not New Age or trying to create an alternative state of consciousness or “bliss” , he says.

You don’t even have to be a Buddhist to do it. “Buddhism is practised as a religion in some parts of the world, but in essence it is a philosophy, a way of life. As such, it does not compete with any belief system,” Osler says.

It has a particular slant that is very grounded in the present moment, he says. “It aims to put you in touch with whatever moment you are living in.”

To Osler, meditation means being “grounded”, mindful, connected to the moment and “being really attentive, moment by moment, so you are able to give yourself to every person you meet and every situation that you are in”.

Zen teachings also demonstrate rather than explain, he says.

“There is a place for explanation, of course, but there is also a place where logic stumbles and we have to enter the world of astonishment and love.”

He says Zen meditation has two important benefits for the business world

“Firstly, if you are more in touch with yourself and your surroundings, including work situations, you are likely to respond more appropriately.

“Secondly, meditation allows you to be less caught up in your own perception of things and, in turn, to be more sensitive and compassionate to how others are feeling,” he says.

“I’m not a businessman, but in my own profession, the more attentive and present I can be, the better I can do my job.”

In a prologue to Stoep Zen, Osler writes: “If we pay attention and live from our belly — without the habitual veil of thinking that stands between us and our experience — then whatever we see, hear, taste, touch or smell is the truth. It is the content of our life at this moment; the place where we truly live.

“Then our life lies clearly in front of us and we can step lightly and kindly.”

Neuroscience suggests that Zen meditation — a centuries-old Buddhist practice aimed at mental, physical and emotional balance — can help you achieve those goals, and more.

An increasing body of scientific evidence supports the benefits of Zen meditation — a centuries-old practice aimed at mental and physical balance — in and out of business. Now, brain imaging shows that experienced Zen meditators can clear their minds of distractions more quickly than others are able to do

In the last decade, there has been a growth of scientific studies into meditation, due in part to the increasing availability and sophistication of a variety of brain-scanning techniques.

Mindfulness in particular is increasingly a focus in the business world. It will be a topic at a one- day Leadership Stamina conference to be hosted by the PQ Institute in Bryanston, Gauteng, on July 14. Stellenbosch University Business School MBA lecturer Dina Oleofson will speak on the relevance and benefits of mindfulness for business.

In the latest research, US neuroscientiststs say that electro- encephalography — brain imaging — shows that experienced Zen meditators can clear their minds of distractions more quickly than novices are able to do.

Meditators show “an enhanced ability to control their mind’s focus and disentangle it from distracting or harmful preoccupations”, say researchers, led by Dr Giuseppe Pagnoni, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia.

Pagnoni says after interruption, differences in brain activity between experienced Zen meditators and novices could be seen in a set of cerebral areas often referred to as the “default mode network”.

Earlier studies have associated this network with spontaneous thoughts and mind-wandering during periods known as “wakeful rest”, the researchers say.

Pagnoni’s study, titled Thinking about Not-Thinking: Neural Correlates of Conceptual Processing During Zen Meditation, suggests that “the regular practice of meditation may enhance the capacity to limit the influence of distracting thoughts”. He says this skill could help conditions characterised by excessive rumination, or abnormal production of task-unrelated thoughts. It is a type of mind training that could be a complementary treatment for neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, attention deficit disorder and depression.

On the Live Science website (www.livescience.com), Pagnoni says the default mode network may be “especially vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease”. He freely admits to be entering the field of “wild speculation” here, medically speaking, but believes that meditation, “by providing regular intervals of respite in the incessant working of the default network, (could) have protective effects for Alzheimer disease”, even if only mildly.

Other studies have shown increased activity of alpha and theta waves in the brain’s frontal region during Zen meditation. Alpha waves are associated with “relaxed wakefulness” (with eyes closed) and usually stop when the eyes are opened. Theta waves are known as the “more elusive and extraordinary realms” of brain activity.

Zen meditation may also be a natural analgesic (pain reliever). A study funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health in Psychosomatic Medicine in January this year shows that meditators have lower pain sensitivity in and out a meditative state compared with non- meditators.

Unlike other forms of meditation that involve repeating a mantra, or visualisation exercises such as imagining yourself on a tropical beach, Zen meditation discourages “mental vacations”, and “prescribes a vigilant attitude” towards one’s surroundings, he says. By focusing on “the here and now”, that is, being mindful, practitioners are less likely to “get carried away” by extraneous and superfluous thoughts.

South African advocate Antony Osler agrees. He has had a longstanding interest in law and meditation. On the legal side, he ran the Karoo Law Clinic, an office of Lawyers for Human Rights, for 15 years and now arbitrates in labour disputes. He has been meditating since the early ’70s, and in 1983 was officially ordained as a Zen Buddhist monk at a monastery in Mount Baldy, California.

Osler holds occasional meditation retreats on his Colesberg farm, Poplar Grove, and says enigmatically: “I meditate because I need to, not because I’m particularly good at it.”

He knows all about the manifold psychological and medical benefits said to accrue from meditation, but has “never meditated for those”. Through meditation, he has experienced “the rising of an instinctive sense of internal balance and a sense of deep connectedness with wherever I am.

“For me, that’s enough. If I don’t contact that level of stillness in myself, I feel out of alignment.”

Osler is author of Stoep Zen (Jacana), which he describes as “taking the Zen tradition and giving it South African feet”.

Despite its quirky “thinking about not thinking” approach and irreverent reputation, Zen meditation is not New Age or trying to create an alternative state of consciousness or “bliss” , he says.

You don’t even have to be a Buddhist to do it. “Buddhism is practised as a religion in some parts of the world, but in essence it is a philosophy, a way of life. As such, it does not compete with any belief system,” Osler says.

It has a particular slant that is very grounded in the present moment, he says. “It aims to put you in touch with whatever moment you are living in.”

To Osler, meditation means being “grounded”, mindful, connected to the moment and “being really attentive, moment by moment, so you are able to give yourself to every person you meet and every situation that you are in”.

Zen teachings also demonstrate rather than explain, he says.

“There is a place for explanation, of course, but there is also a place where logic stumbles and we have to enter the world of astonishment and love.”

He says Zen meditation has two important benefits for the business world

“Firstly, if you are more in touch with yourself and your surroundings, including work situations, you are likely to respond more appropriately.

“Secondly, meditation allows you to be less caught up in your own perception of things and, in turn, to be more sensitive and compassionate to how others are feeling,” he says.

“I’m not a businessman, but in my own profession, the more attentive and present I can be, the better I can do my job.”

In a prologue to Stoep Zen, Osler writes: “If we pay attention and live from our belly — without the habitual veil of thinking that stands between us and our experience — then whatever we see, hear, taste, touch or smell is the truth. It is the content of our life at this moment; the place where we truly live.

“Then our life lies clearly in front of us and we can step lightly and kindly.”

Stretching back thousands of years to ancient spiritual traditions, meditation has been attracting a growing following of secular practitioners in recent years. While it’s still not exactly mainstream, data released in December by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, an arm of the National Institutes of Health, show that 9.4 percent of adults surveyed in 2007 had tried meditation at least once during the previous 12 months, a significant increase from 7.6 percent in 2002. And 1 percent of children had zoned in, too.

Your choices are extensive—mindfulness meditation, transcendental meditation, and the latest trend, compassion meditation, are three of many approaches, each with a slightly different intent. Compassion meditation aims to foster a feeling of loving-kindness toward others, for example, while mindfulness meditation focuses on awareness and acceptance of the present moment.

Whatever the variation, certain basic elements are common to all forms of meditation. Comfortably seated, lying down, or even walking around, you focus your mind on your breath, a word, a mantra, an object—something specific—possibly for a few minutes but perhaps much longer, gently pushing away distracting thoughts. As you learn to stay focused, you experience a sense of calm. Your body relaxes. Your breathing slows. Your heart rate drops.

Many of those who practice meditation turn to it to help them deal with emotional stumbling blocks like stress and anxiety. It can also be used to change unhealthful eating habits or to battle substance abuse. And studies continue to add to the ways in which meditation might be able to play a therapeutic role—for example, it has been shown to bolster HIV patients’ immune systems, ease chronic pain, and reduce blood pressure.

Gene control. New research has been taking these discoveries to a deeper level, revealing how meditation and other relaxation techniques work in cells, turning on and off genes that are associated with inflammation, cell aging, and free radicals, all of which are associated with damage to cells and tissues. French philosopher René Descartes famously believed that the mind and body were separate entities, but emerging evidence is proving him wrong.

What this shows is that you can actually change the brain with the mind,” says Herbert Benson, director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is a coauthor of a study demonstrating such genetic changes that was published in July in the online journal PLoS One.

Meditation’s psychological and physical effects both are tied to the “fight or flight” response. When we are under stress, the brain sends hormones and other substances racing through our system to ready us for action. We become hyper alert, our heart rate and breathing speed up, our muscles tense, and our digestive processes shut down. While modern Americans are less likely to face physical danger than were our prehistoric, mastodon-hunting ancestors, there’s no shortage of other sources of stress. High-pressure, over busy lives, coupled with the unrelenting economic uncertainty of much of the past year, can put the body in a constant state of hyper vigilance. That’s not good. An ongoing state of revved-up alertness can damage tissues and organs, suppress the immune system, and cause anxiety and depression.

Mental workout. The calm that meditation engenders produces physical and emotional changes that represent the flip side of fight-or-flight. For those with overtaxed lives, a bonus of meditation is that a little of it apparently goes a long way. One study of individuals who were new to meditating showed measurable brain and behavior differences after just two weeks of daily 30-minute sessions, says Richard Davidson, director of the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But meditation is like any other workout: To reap the benefits, don’t stop. “This is mental exercise,” says Davidson. “If one wants [benefits] to continue, you have to continue.”

Experts and practice centers that can serve as sources of meditation training are becoming easier to find. One of the best known and most studied programs is the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program, which started at the University of Massachusetts Medical School nearly 30 years ago and is now offered by certified instructors at centers around the world. (You can see if there is one in your area at umassmed.edu/cfm/mbsr.) The program brings together a group of people once a week for eight weeks to learn sitting and walking meditation practices and gentle yoga stretches. For those who would rather learn on their own, books, tapes, and CDs are available from Jon Kabat-Zinn, founding executive director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts and creator of the MBSR program, at mindfulnesstapes.com. They can help do-it-yourselfers learn the ropes.

No amount of meditating can magically erase the stress of losing a job or a loved one. But it can help people cope. “It can transform the emotional brain in ways that promote higher levels of resilience [and] less vulnerability and affect the body in ways that can improve health,” says Davidson. All that for just minutes a day? Even a shell-shocked investor would have to admit: That sounds like a good deal.

A study conducted by the University of British Columbia measured how
a child’s spirituality, and factors like temperament, affect the
child’s sense of well being.

“Our goal was to see whether there’s a relation between spirituality
and happiness,” said Mark Holder, an associate professor of psychology
and the study’s co-author. “We knew going in that there was such a
relation in adults, so we took multiple measures of spirituality and
happiness in children.”

Spirituality accounted for about five percent of happiness in adults, but a surprising 16.5 percent of happiness among children.

“From our perspective, it’s a whopping big effect,” Holder said. “I
expected it to be much less. I thought their spirituality would be too
immature to account for their well-being.”

The study tested 315 children ages 9 to 12.

Next, researchers hope to survey children in a country where Christianity is not prominent and compare the results.

Underestimating the technique may mean they’re missing out on a range of benefits to health, mood and attention span, according to research.

One study has found that people who meditate have a better immune response to the flu vaccine than people who don’t. Another looked at 90 cancer patients who did meditation for seven weeks and it was found that those who meditated had 31 per cent lower stress symptoms and 67 per cent less mood disturbance than the ones who did not meditate.

Studies this year suggest that meditation is powerful enough to even “re-circuit” the brain.  Just as we do aerobics to improve muscle shape, meditation tones the grey matter.

Brain scans conducted by researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reveal that those experienced at meditating boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention and processing sensory input.

The finding agrees with other studies showing that accomplished musicians, athletes and linguists all have thickening in relevant areas of the cortex.

It is also claimed that meditation is helpful for improving asthma and increasing fertility through to reducing the effects of ageing.

So how does it work?

To understand the impact of meditation, experts say we need to understand what meditation actually is. A broad description is that it’s a mental practice in which a person focuses their attention on a particular subject or object, maybe a candle flame, a mantra, breathing patterns, or simply an awareness of being alive.

In Madison, Wisconsin, Dr Richard Davidson carried out studies on Buddhist monks. In one study, he also observed the brains of a group of office workers before and after they did a course of meditation. At the end of the course the workers’ brains seemed to have altered in the way they functioned, they showed greater activity in the left-hand side – a characteristic linked to happiness and enthusiasm.

Dr Davidson told the BBC: “By meditating, you can become happier, you can concentrate more effectively and you can change your brain in ways that support that.” Meditation is said to improve the well-being of everyone, as well as those suffering from depression and mental illness.  Researchers are very excited by this.

One of those researchers is Kathy Sykes, professor of sciences and society at Bristol University in the UK, who visited Kathmandu for instruction with Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk who has been meditating for more than 30 years. She wanted to learn more about meditation and says it helped her cope with the death of her father and she now uses it all the time. It helps her to cope in many situations.

Her father died from cancer about two months before she went to Kathmandu and she had not been able to grieve. Matthieu suggested she focus on unconditional love, and when she thought about that, she thought about her father. She wept and was finally able to let go.

“Meditating and mindfulness now help me get in touch with what really matters, and stop me from worrying,” she says. “It helped me profoundly in handling all my grief around dad’s illness and death. It helps me with almost everything.”

After her visit to Kathmandu, she went to Massachusetts General Hospital in the US, where Dr Herbert Benson, a Harvard Medical School professor, put her through a series of tests.  Doctors measured her resting pulse, muscle tension, respiration and sweat. They then subjected her to some mental arithmetic, her stress levels and all her readings soared.  However, after a short period of meditation, her pulse and breathing dropped below the resting rate. He said that to the extent that any disorder was caused or made worse by stress, achieving a “relaxation response” like this, would counteract that condition.

Sykes said she was recently on a crowded train travelling from London where there was “standing-room only”.

“I’d had a frenzied day, having to think and concentrate hard, speak and plan all day. The train was a nightmare. Packed, noisy, no seats left and truly horrid. I just found a place to sit in the floor, closed my eyes, and allowed all the mad busyness of my brain that day to stop, concentrated on my breathing and found it was a massive relief and escape.”

Meditation and mindfulness have now been approved by the UK clinical watchdog, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, for use with people in the UK who have experienced three or more periods of depression and it is offered by hospitals in cases of chronic or terminal illness to reduce complications ­associated with increased stress, including a depressed immune system.

So, what are you waiting for?  Find yourself a local meditation class, practice using the videos on the website and see just what benefits meditation and mindfulness can offer you.

Erin Gammel is a shoo-in for the Canadian Olympic swim team. Canadian record holder, champion backstroker – unless something wildly unexpected happens, she’s going to Athens.

But four years ago she was a sure bet for the Sydney Olympics, too.

“Everyone kept telling me you’re a shoo-in,” she says. “And we had the strategy and everything was perfect. And I thought this is it, I’m going to the Olympics.”

She was racing at the Olympic trials in Montreal. She hit the lane rope, lost her concentration and lost her place on the team.

“It was just extremely disappointing. I was depressed. I was just really sad. I was crying and I couldn’t control myself,” Gammel says.

Erin Gammel cried for two years. Help was to come in a way she would never have dreamed, from Dharamsala in Northern India, 5,000 kilometres and cultural eons away.

Dharamsala is the home in exile to thousands of Tibetans who followed the Dalai Lama, after China occupied Tibet.

For 25 centuries Tibetan Buddhists have practised and refined their exploration. For generations they probed their inner space with the same commitment with which western science explored the external world and outer space. The two inhabited separate worlds.

But now, they are finding common ground in a remarkable collaboration.

In March 2000, a select group of scientists and scholars journeyed to Dharamsala. They came to share insights and solutions – to human distress and suffering.

Among them was Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist from the University of Wisconsin. He finds nothing contradictory about doing science with Buddhists.

“There is almost a scientific-like attitude that is exemplified by Buddhist practitioners in investigating their own mind,” he says. “Their mind is the landscape of their own experimentation, if you will.”

The westerners had been invited by the Dalai Lama himself to his private quarters.

For five days, monks and scientists dissected what they call “negative emotions” – sadness, anxiety jealousy craving, rage – and their potential to destroy.

One of the participants, Daniel Goleman, author of the book Destructive Emotions, says, “As we were leaving the U.S. to come here the headline was a six-year-old who had a fight with a classmate and the next day he came back with a gun and shot and killed her. It’s very sad.”

Why would the scientists seek answers in Tibetan Buddhism?

Because its rigorous meditative practices seem to have given the monks an extraordinary resilience, an ability to bounce back from the bad things that happen in life, and cultivate contentment.

Richard Davidson’s lab is one of the world’s most advanced for looking inside a living brain. He’s recently been awarded an unprecedented $15-million (Cdn) grant to study, among other things, what happens inside a meditating mind.

“Meditation is a set of practices that have been around for more than 2,500 years, whose principal goal is to cultivate these positive human qualities, to promote flourishing and resilience. And so we think that it deserves to be studied with the modern tools of science,” Davidson says.

A little over a year later, in May 2001, the Dalai Lama returned the visit to Davidson’s lab in Madison, Wis.

His prize subjects – and collaborators – are the Dalai Lama’s lamas, the monks.

“The monks, we believe, are the Olympic athletes of certain kinds of mental training,” Davidson says. “These are individuals who have spent years in practice. To recruit individuals who have undergone more than 10,000 hours of training of their mind is not an easy task and there aren’t that many of these individuals on the planet.”

The Dalai Lama has said were he not a monk, he would be an engineer.

He brings that sensibility – the curiosity and intellectual discipline – to the discussion on EEGs and functional MRIs.

But this isn’t really about machines.

And it isn’t about nirvana.

It’s about down-to-earth life: about the distress of ordinary people – and a saner world.

“The human and economic cost of psychiatric disorder in western industrialized countries is dramatic,” says Davidson. “And to the extent that cultivating happiness reduces that suffering, it is fundamentally important.”

The monk and the scientist are investigating – together – the Art of Happiness.

“Rather than thinking about qualities like happiness as a trait,” Davidson says, “we should think about them as a skill, not unlike a motor skill, like bicycle riding or skiing. These are skills that can be trained. I think it is just unambiguously the case that happiness is not a luxury for our culture but it is a necessity.”

But we believe we can buy happiness…if we just had the money. That’s what the ad industry tells us. And we think it’s true.

People’s theories about what will make them happy often are wrong. And so there’s a lot of work these days that shows, for example, that winning the lottery will transiently elevate your happiness but it will not persist.

There’s some evidence that our temperament is more or less set from birth. So and so is a gloomy Gus…someone else is a ray of sunshine – that sort of thing.

Even when wonderful or terrible things happen, most of us, eventually, will return to that emotional set-point.

But, Davidson believes, that set point can be moved.

“Our work has been fundamentally focused on what the brain mechanisms are that underlie these emotional qualities and how these brain mechanisms might change as a consequence of certain kinds of training,” Davidson says.

His work could not have been done 20 years ago. “In fact, 20 years ago, we had dreams of methods that allows you to interrogate the brain in this way, but we had no tools to do it.”

Now that we have the tools we can see that as our emotions ebb and flow, so do brain chemistry and blood flow. Fear, depression, love … they all get different parts of our brain working.

Happiness and enthusiasm, and joy – they show up as increased activity on the left side near the front of the cortex. Anxiety, sadness – on the right.

Davidson has found this pattern in infants as young as 10 months, in toddlers, teens and adults.

Davidson tested more than 150 ordinary people to see what parts of their brains were most active.

Some were a little more active on the left. Some were a little more active on the right.

A few were quite far to the right. They would probably be called depressed. Others were quite far to the left, the sort of people who feel “life is great.”

So there was a range. Then Davidson tested a monk.

He was so far to the left he was right off the curve. That was one happy monk.

“And this is rather dramatic evidence that there’s something really different about his brain compared with the brains of these other 150 people. This is tantalizing evidence that these practices may indeed be promoting beneficial changes in the brain.”

Here, the Olympic athletes of meditation meet the Cadillac of brain scanners.

Khachab Rinpoche, a monk from Asia, came to Madison to meditate in perhaps the strangest place in his life: the functional MRI.

It let’s scientists watch what happens inside his brain when he switches between different types of meditation.

They want to know how his brain may differ from ordinary people, and whether that change is related to the inner contentment the monks report.

So they test how subjects react to unpleasant sounds and images flashed into the goggles they wear in the MRI.

Normally when we’re threatened one part of the brain is tremendously active, but in the monks, “the responsivity of this area is specifically decreased during this meditation in response to these very intense auditory simuli that convey strong emotions,” Davidson says.

It’s very preliminary work, but the implication may be that the lamas are able to move right through distressing events that overwhelm the rest of us – in other words, one of the keys to their happiness.

It may tell us something about our potential. “Our brains are adaptable, our brains are not fixed. The wiring in our brains is not fixed. Who we are today is not necessarily who we have to end up being,” Davidson says.

Tibetan Buddhism is said to be one of the most demanding mental endeavours on the planet. It takes 10,000 hours of meditation and years in retreat to become adept. Few of us can imagine such a commitment.

But that doesn’t mean the benefits of meditation are out of our reach.

Zindal Segal is a psychologist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. He uses meditation to treat mood disorders.

It’s based on Buddhist teachings and its called mindfulness.

Michael Herman, senior partner with the law firm of Goodman and Goodman, meditates in his office.

“Very few of us can sit for 10,000 hours to be able to do this but the interesting thing is that we don’t need to. These capacities are available to all of us,” Segal says. ” We’re talking about paying attention, we’re talking about returning wherever our minds are to this present moment. These are things that we all have. We don’t have to earn them, we just have to find a way of clearing away the clutter to see that they are already there.”

Meditation is now out of the closet. The word is, it eases stress, drops blood pressure, helps put that bad day at the office in perspective.

Meditation is being mainlined by the mainstream, from corporate offices to factory floors.

These days it’s not unusual to find hospitals like St. Joseph’s in Toronto offering meditation programs. Some 360 people pass through the eight-week course every year.

Like most, this program has taken the simplest form of Buddhist teaching and adapted it for busy lives.

“Meditation is a skill, and like any skill it needs to be practised. So we use the breath as the place where we start to practise but eventually what we want to be able to do is to be able to use the awareness of the breath in our daily lives,” Segal says.

“When we have the ability to do that we can then use the breath when we’re standing in line at a bank, or if we’re having an argument with a spouse, as a way of grounding ourselves in the middle of something that is disturbing.”

Something disturbing, like the mind movie Erin Gammel couldn’t escape: the day when she failed to make the Olympic team.

“I just remember my hand getting caught in a lane rope and thinking to myself, it’s over,” Gammel says.

She lost her focus, her place on the team, and her heart to swim.

“It affected my entire life. I cried at the drop of a hat. I wasn’t improving and it didn’t look like anything was really improving. And I felt everything I did I seemed to fail at,” she says. “That was part of the depression and the sadness because I felt like I was failing at the time. Nothing was going well.”

Until she hooked up with the National Swim Team’s sports psychologist, Hap Davis. Davis had been fascinated by scientist Richard Davidson’s work.

He had a hunch that reliving the trauma was suppressing that part of Erin’s brain on the left that Davidson had found was so active in happy people.

He devised a rescue plan – a breathing meditation that she was to do before and after repeatedly viewing the video.

“If a person can ground themselves and feel centred with meditative breathing they can get to the point where they can look at it and view it with a critical mind, with a mind that is capable of being open to the experience and looking objectively at what took place,” Davis says.

“You know what it felt like during the race. It felt like I stopped absolutely dead. But in the video I look and it looks like just a little glitch. Nothing.”

It’s more than two years since they’ve needed to study the tape – because it worked. Erin’s joy of swimming returned; she’s winning race after race.

“She’s more resilient emotionally. She’s more stable emotionally. She’s more consistent in terms of performance,” Davis says.

“Meditation isn’t necessarily about happiness but it makes you happier. I guess that is how you would say it. And I feel more confident. That I know how to work with this stuff and work with bad things that happen in my life,” Gammel says.

Once again there’s one more race to win – the trials to make the team that goes to Athens.

“This is my year. That’s what I keep telling everyone. This is my year to make the Olympic team because making it through all those times there it’s just going to happen, I know it is. lt’s just going to happen,” she says.

“Meditation has been around for 2500 years so it’s not like a new practice,” Davis says. “But science is catching up to an old tradition and the evidence seems to be emerging that meditation can change the pattern of brain chemistry or blood flow in the brain.”

And now there’s proof meditation can change the brains of ordinary people and make them healthier.

Promega is a biotech company in Madison, Wis., where the researchers from the Brain Imaging Lab recruited typical stressed out workers – office staff, managers, even a skeptical research scientist, Mike Slater.

“Things were chaotic and crazy. We had a newborn. We had three deaths in the family. So it was a pretty topsy-turvy time,” Slater says.

All the subjects had activity in their brain measured…and half – including Mike Slater – were given an eight- week course in meditation.

Then everyone – meditators and controls – got a flu shot, and their brains were measured a second time.

The meditators’ brain activity had shifted to that happy left side. Mike Slater was almost too successful.

“I was pretty happy all the time and I was worried that maybe I was masking some stuff that might really be irritating me so I stopped it and my wife noticed an increase in my irritability, so, you know, I have both sides of the experiment now. It calmed me down and I stopped doing it and my irritability increased,” he says.

That wasn’t all. Their immune systems had strengthened.

“Those individuals in the meditation group that showed the biggest change in brain activity also showed the biggest change in immune function, suggesting that these were closely linked,” Davidson says.

Davidson and his team had shown meditation could shift not just mood – but also brain activity and immunity in ordinary people.

And they’d answered a potential flaw in the monk study.

“Someone may say, well, maybe these individuals are that way to start out with. Maybe that’s why they’re attracted to be monks,” Davidson says. “And we actually can’t answer that on the basis of those data, but with the Promega study, we can say definitely that it had to do with the intervention we provided.”

There are reasons to believe the insane pace and many aggravations of daily life can be dangerous to the health of our minds and our bodies.

We can’t push the delay button on a busy world and we can’t bail out.

But perhaps meditation is a way to encourage a sense of well-being – a deep breath in the centre of the whirlwind.

“As the Dalai Lama himself said in his book The Art of Happiness, we have the capacity to change ourselves because of the very nature, of the very structure and function of our brain,” Davidson says. “And that is a very hopeful message because I think it instills in people the belief that there are things that they can do to make themselves better.”