April 21st, 2012 | 
Author: It has been validated that 20 minutes of meditation is the equivalent of 3 hours of sleep. If you are on a plane and onto your next important board meeting, think about how efficient you can be by utilizing 20 minutes of that time to regenerate and renew yourself and be clear and focused for the upcoming event.
First thing we have to do is demystify meditation. Truly, it’s not this thing that these pious monks do high on the hilltops in Tibet, nor is it exclusive to Eastern philosophy. What is meditation? Actually, let’s rather refer to it as relaxation and that brings me to telling you about Herbert Benson, cardiologist, researcher, educator, a mentor. He had a private practice in Massachusetts and in 1962 some TM students, who requested to do a research study on the effects of TM on his patients, approached him. The first time they approached him, in his own words he threw them out the door. Fortunately, they were persistent and so two years later they were back, knocking on his door. This time, for whatever the reason, he was open to their suggestions and the next thing a research study was set up, incorporating his most difficult patients, those that did not respond to medication etc. They hooked them up to all sorts of electrical devices and then analyzed the data. Guess what! Here were these cardiac patients, medically at risk of dying, literally. The study showed that when they were meditating for 20 minutes twice a day, they were able to keep their medical condition under control. The data revealed not only a decrease in blood pressure but also a slowing down of their heart rate, their rate of breathing, as well as a decrease in muscle tension.
So here’s this doctor, renown as a physician and researcher and his data is showing that something like an esoteric and spiritually associated practice of meditation is truly having a profound effect on his patients. Yes, they were able to control a life threatening medical condition by taking 20 minutes twice a day to be quiet. Imagine that! Well, the first thing that he did was to package it in vocabulary that was going to be easier for his colleagues to digest and so he coined the phrase ‘eliciting the relaxation response’ and he continued to analyze the techniques with more scrutiny and eventually came up with the understanding that the basis of the success of the process was in what he referred to as the ‘refocusing process’.
You see, people tend to think that meditation is hard to do and that you really have to stay focused in order to achieve the benefits and if you don’t do all that, that its a waste of time and of no benefit. Wrong! The benefit is in the doing. Just taking the time to sit there. And the process occurs through ‘refocusing’. In other words, when you take the time to practice eliciting the relaxation response, you choose a focus of attention. Now, it doesn’t have to be the so-called ‘mantra’, which is a harmonic sound that is given to people when they are initiated into the practice of TM. In fact, it can be anything. It can be focusing on your breathing or it may be using a phrase that you choose from your religious affiliation or even a visual image. To elicit the relaxation response, all you need is a focus and then what you do is keep on refocusing on that word, sound, object, whatever. You see, what Benson found was that there was a direct shift in the autonomic nervous system. The body physically switches from a sympathetic to a parasympathetic mode.
Let me take a moment or two and explain this aspect of our human function. When you understand the basis of this function, I know you will feel more open to incorporating the practice because it makes so much sense. The autonomic nervous system is comprised of the two polar opposite responses from the body that put it in sympathetic or parasympathetic mode. The sympathetic nervous system is activated dramatically and manifests what is known as the fight or flight response. This phenomena was first documented by Dr Walter B Cannon of Harvard Medical School early this century who found that when a person is subjected to a frightening experience it unconsciously and automatically sets up a physiological reaction to get ready to fight. In other words, there is a cascade of hormones from the adrenals that flood the body, like the flame of a dynamite stick and causes arousal. The heart rate increases, the rate of breathing increases, so does the breathing rate, blood pressure and metabolism. Because of the stresses of daily living, our bodies are constantly in the sympathetic mode some researchers suggest 50 times a day starting with the alarm first thing in the morning. Now when we are lying on the beach in Hawaii, listening to the sound of the waves and the gulls, our bodies automatically switch into parasympathetic mode.
It is not the same as sleep. When you sleep it takes 3-5 hours for the metabolism to slow down. It takes 3-5 minutes when eliciting a relaxation response:
So back to the idea of refocusing. Sometimes there are a lot of thoughts that are passing endlessly through our minds and when we close our eyes and start to focus on the pattern of our breathing, say, we are interrupted by these thoughts that keep coming back and demanding attention. Now here’s the secret to success. It doesn’t matter how many thoughts there are, it doesn’t matter how restless it makes you feel. As soon as you notice that you are focusing on the thoughts instead of focusing on whatever you have chosen as your ‘distraction’ you remind yourself that you don’t want to be paying attention to that thought right now, and gently refocus your attention. That’s the process. And its so simple and easy. And it works. You just have to take the time to do it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Sometimes, while you’re doing it, it feels like it is not doing anything for you, but when you open your eyes, you notice the distinct change in how you feel.
Of course, the most remarkable aspect of the practice is in the cumulative effect. The more you do it, the easier it is to access the state of relaxation, and the benefits of the practice creep into your daily activity where you experience that sense of clarity and calm throughout the day and not only immediately after doing it.
What I like about the practice is that it allows you to maximize your own potential. We tend to think that the only way to process stuff is by talking to others. What you realize and begin to experience is that a lot of that stuff can get taken care of by you, and with very little effort. You don’t necessarily need to be focusing on a particular problem. Your body just needs to be in a better frame of mind to access the solutions and a lot of those you know yourself, you just enhance the ease of access.
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