What Meditation Does
Top of the Pops
As another recent cover story in TIME magazine recently ('Just Say Om' by Joel Stein TIME The Science of Meditation 4 August 2003) put it, in its own inimitable TIMEspeak: 'For upwardly mobile professionals, convinced that their lives are more stressful than those of the cow-milking, soap-making, butter-churning generations that preceded them, meditation is the smart person's bubble-bath.In fact, it's becoming increasingly hard to avoid meditation. It's offered in schools, hospitals, law firms, government buildings, corporate offices and prisons..And, as with any great trend that finds its way onto the cover of TIME, many of these meditators are famous. To name just a few: Goldie Hawn, Shania Twain, Heather Graham, Richard Gere and Al Gore, if he still counts as famous. In a confluence of Eastern mysticism and Western because scientific studies are beginning to show it works, particularly for stress-related conditions.'
TIME reports the scientific-medical reason why meditation can reveal another dimension to one's daily life - as countless religious movements have demonstrated for time immemorial. It quotes research by Dr. Gregg Jacobs of the Harvard Medical School found that repeated meditation deactivates the frontal areas of the brain that receive and process sensory information and lowered activity in the parietal lobe, a section of the brain located near the top of the head that orients you in space and time. By shutting down the parietal lobe, it says, you can lose your sense of boundaries and feel more 'at one' with the universe.
The physiological impact of meditation is clear. What you make of it however, is entirely up to you.
(For more on meditation and what it does, there is no better general introduction than Eric Harrison's 'Meditation & Health' see www.perthmeditationcentre.com.au)
'The results have been extraordinary and we now have staff practicing their favorite meditation methods daily and who are feeling the benefit, not only at our workplace but also in their life as a whole.'
John Owen, General Manager, Willoughby City Council, Sydney.
'This course made me think — really think — that there is a different way to think at work and otherwise in my life.
Warwick La Hood, Lawyer, Sydney.