Meditation has been *on* your mind? That is the problem. It should be
*in* your mind.

HTH.

From the above link:

"Since meditation usually involves sitting quietly for a period of time and
breathing deeply, anyone who cannot sit comfortably ........... may have
difficulty practicing meditation."

This is nonsense. I have been meditating for 40 years and I do it while flat
on my back.

Below is an interesting article I read recently.

Enjoy

RF
Subject: The Anti-Aging Effects of Meditation

Originally published in MORE magazine, May 2005.

It's so unfair: Just at the age when you start figuring things out -- who

you are, what you want out of life -- you begin noticing that you're losing

your mind. Already, at 44, I not only forget where I left my keys, I get in

the car and have no idea where I'm going. I'm worried that what's left of my

poor brain is starting to petrify. Finally sure of my priorities and values,

I'm cross with others who don't see things my way. I'm anxious about getting

older, and impatient with my little aches and pains. When I look in the

mirror, I see not just superficial wrinkles, but something deeper and more

troublesome -- the nascent beginnings of a forgetful, cranky, inflexible old

bat.

Forget about anti-aging creams. I need something to reset my mental clock.

Is there anything like exercise for the brain to keep it in shape? Studies

have shown that doing crossword puzzles helps keep the mind sharp, but I

doubt that struggling with 37-down, "Palenque king," can relieve the stress,

anxieties, and mental rigidity that can accompany aging. Recently, alarmed

at my brain's seemingly swift degeneration (not to mention my impatience,

distractedness, and maddening forgetfulness), I decided to try a different

kind of mental exercise: meditation.

It seemed unlikely that simply sitting, closing my eyes, and focusing on my

breathing could help. But after only a couple of weeks -- results are quick

-- I was starting to believe that the best thing to keep my mind calm,

cheerful, flexible, and focused is to do nothing, for 15 minutes a day.

Meditation made me feel both relaxed and more energetic. I developed a bit

of distance between events and my reactions. Someone cut me off in the car?

Maybe he's having a bad day. A promising date didn't blossom into a romance?

Perhaps it's his problem, not mine. Even at this early stage, I've noticed

I'm much more able to let go of judgments of myself and others. I wondered:

Can meditation really keep your mind young? And if your mind stays young,

will your body follow?

When I attended a daylong meditation retreat to strengthen my practice, it

certainly appeared that way. The participants, mostly a decade older than I,

radiated the kind of clear-eyed luminosity one associates with the bloom of

youth. "I don't know whether meditation actually makes you younger," said

the teacher, who, in his 60s, had no trouble sitting cross-legged for hours

on end. "But it sure as hell makes you feel younger."

It turns out that how you feel -- stressed or relaxed, anxious or calm --

does affect the aging process. Recent research suggests that meditation and

other forms of mindful relaxation may help slow down the biological clock,

so you're better able to heal and to withstand disease. "There's a reason

why experienced meditators live so long and look so young," says Eva Selhub,

MD, medical director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute. That reason has

mainly to do with reducing stress. Though there is little direct research on

meditation and aging, one 1989 study of residents in nursing homes showed

that those who practiced transcendental meditation had better mental

flexibility and lower blood pressure, and lived longer.

Stress = Aging

Why? Researchers suspect that meditation slows down aging because aging is,

in many ways, an accumulation of stress. The new thinking is that our cells,

under stress, may stop regenerating as quickly, and become more prone to

disease and early cell death. Meditation and other forms of deliberate

relaxation also change the way you perceive stress, which actually lightens

the physiological load. To some extent, age really is a state of mind: If

you feel young, you're apt to be physiologically younger and healthier than

your cranky peers.

"If we can affect the stress response, we can affect the aging process,"

says Selhub. The longer we live, the more stress we're under, because

stressful events are stored in our brains, Selhub continues, like icons on a

computer, and each new anxiety triggers a lifetime's worth of anxiety, like

double-clicking on that icon. The average woman over 40, who deals with

work, kids, relationships, and her changing life and body, has about 50 of

these stress responses a day. Selhub adds, "Without a lot of rest and

recovery time between stress responses, we can age quickly."

The good news is that several studies have shown that deliberate relaxation,

or meditation, has exactly the opposite effect as the stress response,

slowing and calming all those wiggy, whacked-out physiological changes. And

while the stress response may be automatic and uncontrollable, the

"relaxation response" can be called up at will, by just sitting and

literally doing nothing. Meditation also teaches you to separate events from

your reactions -- simply observing situations, without judging them, and

then letting them go -- so that a stressful event might not automatically

cause your brain to click on that icon of stored memories of stress.

Other studies have shown that meditation can help strengthen the immune

system and promote healing of illnesses that crop up as we age. Jon

Kabat-Zinn, MD, founder of the Stress Reduction Program at the University of

Massachusetts Medical School, whose most recent book on meditation is Coming

to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness, has

shown that when patients with psoriasis listened to meditation tapes during

light therapy, they healed four times faster than those who didn't relax.

"The mind can affect the healing process right down to the level of cell

division and cell replication," he says. Psoriasis is an uncontrolled cell

growth -- not unlike cancer, so there is some potential that meditation can

help control cancer, too, he theorizes.

Rewire Your Brain

In another study, Kabat-Zinn and his colleagues found that meditation can

change the way the brain works. After an eight-week program, employees at a

biotech firm showed increased activity in the left prefrontal cortex -- the

side associated with feelings of happiness and well-being (Buddhist monks

show the same kind of brain activity). The subjects who meditated developed

more antibodies more quickly in response to a flu vaccine, signaling a

stronger immune system.

A calm, focused mind also improves memory and concentration. So much of

forgetfulness has to do with multitasking, with your mind scattered in a

million directions. "When you can't find your keys or remember a name, you

have to ask yourself, how many things are you trying to pay attention to at

once?" says Leslee Kagan, of the Mind/Body Medical Institute. Meditation

teaches you to be mindful in the present moment, letting go of all those

spiraling thoughts about the past, future, office politics, and the grocery

list, and giving your mind and memory an opportunity to come into focus.

"There's nothing as effective as some form of meditation for cultivating

concentration," Kabat-Zinn says. "If exercise takes care of the body,

meditation is what takes care of the mind."

Meditation may also help us cope with the aging process. Studies at the

Mind/Body Medical Institute have shown that women who did 15-20 minutes a

day of some kind of meditative activity that produced a relaxation response

reported a 58 percent reduction in premenstrual symptoms and significant

decreases in hot-flash intensity, and 90 percent were able to reduce or

eliminate use of sleep medications. Beyond reducing physical symptoms, the

meditators had a more positive attitude about their body's changes, with

fewer anxieties and negative thoughts. "With regular practice, relaxation

techniques can substantially diminish one of the most problematic aspects of

menopause -- our negative attitudes about aging," says Kagan, director of

the Institute's menopause program.

Over-the-Hill Illusion

Meditation, says Kabat-Zinn, involves accepting things as they are, without

judgment. "Acceptance doesn't mean passive resignation, like, 'Oh, well, I'm

over the hill,'" he says. Instead you realize that over the hill is an

illusory thought -- one which, if you identify with it, can affect how you

feel about yourself. "If you think you're old, you can look in the mirror

and find 100 different ways to confirm it," he says. "It becomes a

self-fulfilling prophecy." Instead, meditation can take you out of the

self-absorption with aging that can actually age you. "What we're talking

about is attitude," he says. "Age is not so much chronological, but how

you inhabit your body and your life in relationship to the world -- and that
can be worked on. Meditation is really about reclaiming your life as if it
were worth living now."

In a society that often tells us otherwise, meditation can help us realize

that aging is not such a bad thing. "There's a certain reflectiveness,

balance, and perspective about the sorrows and the joys of life, which

meditation can enhance," says my first meditation teacher, Sharon Salzberg,

author of Lovingkindness and Faith. Salzberg, who looks much younger than

her 52 years, says meditation keeps your mind young by keeping you

constantly open to the present, curious and interested in the world around

us. "That attitude, that sense of wonder and interest -- that daring -- is

a product of meditation," she says. "Instead of feeling stuck in a
self-image

of being old, I feel like I'm getting younger all the time, in a sense of

playfulness. What's important is not aging, but continuing to learn and

grow."

I'm a beginner, but after a few months of meditating, I feel less impatient,

more relaxed, and able to concentrate more easily. I can meditate about a

friend who is facing a serious illness and not spend the rest of the day

panicked about her. Things on my desk get cleared away one by one, instead

of haphazardly, between cups of coffee. I'm less likely to blurt out

something in a fit of anger, or press "send" on a fuming e-mail. I'm also

more apt to let go of grievances and disappointments. My mind may feel

younger and in better shape -- but I also feel older, wiser, and more

content. The research on meditation and aging is still in its infancy, but

I'm convinced that meditation will indeed help keep my mind fit, flexible,

and acute for the coming decades.

Now that I've found the key, I'm in the driver's seat...

Meditation 101

There is more than one way to quiet the mind and elicit the relaxation

response. Take your pick from among deep breathing, meditation,

visualization, yoga, repetitive prayer and mindfulness (which includes

deliberately focusing on the sensations of a small activity, like washing

your hands or drinking a cup of tea). What's important is to set aside at

least 15 minutes a day to engage in one of these activities.

Even though it sounds straightforward enough, it can be difficult to begin

meditating without some guidance (not to mention keeping up the practice).

There are many books, classes, and tapes on meditation practice available,

and you need to find one that's right for your temperament.

Classes: The semi-annual journal Inquiring Mind (www.inquiringmind.com) has

listings of retreats and sitting groups (it's meditation's equivalent of the

book club). Or just Google "meditation sitting groups" for local

information.

Tapes and DVDs: Sharon Salzberg's tapes can be found at

www.loving-kindness.org. Jon Kabat-Zinn has a series of guided meditations

available at www.mindfulness tapes.com. Dharma Seed Tape Library

(www.dharmaseed.org) sells live recordings from top teachers. This Web site

links to Dharmastream (www.dharmastream.org) where you can listen to samples

of meditation talks for free, so you can try before you buy.

Books: Jon Kabat-Zinn's Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the

World Through Mindfulness explores meditation via the five senses. Also try:

8 Minute Meditation by Victor Davich and Mindfulness in Plain English by

Bhante Henepola Gunaratana.

Originally published in MOREmagazine, May 2005.

Here is another article

Spiritual State

From National Geographic, March 2005, Pp 30-31.

To focus the mind and increase awareness of self, Shingon Buddhists like
Souei Sakamoto practice takigyo chanting for hours while standing in frigid
waterfalls at the Oiwasah Nissekiji Temple in Toyama, Japan.

For 2,500 years Buddhists have employed such strict training techniques to
guide their mental state away from destructive emotions and toward a more
compassionate, happier frame of being. Spurred by the cascade of new
evidence for the brain's plasticity, Western neuroscientists have taken a
keen interest. Can meditation literally change the mind?

For the past several years Richard Davidson and his colleagues at the
University of Wisconsin, Madison have been studying brain activity in
Tibetan monks, both in meditative and non-meditative states. Davidson's
group had shown earlier that people who are inclined to fall prey to
negative emotions displayed a pattern of persistent activity in regions of
their right prefrontal cortex. In those with more positive temperaments the
activity occurred in the left prefrontal cortex instead.

When Davidson ran the experiment on a senior Tibetan lama skilled in
meditation, the lama's baseline of activity proved to be much farther to the
left of anyone previously tested. Judging from this one study, at least, he
was quantifiably the happiest man in the world.

Davidson recently tested the prefrontal activity in some volunteers from a
high-tech company in Wisconsin. One group of volunteers then received eight
weeks of training in meditation, while a control group did not. All the
participants also received flu shots.

By the end of the study, those who had meditated showed a pronounced shift
in brain activity toward the left, "happier," frontal cortex. The meditators
also showed a healthier immune response to the flu shot, suggesting that the
training affected the body's health as well as the mind's.

"You don't have to become a Buddhist," says the Dalai Lama himself, who is
closely following the work of Western cognitive scientists like Davidson.
"Everybody has the potential to lead a peaceful, meaningful life."