Meditation

The word meditation, is derived from two Latin words : meditari(to think, to dwell upon, to exercise the mind) and mederi (to heal). Its Sanskrit derivation 'medha' means wisdom.

There are many adjectives I have heard lately when I ask people to describe their life: busy, frantic and chaotic are in the top five. Never has anyone answered calm, serene or peaceful. This anecdotal evidence comes primarily from people working or studying in a large city, where many feel pressured juggling many roles in life.

Meditation is a conscious state of calm and clarity. The key to meditation is awareness, yet it is not about thinking. It is all about being in the moment and conscious rather than drifting off to sleep. A common form of meditation is “mindfulness”, where initially the attention is drawn to the observing your breath and nothing else.

There are many forms and styles of meditation, some associated with a spiritual practice (such as Buddhism) and others that are not. They all have the same aim of calming the mind to encourage a state of awareness.

While meditation doesn’t change what is going on in our world it can help us alter the way we respond to it. In a way it “heals the mind” to help us be less reactive to the stresses of daily life.

How do you meditate

If you have never meditated before I would suggest that you take a class as many of the problems that most people encounter that hinder the practice of meditation are universal. A skilled teacher can guide you through these and help you find a remedy for them.

To begin with most of us can feel physically or emotionally uncomfortable when we learn to “sit”. While our back may ache or we feel plagued by an uncontrollable itch, it is what an unquiet mind can throw at us that can be even more disconcerting. Sometimes learning to meditate can be the first opportunity in a very long time that our psyche finds a ‘break in the traffic’ to bring up buried thoughts or feelings. Working with an experienced meditator can help you work with this. But be aware that sitting down the first, or even the tenth, time may not be an instantaneous road to bliss. Despite its simplicity, it can be hard work initially.

Like many other things in life, meditation is referred to as a “practice”. Even someone who has practiced meditation for years can have different experiences when they sit. It is a work in progress.

Can regular meditation improve your health

Regular meditators often appear calmer, less stressed and have a greater clarity of mind. But is there any evidence to back this up?

Evidence based medicine provides rigid guidelines to prove or disprove anecdotal evidence such as this. One of the problems when it comes to meditation is that rats cannot be taught to meditate.

Most studies in this area use mindfulness meditation in some form and tend to be small studies. This may be because the biggest source of funding in medical research is from pharmaceutical companies. They want a return on the investment in the form of being able to sell a drug or device. As meditation can be taught for free or low cost, it does not attract the kind of money needed to meet the criteria for the large, repeatable studies.

There is small study evidence to support that meditation can increase immunity (from CD4 cell and other immune markers in HIV to increasing the positive biological response to the flu vaccine), decrease stress, reduce blood pressure, help us sleep better and help us deal with chronic pain.

There is evidence to show that even for novice meditators, brain activity changes with meditation. To distil complex neurological information into a few simple sentences, the changes in brainwaves include less Beta, the thinking and stress related brain wave and more Alpha, Theta and Gamma - the relaxation and meditation brain waves. A fascinating study that took MRI’s of Buddhist Monk’s brains found significant changes in the architecture of the brain. Sara Lazar, the study's leading author summarized this as, "The area where we see these differences is involved in both the modulation of functions like heart rate and breathing and also the integration of emotion with thought and reward-based decision making – a central switchboard of the brain,"“

The take home message regarding the research behind meditation is that the small studies to date provide positive evidence that it can benefit both body and mind but what I would say is “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”, try it for yourself and see how you feel.

What if you’ve tried to meditate and feel you can’t do it, is there any other way to get the benefits of mindfulness?

If you’ve given meditation a go, especially in the form of classes over a number of weeks and find it too challenging, I’d suggest you try an active form of exercise that involves a meditative element such as chi gong, tai chi or yoga classes (that end with a decent period of yoga nidra).

A guided relaxation CD may also be a useful tool to begin to calm down and relax.

It also helps to keep off caffeine and alcohol and cultivate a practice of being in the moment as much as possible. For example doing mundane tasks like doing the dishes consciously stay with the job you are doing, feel the warmth of the water, really look at each dish as you clean it and take note of how often your mind drifts away from being in the moment. Like meditation, this is something requiring frequent practice to get the hang of it.

One aspect of meditation is that it is also about what we are not doing for a period of time. When we meditate (usually for 20-40 minutes) the time is not spent on a computer, watching TV, thinking, talking, arguing or working

Disconnecting from screen-based entertainment (TV, computer, video games etc) may be a first step to achieving calmness and clarity.


Learning meditation

There are many places to learn meditation, the following are my favourites.

The Friends of the Western Buddhist Order is a worldwide organisation that teaches two forms of meditation – mindfulness and Metta (loving kindness). I have personally found this to be very effective. They teach meditation without necessarily promoting Buddhism making it very accessible to people regardless of belief structure.

The Melbourne CAE (adult education) usually has a variety of meditation courses on offer.

The Gawler Foundation has meditation retreats, workshops and ongoing groups.

Melbourne Life Coach Kate James runs regular meditation classes and has inexpensive guided meditations available from her website.

Heart health

The cardiovascular system (CVS) includes our blood, the network of vessels that carries it around the body and the heart, which is a large muscle that pumps the blood though the vessels. The CVS interacts with almost every other part of the body through over 160,000 kilometres of blood vessels.

There are many things that can go wrong within the system. But beyond being born with CVS defects or trauma (such as causing massive blood loss) the most common problems that arise in the CVS are from the vessels (a bit like pipes) blocking up, becoming too rigid or generally shutting down, blood clots causing major obstructions in the blood vessels, or the heart itself failing (problems with the valves, electrical impulses, outer layer of the heart, the actual muscle itself etc). Because of the close interaction of the CVS with other body systems, a problem elsewhere can have a secondary effect on the CVS for example lung or kidney disease or even an infection.

The aim of good CVS care is to prevent the pipes clogging up (a common source of high blood pressure) or hardening, keeping the weight within normal range so the heart doesn’t have to work harder to pump blood around the body and exercising that big muscle – the heart, appropriately. But as almost every aspect of our health can impact on our CVS – general wellbeing including balance in our body, mind and spirit is essential.

Key nutrients for the CVS

Ultimately being deficient in any essential nutrient can impact on our heart health, however the following have the most direct effect to prevent or moderate common CVS problems.

Vitamin E: Considered the king of antioxidants, it assists the CVS in many ways. One key action is by reducing or preventing oxidation of cholesterol, which can otherwise form a fatty plaque on vessel walls (causing constriction and blockages). To have the most impact on preventing oxidation, Vitamin E works better in a combination with all the other antioxidants.

Currently there is controversy regarding the effectiveness of Vitamin E in heart health. This article by Jeffrey Blumberg helps explain some of the anomalies in current research on the subject.

Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10): a naturally occurring coenzyme essential to the production of cellular energy, this new kid on the block (in regards to the history of modern nutrition) is especially important in heart muscle function and as in stopping oxidation of “bad” cholesterol. Conversely the group of drugs known as statins, to lower cholesterol, reduced CoQ10 levels leading to a nutritionally counterproductive side effect).

A recent meta-analysis of 12 studies involving CoQ10, showed it’s potential to significantly lower high blood pressure.

Fish oil: Omega 3 Fatty acids had a recent show of their own. Apart from overall health support, there is increasing evidence for fish oils and heart health. One of the most recent is in the revision of guidelines handed down in the UK for patients who have suffered a heart attack. These include – a Mediterranean diet, regular exercise of 30 minutes a day and at least 7 g of Omega 3 FA/week.
(Listen to my podcast on omega 3 fats)

Garlic: bad news for those who don’t like garlic breath as it’s the smelly sulphur compounds in it that benefit the heart! One key new finding is that it significantly reduces the tension in vessel walls (remember that narrow vessels increase blood pressure as the heart has to work harder to force the blood through smaller ‘pipes’).

Diet

The Mediterranean diet: rich in fish and natural plant oils, fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans and grains (also low in red meat, processed and fried foods) can form the basis of a healthy CVS eating plan. Eat food that looks like it does when it comes from the fields and the sea, use good quality cold pressed vegetable oils as dressings (cooking with any oil caused oxidation) and have masses of fruit and vegetables. Keep in mind that what you eat at an Italian or Greek restaurant is not usually what a family would have at home – a Mediterranean meal has lots of salad and vegetable dishes. In a restaurant we tend to choose the festive foods and eat them at the expense at all the other components that would balance the richness.

Salt: the cook’s best friend, is nature’s own flavour enhancer. Though a little can help balance our electrolytes, too much can harden our arteries and raise our blood pressure. The more salt we eat, the higher the flavour threshold is so that we want to have more to make the food taste good. Having a rest from salt (which includes all processed foods or restaurant meals, rather than just the table salt we might add) for a week can help reset your tastebuds.

However, though salt is an easy culprit it is really about mineral balance. While excess sodium (the key ingredient in salt is sodium chloride) can raise blood pressure and cause CVS havoc it is actually about sodium levels relevant to potassium. We need at least as much potassium as sodium to keep blood pressure normalised. Potassium is high in vegetable foods eg: fruit, vegetables and legumes. Sodium is high in processed food eg: ham and cheese. Diuretics cause potassium loss. Magnesium (also rich in plant foods) is the other key mineral to sodium balance.

The cholesterol controversy: while a good balance between high density (“good”) and low density (“bad”) cholesterol is a key to keeping good heart health, to have very low overall cholesterol is not necessarily the answer for a long and healthy life. For notes from a previous show on cholesterol, with references to the whole conundrum click here. Note – independent medical advice now suggests that cholesterol-lowering drugs have the most benefit for middle-aged men with a history of cardiovascular disease. For people outside that age group, women or men who have no signs of cardiovascular disease – always get a second opinion before commencing this type of medication.
(Listen to my podcast on cholesterol

Lifestyle

Appropriate exercise: doesn’t have to be doing a triathlon (unless that is what you love) – think about strength, flexibility and endurance – not just getting aerobic, heart rate increasing exercise. Walking is one of the safest, convenient and most stuck-at forms of exercise. Aim for at least half an hour a day of dedicated exercise is the place to start.

Smoking : do we even need to go there? There is overwhelming evidence linking smoking (any type of vegetation) and CVS disease! If you would like to give up smoking consider hypnotherapy, which has a high success rate in people who genuinely want to quit by reducing cravings and increasing will power.

Stress: As part of our survival mechanism our primitive nervous system (ANS) triggers an increase in blood flow and heart activity. While in a healthy person an episode of acute stress should not lead to a heart attack – it is not unusual for even a young person to experience chest pain and an elevated or erratic heart beat. Prolonged stress does many things, including long term increased heart activity, reducing levels of cardio-protective nutrients and increasing inflammatory hormones in the body. On top of that at such times of stress other protective lifestyle measures may drop off, such as healthy sleeping patterns, diet and exercise. People may also drink more alcohol and caffeine, increase cigarette intake or use other drugs, which may ultimately damage the CVS.

Happiness: Will being happy keep your CVS healthy? Other than happiness being an antidote to stress, studies are emerging that when happy people do become stressed the negative CVS effects of it are less. One study showed that happy people had significantly lower levels of cortisol (associated with stress, type 2 diabetes, hypertension and autoimmune diseases) and less plasma fibrinogen (to do with inflammation and blood clots – a cause of heart attacks and strokes).

Join the Happiness Thread.

An anecdotal experience of hypertension

A non-smoking, 46 yo male with moderate to high essential hypertension and family history of myocardial infarction at a similar age monitored his blood pressure twice a day for 2 weeks, with the support of his GP and naturopath. He drank no caffeine and his diet was basically Mediterranean at home. Stress levels were variable (though not excessive) through the trial and exercise was moderate.

In reviewing his data the 3 most significant factors in raising his blood pressure were:

Salt – immediate worsening of hypertension. Despite having a higher than average intake of plant foods, the peak in sodium levels had a definite negative impact on blood pressure.

Alcohol – intake over recommended units of alcohol caused a delayed worsening of hypertension causing a peak around 24 hours later.

Feeling cold – feeling physically cold caused immediate worsening of hypertension, relieved by having a warm shower. (Peripheral circulation narrows down in a response to cold causing an increase in central pressure).

Managing these factors has allowed him to avoid medication, usually multiple drugs for the rest of his life. But he needs to remain vigilant and have regular check ups.