Jacqui Lewis, founder of The Broad Place. Photo: Alexandra Cain

What do Rupert Murdoch, Arianna Huffington, Naomi Watts, Oprah Winfrey and Hugh Jackman all have in common? If you silently contemplate the answer you will realise that these are just some of the dozens of celebrities, Wall Street, Fortune 500 and ASX 200 chief executives "coming out" as avid meditators.

No longer the domain of spiritual seekers or hinterland hippies, meditation is billed as an essential ingredient in a busy life; another form of exercise just as important as the gym.

Front runners in the meditation-on-the-run boom are husband and wife team Jacqui Lewis and Arran Russell, whose inner Sydney wellness and meditation centre The Broad Place has garnered even broader than anticipated patronage since being launched 18 months ago.

"We were blown away by the rapid business growth in the first year. I underestimated the thirst that exists for this work; people are stressed and overwhelmed and looking to meditation as a solution," Lewis says.

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It's a scenario Lewis knows too well. On the brink of breakdown a few years ago, learning vedic meditation was her lifeline back to balance.

"I had a new baby and a high stress business and it was all too much. I was having anxiety and panic attacks and my marriage was suffering. I was desperate," Lewis says. "I literally crawled through the door to my first meditation class."

For five years Lewis followed the vedic meditation instructions of two 20-minute "sittings" a day, and, in doing so, turned her life around. Her new resolve was to dedicate her life to bringing the vedic technique to others.

"Vedic meditation is an ancient form of mantra meditation and not a monastic practice. This means it's a technique that was developed for householders, people who are completely engaged in life. It's the perfect meditation for modern people who lead busy, active lives with jobs, relationships and families," Lewis says.

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Meditation for busy bizoids

One hundred fifty people sat in the big meeting room, hands on laps, eyes closed, feet flat on the floor.

"Bring your attention to this moment," Janice Marturano instructed. "Be open to sensations of warmth or coolness, sensations of fullness from breakfast, or perhaps hunger." Minutes later, the meditation ended with the traditional strikes of little hand cymbals.

Buddhists? Old hippies? New Agers?

Nope. The room was full of hospital executives and managers in lab coats and scrubs, jeans and sports coats at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center. And the teacher was Marturano, once a top executive at General Mills.

The founder of the Institute for Mindful Leadership, Marturano is about as far from woo-woo as the spectrum allows and a sign that meditation has snaked its way into every sector of our lives. The hospital employees were learning a practice shared by millions these days: college students, parents and prisoners; soldiers, the overweight and the lovelorn; the Seattle Seahawks, public school kids and members of Congress; Oprah, Chopra and Arianna.

And perhaps you. What? You're not meditating?

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Meditation, primarily a 2,500-year-old form called mindfulness meditation that emphasizes paying attention to the present moment, has gone viral.

The unrelenting siege on our attention can take a good share of the credit; stress has bombarded people from executives on 24/7 schedules to kids who feel the pressure to succeed even before puberty. Meditation has been lauded as a way to reduce stress, ease physical ailments like headaches and increase compassion and productivity.

Religious practitioners have long claimed that, adopted by enough people, meditation could bring us world peace. Now we hear that from Chade-Meng Tan, a Google executive charged with making the company more mindful. You needn't even put down your phone, with apps like Insight Timer, which has guided meditations and ways to track your stillness.

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Meditation booms as people seek a way to slow down

Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment students practice the Transcendental Meditation technique in front of TM teacher Siggi Lamothe, right, Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2004, in Fairfield, Iowa. Students at the school do TM, the practice of invoking a state of deep relaxation brought about by mentally repeating a word, or "mantra," for about 15 minutes several times a day. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

CHARLIE NEIBERGALL, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Duke may have one of the best law schools in the country, but in recruiting new students, its promotional materials point out that Durham's bar scene has exploded in the past few years.

At Carnegie Mellon, the pitch is similar: "Pittsburgh rocks after dark," prospective students are told.

The story is the same at schools across the country. The "student experience," which often includes binge drinking and raucous parties for undergrads, is for many students as important as getting good grades and a degree.

The Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, might as well be on another planet. Its consciousness-based education involves daily transcendental meditation for its 1,200-something students, organic vegetarian meals, and four hours a week of required physical activity. Its ideal routine stresses rest as the basis of activity, including a "strongly" encouraged 10 p.m. curfew.

That early bedtime curtain call may be what prospective students thought they left behind in grade school. But the universitys routines, particularly regular transcendental meditation practice which involves sitting comfortably with eyes closed is not invasive, says Craig Pearson, Maharishis executive vice president.

Meditators report that once they begin to meditate, they naturally find themselves taking better care of themselves," he says. "But its not necessary to embrace any different lifestyle.

And, according to Pearson, students who meditate can expect to see a variety of benefits, from increased grade point averages to better focus, memory, energy, ego development and brain integration. Meditation, he adds, can also improve relationships and lower stress and anxiety levels. The benefits usually begin to be evident quickly, he says.

With its daily meditation, Maharishi is a good test case for the efficacy of meditation for students. But other schools, including Brown University and UCLA, have found benefits to meditative practices without making it a requirement.

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The rise of meditation on college campuses

Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment students practice the Transcendental Meditation technique in front of TM teacher Siggi Lamothe, right, Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2004, in Fairfield, Iowa. Students at the school do TM, the practice of invoking a state of deep relaxation brought about by mentally repeating a word, or "mantra," for about 15 minutes several times a day. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

CHARLIE NEIBERGALL, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Duke may have one of the best law schools in the country, but in recruiting new students, its promotional materials point out that Durham's bar scene has exploded in the past few years.

At Carnegie Mellon, the pitch is similar: "Pittsburgh rocks after dark," prospective students are told.

The story is the same at schools across the country. The "student experience," which often includes binge drinking and raucous parties for undergrads, is for many students as important as getting good grades and a degree.

The Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, might as well be on another planet. Its consciousness-based education involves daily transcendental meditation for its 1,200-something students, organic vegetarian meals, and four hours a week of required physical activity. Its ideal routine stresses rest as the basis of activity, including a "strongly" encouraged 10 p.m. curfew.

That early bedtime curtain call may be what prospective students thought they left behind in grade school. But the universitys routines, particularly regular transcendental meditation practice which involves sitting comfortably with eyes closed is not invasive, says Craig Pearson, Maharishis executive vice president.

Meditators report that once they begin to meditate, they naturally find themselves taking better care of themselves," he says. "But its not necessary to embrace any different lifestyle.

And, according to Pearson, students who meditate can expect to see a variety of benefits, from increased grade point averages to better focus, memory, energy, ego development and brain integration. Meditation, he adds, can also improve relationships and lower stress and anxiety levels. The benefits usually begin to be evident quickly, he says.

With its daily meditation, Maharishi is a good test case for the efficacy of meditation for students. But other schools, including Brown University and UCLA, have found benefits to meditative practices without making it a requirement.

Read more here:
Students can manage stress with meditation, but should regard it cautiously

The meditation-and-the-brain research has been rolling in steadily for a number of years now, with new studies coming out just about every week to illustrate some new benefit of meditation. Or, rather, some ancient benefit that is justnow being confirmed with fMRI or EEG. The practice appears to have an amazing variety of neurological benefits from changes ingrey matter volume to reduced activity in the me centers of the brain to enhanced connectivity between brain regions. Below are some of the most exciting studies to come out in the last few years and show that meditation really does produce measurable changes in our most important organ. Skeptics, of course, may ask what good are a few brain changes if the psychological effects arent simultaneously being illustrated? Luckily, theres good evidence for those as well, with studies reporting that meditation helps relieve our subjective levels of anxiety and depression, and improve attention, concentration, and overall psychological well-being.

Meditation Helps Preserve the Aging Brain

Last week, astudy from UCLA found that long-term meditators had better-preserved brains than non-meditators as they aged. Participants whod been meditating for an average of 20 years had more grey matter volume throughout the brain although older meditators still had some volume loss compared to younger meditators, it wasnt as pronouncedas the non-meditators. We expected rather small and distinct effects located in some of the regions that had previously been associated with meditating, said study author Florian Kurth. Instead, what we actually observed was a widespread effect of meditation that encompassed regions throughout the entire brain. Meditation Reduces Activity in the Brains Me Center

One of the most interesting studies in the last few years, carried outat Yale University, found that mindfulness meditation decreases activity in the default mode network (DMN), the brain networkresponsible for mind-wandering and self-referential thoughts a.k.a., monkey mind. The DMN is on or active when were not thinking about anything in particular, when our minds are just wandering from thought to thought. Since mind-wandering is typically associated with being less happy, ruminating, and worrying about the past and future, its the goal for many people to dial it down. Several studies have shown that meditation, though its quieting effect on the DMN, appears to do just this. And even when the mind does start to wander, because of the new connections that form, meditators are better at snapping back out of it.

Its Effects Rival Antidepressants for Depression, Anxiety

A review study last year at Johns Hopkins looked at the relationship between mindfulness meditation and its ability to reduce symptoms of depression, anxiety, and pain. Researcher Madhav Goyal and his team found that the effect size of meditation was moderate, at 0.3. If this sounds low, keep in mind that the effect size for antidepressants is also 0.3, which makes the effect of meditation sound pretty good. Meditation is, after all an active form of brain training. A lot of people have this idea that meditation means sitting down and doing nothing, says Goyal. But thats not true. Meditation is an active training of the mind to increase awareness, and different meditation programs approach this in different ways. Meditation isnt a magic bullet for depression, as no treatment is, but its one of the tools that may help manage symptoms.

Continued here:
7 Ways Meditation Can Actually Change The Brain

Thomas Barwick via Getty Images

Preserving the brain's most important tissue -- the neuron-rich gray matter -- could be accomplished through meditation, according to a new study at the University of California at Los Angeles.

As early as the mid-to-late 20s, the brain starts to show the effects of aging, as its volume and weight start to dwindle.

Previous research has suggested that those who practice meditation have less age-related degradation in their white matter, so the UCLA team, whose study was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, sought to build on these findings.

"We expected rather small and distinct effects located in some of the regions that had previously been associated with meditating," says co-author Dr. Florian Kurth, a postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center. "Instead, what we actually observed was a widespread effect of meditation that encompassed regions throughout the entire brain."

In the study, the team compared 50 participants who had years of experience in meditation against 50 more who had none in order to understand the relationship between age and gray matter.

Participants ranged in age from 24 to 77 and each group consisted of 28 men and 22 women.

In the group that consisted of people who meditated, the average amount of experience was 20 years and the most experienced among them had been doing so for 46 years.

The research team captured the state of participants' brains using scans taken with high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology and found that gray matter declines with age, although less so for those who meditate.

While the findings are encouraging, the researchers caution that they were unable to establish a casual connection between practicing meditation and preserving gray matter.

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Meditation Can Literally Keep Your Brain Young: Study

LOS ANGELES (KABC) --

Making meditation easy and accessible is at the heart of what Diana Winston teaches her students. She started her practice 25 years ago.

"I feel a youthfulness, a happiness, from a meditating mind," Winston said.

Could meditation be behind her younger outlook?

Researchers with the UCLA Brain Mapping Center scanned the brains of people who have been meditating for years as well as those who haven't meditated at all.

After about the mid-20s, our brain tissue begins to wither. This may be one reason why we become more forgetful.

"Less brain matter in some regions is associated with less cognitive functioning," said Dr. Florian Kurth.

Kurth and his colleagues found that in the brains of people who meditated, the shrinkage of gray matter was less.

"What was kind of surprising about this was we found this effect throughout the whole brain, basically," Kurth said.

How meditation protects the brain is going to be the subject of further study, but Kurth theorizes it might be a two-pronged approach. First, meditation reduces stress and protects the brain. Second, it can help build up certain parts of the brain.

See the article here:
Can meditation keep your brain youthful?