The Science of Meditation

The other day one of my students sent me an article from the CBC's website about a scientific study which suggested that meditating for as little as 11 hours in a month could prevent mental illness. The US-based study noted physically measurable changes in the brains of people with mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder, when they practiced a specific type of meditation.

This information may be news to some people but accounts of the benefits of meditation can be found among the oldest surviving records of human history. Daoism in China, and the teachings of Vedanta and Buddhism in India, all have hallowed traditions of 'sitting still and doing nothing' to benefit the body, mind and soul, going back thousands of years.

If you do a search of the words 'science' and 'meditation' on Wikipedia you will find an entry titled 'Research on meditation', detailing the modern history of this field starting with the work of Dr Herbert Benson. I rely heavily on Dr Benson's work to give credibility to what I do, since the word 'Qigong' carries little weight with most Canadians until they have tried it.

The CBC article came to me the day after I sent an email off to our local recreation department announcing my fall meditation classes. In the past I have always done my classes on Monday or Tuesday evenings, but since many people say those days don't work for them, I thought I'd try a different approach. Starting Monday, September 17th, I will be offering a meditation class one day a week for five weeks, on each successive day of the week, finishing on Friday, October 19th.

These classes are also different in that they are stand-alone classes rather than a series. Over the past six months, since I first started preparing for the presentation I did at LDSS, I have been refining the way I teach meditation. My hope is that a single class will give students all the information and experience they need to make meditation a daily habit. The slide show I am using for the class will be emailed to students afterwards so they can review it if they need to.

Most of the information I am sharing in these classes is already available on this blog, and I have added another page called 'Download and Print' to make it easier to access.

The goal of this blog from the beginning has been to demonstrate how simple the principles involved in meditation are, but if you're like me, you will find great benefit from attending a class. After all, there is no substitute for being in the same room as the teacher.

The cost of the class is $10 and you can contact the Rec Dept at 519-292-2054 after September 1st to register.