Journal of Research on Adolescence

Transcription

Thank you very much Nigel. Okay. So as Nigel said, I will tell you about the medical aspects of Sahaja Yoga. As we've heard, Sahaja Yoga is a spiritual method but it has been associated with health benefits. So I will tell you about the effects on the body, on the brain, on your health and on diseases: mental and physical diseases. First of all, what is meditation? And Nigel has already explained more or less what meditation is, I will just say a few more words. So, if you read the Oxford dictionary, it says that meditation is thinking in silence. Now first of all, you cannot think aloud and secondly thinking is of course the exact opposite of what meditation is, as originally conceived in the East. So meditation, Patanjali was one of the first to talk about meditation and he said that meditation is the cessation of thinking, it's the stopping of your thoughts, it's the control of your thoughts, the control of your attention. In the West we know there are three states of consciousness, that's sleeping, dreaming and thinking. But in the East, and we think that thinking is the highest state of consciousness, but in the East it's very common knowledge that there's another state of consciousness It's called the fourth state of consciousness. Turiya awastha and the fourth state of consciousness is the state of Thoughtless Awareness. Mental Silence. Where you learn to stop your thinking. And this process of stopping your thinking has amazing benefits at the subjective level but also objectively and you feel, when your thoughts are stopped you feel happy, you feel joy and depending on the intensity, you can feel absolute bliss. So there are several subjective correlates, what you feel when you meditate, which are listed here and which, however, have health implications. And as I said before, in the West we are not really interested in spiritual things but we are very much interested in our health and in fact, we are obsessed with our health. And it's the health benefits which have actually attracted all the interest in Western science. So over the last years there have been a lot of studies on meditation because people have realised, meditation actually leads to better health. And, so what you feel when you meditate, you feel an overwhelming calmness and this is a calmness which goes much more beyond normal relaxation. Because when you relax, you relax the body and if you lie on the sofa, you may be relaxed, but if you worry about the future you are not really relaxed. So, when you're thoughtless, you don't just relax the body, you also relax the mind and your brain and you cannot do it with any other way. You can only do it by stopping to think. Stopping to worry about the future, stopping to rumenate about the past and be in the present. So, this overwhelming feeling of peace within, calmness, is associated with stress relief and I'll show you later how. When you are mentally silent, you have a better mental balance. And this is - because if you think about it - all mental disorders are actually characterised by thought problems. If you have schizophrenia you have paranoid thoughts. If you are obsessive-compulsive you have obsessive thoughts. If you are ADHD you have racing thoughts and if you are depressed you have negative thoughts which you ruminate about. So, it has also been shown that all disorders, all mental disorders they have more mental clutter. This has been shown over recent years. And meditation of course is the reduction of the mental clutter. Because that's what it is, you stop your thinking so you have less mental clutter. So therefore, mental silence is a state of super mental balance. More than normal people have, because if you meditate and you have less mental clutter than a normal person, then you are super healthy, and super balanced mentally. When you don't have any thoughts, you are much more concentrated and you are much more alert because your are pure consciousness without the content, which are the thoughts and the emotions. And if you go through life, the whole day you throw out your thoughts and your emotions into the world and you don't really see reality as it really is. Because you constantly have the intermediation of your thoughts and your emotions. So, when you have no thoughts - you absorb reality as it really is. So for example, if you're now listening to me you may be thinking about the dinner later and you may have to inhibit your thoughts in order to actually listen or attend. If you have no thoughts, you absorb information much quicker. And it has been shown that children who meditate have better attention at school, Zen Buddhists who have meditated for a long time have better attention and this has been associated with better productivity at work, because when you are more concentrated and have no mental clutter, you are actually more focused. Another very interesting feature which I have said before, when you have no thoughts you feel happy, you feel bliss, you feel joy and this, of course, you, if you have these positive emotions during your meditation because it's so peaceful it's so pleasant this state of mental silence, then you carry this over into daily life and this leads to more positive emotions. And positive emotions of course protect you against depression, anxiety, affective disorders and that's of course very good for you and you have less negative thinking. Last but absolutely not least, to me this is the most important aspect of meditation, you achieve a state of emotional detachment. You enter a witness state, where you actually go beyond your thoughts, because you're no longer thinking and you're no longer having your emotions but you see them from a stepping-back witness state. We call it in psychology a meta-cognitive awareness, where you're beyond your thoughts. And you can observe them. And that's, I think, the most important thing of meditation, the most important aspect and, if you remember, Buddha went out to find meditation because he realised that there is a lot of suffering in the world. And how do you deal with the suffering? You cannot control the life events. We all have negative life events, you know: your parents are going to die eventually, people you love may die, you might have a divorce, whatever happens to you, you cannot really control those life events. But what you can control is how you actually deal with those life events and how you perceive them. You can control your state of mind. And your thoughts and your emotions. And that we do by meditation and that's the only way. Only through meditation we can actually enter a witness state, which makes you emotionally more resilient and I think this is the most important aspect of meditation because, who wouldn't want to be happy and sail through life in a sort of serene, happy, joyful way, without being carried away on a roller - coaster of emotions constantly, depending on what happens to you. So, I think this is crucial. And of course, the state of meditation, of thoughtless awareness you may have seen has been described in all mystical traditions of world cultures. Here are just a few names: Nirvana, Sahaj Samadhi, Satori, Yoga - which means union, Zen, Tao, and in the west we had our own meditation, our own tradition of mental silence, which were the Christian Gnostics and Gnosis means knowledge. Which means the knowledge of your Self. And your Self, you're not just these thoughts and these emotions, but you're a different thing, you're actually a spiritual person who can go beyond the thoughts and emotions. So the claims I will try to prove to you today and show you medical evidence, is that meditation has an effect on the body, because mental silence reduces stress and it activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which restores bodily functions. I will show you that meditation has an effect on the brain: mental silence is a different state of consciousness, you activate different areas of the brain, of deep attention, of positive emotions, and there is a release of happy chemicals, which make you joyful. Now, meditation is a good way to prevent illness because mental silence leads to better physical and mental health. And lastly, I will show you that you can use it as a therapy, so if you have any mental, or physical - problems, you can actually solve them with meditation.