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Barb lentz Nurs 310

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There are many different philosophies behind meditation. It can be used as a physical aspect or a spiritual journey. The major attribute of meditation tackles the mindset. When you meditate, it is not as if your mind is free of deliberations and reflections. Instead, you become detached; you go instead to a place where you can see everything more clearly. Yoga is also incorporated into many meditation practices to balance the mind and body.

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Meditation is almost indispensable in todays world of strife and competition. Different meditation types are used in Yoga along with the practice of Asanas and Pranayamas. Whichever practice you choose from various meditation types, it is necessary to put it into a regular schedule. Success and bliss in spiritual field comes through practice and patience. Let's venture to peep into some aspects of meditation types that are prevalent in present scenario

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Category Concentration Category concentration is another one among various meditation types. It helps you make more concentrated about the things that are helpful in meditation. People feel very difficult to concentrate on one particular thing, and this is where this technique is very beneficial. Category concentrations works by narrowing the objects of concentration, so that your mind is trained to focus better.

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Transcendental Meditation This is the most debated and researched one among the meditation types. This meditation type helps in increasing intelligence and creativity. In this technique, you need not to master difficult breathing techniques or some special postures. You just need to concentrate by sitting in a relaxed posture or even on a chair.

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Mindfulness Meditation Mindfulness meditation is known as Vipassana, and is practiced by Buddhists among many meditation types. The meditation type involves practicing to be aware about the things that you do and the things that happen around you at the very moment.

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Body Scan Meditation Body scan meditation is very useful for people who do not have any time for other meditation types. You just need to lie down and focus on your body parts right from your toe to your hair.

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Breath and Navel Meditation It is the oldest one recorded in China as well as in India and one of the most famous among other meditation types. It involves control over breath through different breathing techniques. You need to sit in a relaxed posture and concentrate on your breath, nostrils, or even on your abdomen.

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Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn developed a mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR) program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. It has been used as a form of complementary medicine addressing a variety of health problems. MBSR brings together meditation and yoga, and is ideal for cultivating greater awareness of the unity of mind and body, as well as the ways the unconscious thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can undermine emotional, physical, and spiritual health.

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MBSR is used to combat many difficulties people have with chronic pain, stress, anxiety, depression, problems with substances, sleep disturbance, hypertension, headaches, grief and life threatening illnesses.

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During MBSR you sit back and take a moment to become aware of the surroundings you are in, the sensations in your body, the thoughts in your mind, and the feelings in your heart. The awareness can be thought of in many ways but it is mostly thought to be you inner wisdom. MBSR cultivates a different relationship between you and the things that challenge you in your life, and relies completely upon the tools you already have.

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Maharishi Consciousness Based Health Care and Transcendental Meditation

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Chronic disease is the leading public health issue in the United States. Americans suffering from a least one chronic disorder and cardiovascular disease carries with it the highest mortality rates and healthcare costs. This modern medical diagnostics and therapeutics now ranks as the third leading cause of death in the United States. Furthermore, in recent comparisons of health system performance in developed countries, the United States ranked near the bottom on most health indicators examined. Such observations aided in the understanding the major shift of public and professional interest toward alternatives to conventional medicine. A recent survey found that 89% of the American public is dissatisfied with the current status of medicine and desires fundamental change in the direction and structure of the US healthcare system.

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In the Maharishi Consciousness Based Health Care system, diagnostic, preventive, and therapeutic modalities are drawn from the broad range of Vedic literature and are said to holistically enhance the bodys innate self-repair and homeostatic mechanisms, thereby preventing disease and promoting health. The Maharishi Consciousness Based Health Care uses Transcendental Meditation (TM) techniques to normalize adaptive mechanisms of the body that have become distorted in their function because of psychosocial stress.

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The Maharishi Consciousness Based Health Care suggests that TM is essential in the prevention oriented, holistic approach that addresses the underlying causes of disease. Also TM shows that quality of life tends to improve, and thus far no negative side effects have been detected. This improvement in quality of life undoubtedly contributes to the high rate of compliance.

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Coronary Risk Factor Reduction through Relaxation and Meditation

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Coronary heart disease is the main cause of death in the industrialized countries. Cigarette smoking, hypertension, and hyperlipidemia are known risk factors. A study conducted at the Department of Chemical Pathology, St. Marys Hospital Medical School, London showed the effects of behavior modification through relaxation and meditation on the levels of blood pressure, pulse rate, smoking habits, serum cholesterol, triglycerides and free fatty acids in participants. The results showed significant reduction in blood pressure, highly significant reduction in the number of cigarettes smoked by smokers, and a reduction in the lipids, particularly in the hypertensive group.

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Stress Reduction Programs in Patients with Elevated Blood Pressure

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Substantial evidence indicates that psychosocial stress contributes to hypertension and cardiovascular disease. A study was conducted at the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention in Maharishi Vedic City, IA where 23 treatment comparisons and 960 participants with elevated blood pressure met the criteria for randomized controlled trials. Available evidence indicates that among the stress reduction approaches, is associated with significant reduction in blood pressure. Related data also suggest improvements with other cardiovascular disease risk factors and clinical outcomes.

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Effect of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) on Immune Function, Quality of Life and Coping in Women Newly Diagnosed With Early Stage Breast Cancer

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Cancer diagnosis of any type evokes fear and dread, but for women a diagnosis of breast cancer is an especially devastating emotional experience. Emotional distress activates neuroendocrine stress response system and increases stress hormone secretion. Stress hormones are well- known to alter immune function. MBSR is a program that shows promise as an approach to not only manage the emotional distress that accompanies this disease but to also produce biological benefits that may promote and contribute to cancer control. Given that MBSR reduces psychological distress, it is possible that it may also reverse stress associated immune dysregulation in cancer patients.

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Effect of Compassion Meditation on Neuroendocrine, Innate Immune and Behavioral Responses to Psychosocial Stress

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Meditation practices impact physiological pathways, including the immune and neuroendocrine systems, which are modulated by stress and are relevant to disease development and progression. Reports show that meditation enhanced antibody production following influenza vaccination and people with early stage cancer showed decreases in monocyte numbers as well as decreased stimulated production of interferon-gamma, interleukin-6 (IL-6), and cortisol levels. Testing the effects of meditation on these physiological responses is of significant potential health relevance given increasing data that chronic life stress increases plasma concentration of IL-6 and that even mildly increased levels of plasma IL-6 and/or its downstream product c-reactive protein precede the development of a number of diseases including vascular disease, diabetes, and dementia. Likewise, increases in cortisol have been frequently observed in major depression and have been posited to contribute to stress related metabolic abnormalities and neurotoxicity.

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Mindfulness mediation training effects on CD4+ T lymphocytes n HIV-1 Infected Adults

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A single blind randomized controlled trial was conducted on 48 HIV-1 infected adults who participated in an 8 week MBSR mediation program. CD4+ T lymphocyte depletion is a hallmark characteristic of HIV-1 pathogenesis and progression to AIDS. This study provided evidence that a behaviorally targeted MBSR program can buffer CD4+T lymphocyte declines. As well as this, studies have provided links between stress and HIV viral replication and MBSR programs have been shown to reduce HIV viral replication levels.

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Differential effects on pain intensity and unpleasantness of two meditation practices

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Pain has been defined as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience. Research on pain perception has come to overlap with emotion regulation as paradigms have been developed to study the effective component of pain perception, and to modulate pain perception through purely cognitive manipulations. MBSR raised the possibility of a mechanism by which training in a very general cognitive process, mindfulness, can lead to beneficial changes in emotion regulation during distress or physical suffering.

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225 participants in a 10 week stress reduction and relaxation program showed significant reduction in pain indices and number of medical symptoms, as well as various measures of psychological well- being. Long-term follow-up showed lasting improvements up to four years after intervention. Pain is inherently demanding of attention, it is thought that distraction of attention away from painful stimuli reduces intensity and the unpleasantness of the sensations. These results support the hypothesis that training of specific cognitive strategies can affect the subjective unpleasantness of a sensory experience separately from the intensity.

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Meditation acutely improves psychomotor vigilance, and may decrease sleep need

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A number of benefits from meditation have been claimed by those who practice various traditions. Among these claims is improved performance and decreased sleep need. In a recent study meditation was assessed to whether it leads to an immediate performance improvement on a well validated psychomotor vigilance task (PVT), and second whether longer bouts of meditation may alter sleep need. The primary study assessed PVT reaction times before and after 40 minute periods of meditation versus a 40 minute nap. The second study examined sleep times in long term experienced meditators versus non- meditators.

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Novice meditators were tested on the PVT before each activity, ten minutes after each activity, and one hour later. All novice meditators improved their PVT reaction times immediately following periods of meditation, and all but one got worse immediately following a nap. In long-term meditators, sleep duration was lower than the non- meditators. These results suggested that meditation provides at least a short-term performance improvement even in novice meditators. In long-term meditators, multiple hours spent in mediation are associated with a significant decrease in total sleep time.

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Mindfulness Meditation Is Associated With Structural Changes in the Brain

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According to a recent study, practicing mindfulness meditation appears to be associated with measurable changes in the brain regions involved in memory, learning, and emotion. Mindfulness meditation focuses attention on breathing to develop increased awareness of the present. Previous research has demonstrated that mindfulness mediation may reduce symptoms of anxiety, depression, and chronic pain, but little is known about its effects on the brain. The focus of the current studypublished in the journal Psychiatry Research: Neuroimagingwas to identify brain regions that changed in participants enrolled in an 8-week mindfulness-based stress reduction program.

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In this study, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital, Bender Institute of Neuroimaging in Germany, and the University of Massachusetts Medical School, took magnetic resonance images of the brains of 16 participants 2 weeks before and after they joined the meditation program. (Participants were physician- and self-referred individuals seeking stress reduction.) Researchers also took brain images of a control group of 17 non-meditators over a similar time period. Participants in the meditation group attended weekly sessions that included mindfulness training exercises and received audio recordings for guided meditation practice at home. They also kept track of how much time they practiced each day. Members of both groups completed a questionnaire, before and after joining the group, which measured five aspects of mindfulness: observing, describing, acting with awareness, non-judging of inner experience, and non-reactivity to inner experience.

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Brain images in the meditation group revealed increases in gray matter concentration in the left hippocampus. The hippocampus is an area of the brain involved in learning, memory, and emotional control, and is suspected of playing a role in producing some of the positive effects of meditation. Gray matter also increased in four other brain regions (though not in the insula, a region that has shown changes in other meditation studies) in the meditation group. Responses to the questionnaire indicated improvements in three of the five aspects of mindfulness in the mediators, but not the control group.

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The researchers concluded that these findings may represent an underlying brain mechanism associated with mindfulness-based improvements in mental health. Additional studies are needed to determine the associations between specific types of brain change and behavioral mechanisms thought to improve a variety of disorders.

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References Creswell, J. D., Myers, H. F., Cole, S. W., & Irwin, M. R., (2009).Mindfulness meditation training effects on CD4+T lymphocytes in HIV-1 infected adults: A small randomized trial. Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences. 23(2), 184- 188, doi: 10.1016/j.bbi.2008.07.004 Hlzel BK, Carmody J, Vangel M, et al. Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging. 2011;191(1):36 43. Kaul, P., Passafiume, J., Sargent, C. R., & OHara, B. F. (2010). Meditation acutely improves psychomotor vigilance, and may decrease sleep need. Behavioral and Brain functions, 6(47), doi:10.1186/1744-9081-6-47 Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (2011), Retrieved From www.mindfullivingprograms.com/whatMBSR.php Pace, T. W. W. PhD., Negi, L. T. PhD., Adame, D. D. PhD., Cole, S. P. PhD., Sivilli, T. I. PhD., Brown, T. D. M.P.H., Issa, M. J. B.S., & Raison, C. L. MD., (2009). Effect of compassion meditation on neuroendocrine, Innate Immune and Behavioral Responses to Psychosocial Stress. Journal of Psychoneuroendorcrinology. 34(1), 87- 98, doi:10.1016/jpsyneuen.2008.08.011

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Patel, C. MD., & Carruthers, M. MD., (1977). Coronary risk factor reduction through biofeedback-aided relaxation and meditation. Journal of the Royal college of General Practitioners.27, 401-405 Perlman, D. M., Salomons, T. V., Davidson, R. J., & Lutz, A. (2010). Differential effects on pain intensity and unpleasantness of two meditation practices. University of Wisconsin. 10(1),65-71, doi:10.1137/a0018440 Rainforth, M. V. PhD., Schneider, R. H. MD., Nedich, S. I. EdD., Gaylord-King, C. PhD., Salerno, J. W. PhD., & Anderson, J. W. MD. Stress Reduction Programs in Patients with Elevated Blood Pressure: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention,9(6), 520-528. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov Some Modern Mediation Practices. Retrieved from http://www.spiritualnow.com Schneider, R. H. MD., Walton, K. G. PhD., Salerno, J. W. PhD., & Nidich, S. I. EdD. (2006). Cardiovascular Disease Prevention and Health Promotion with the Transcendental Meditation Program and Maharishi Consciousness-Based Health Care, Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.gov Witek-Janusek, L., Albuquerque, K., Chroniak, K. R., Chroniak, C., Durazo, R., & Mathews, H. L. (2008). Effect of Mindfulness based Stress Reduction on the Immune Function, Quality of Life and Coping in Women Newly Diagnosed with Early Stage Breast Cancer. Journal of Brain Behavior Immunity, 22(6),969-981, doi: 10.1016/jbbi.2008.01.012